Familiarity Quotes - Page 4

• Some authors write nonsense in a clear style, and others sense in an obscure one; some can reason without being able to persuade, others can persuade without being able to reason; some dive so deep that they descend into darkness, and others soar so high that they give us no light; and some, in a vain attempt to be cutting and dry, give us only that which is cut and dried. We should labor, therefore, to treat with ease of things that are difficult; with familiarity, of things that are novel; and with perspicuity, of things that are profound.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Writing, Cutting, Light

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.307

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• Through constant familiarity, we can definitely establish new behavior patterns, using our tendency to form habits to our advantage. If we make a steady effort, I think we can overcome any form of negative conditioning and make positive changes in our lives. But we need to remember that genuine change doesn't happen overnight.

  Dalai Lama

  Thinking, Effort, Needs

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• All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport - in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign policy.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Sports, Dog, Travel

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• With Cats, some say, one rule is true: Don’t speak till you are spoken to. Myself, I do not hold with that — I say, you should ad-dress a Cat. But always keep in mind that he Resents familiarity. I bow, and taking off my hat, Ad-dress him in this form: O Cat! But if he is the Cat next door, Whom I have often met before (He comes to see me in my flat) I greet him with an oopsa Cat! I think I've heard them call him James — But we've not got so far as names.

  T. S. Eliot

  Cat, Thinking, Doors

  T.S. Eliot (2015). “The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume II: Practical Cats and Further Verses”, p.33, Faber & Faber

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• Love at a distance may be poignant; it is also idealized. Contact, more than separation, is the test of attachment.

  Ilka Chase

  Distance, Attachment, May

  Ilka Chase (1948). “Free Admission”

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• Familiarity breeds contempt, but without a little familiarity it's impossible to breed anything.

  Noel Coward

  Sex, Littles, Impossible

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• In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Eye, Men, Rocks

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West”, p.258, Vintage

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• One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to a familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction.

  Beryl Markham

  Stars, Men, Curves

  Beryl Markham (1994). “The Illustrated West with the Night”, Stewart, Tabori, & Chang

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• It was strange, I reflected.. that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.

  Elizabeth Kostova

  Home, Joy, Strange

  Elizabeth Kostova (2010). “The Historian”, p.235, Hachette UK

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• I believe it was Shakespeare, or possibly Howard Cosell, who first observed that marriage is very much like a birthday candle, in that 'the flames of passion burn brightest when the wick of intimacy is first ignited by the disposable butane lighter of physical attraction, but sooner or later the heat of familiarity causes the wax of boredom to drip all over the vanilla frosting of novelty and the shredded coconut of romance.' I could not have phrased it better myself.

  Dave Barry

  Believe, Passion, Flames

  Dave Barry (1994). “The World According to Dave Barry”, Outlet

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• Among the innumerable mortifications which waylay human arrogance on every side may well be reckoned our ignorance of the most common objects and effects, a defect of which we become more sensible by every attempt to supply it. Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use; but the speculatist, who is not content with superficial views, harasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still, as he inquires more, perceives only that he knows less.

  Samuel Johnson

  Education, Peace, Truth

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• Familiarity with nature never breeds contempt. The more one learns, the more one expects surprises, and the more one becomes aware of the inscrutable.

  Archibald Rutledge

  Nature, Surprise, Contempt

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• Even a pandit comes to grief by giving instruction to a foolish disciple, by maintaining a wicked wife, and by excessive familiarity with the miserable.

  Chanakya

  Grief, Giving, Wife

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• There's a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me. People want a relationship with you that they haven't earned.

  Alan Arkin

  People, Want, Sometimes

  Source: collider.com

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• The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  May, Superiors

  Friedrich Nietzsche “Writings of Nietzsche: Volume 1”, Lulu.com

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• I'm sure there are a lot of Italians who refer to themselves as goombahs and greaseballs and whatever. That's what people do. It gives them a sort of familiarity that other people don't have.

  Samuel L. Jackson

  People, Giving

  Source: www.ericspitznagel.com

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• Familiarity can no longer be a necessary condition for trust.

  Robert C. Solomon

  Trust, Conditions

  Robert C. Solomon, Fernando Flores (2003). “Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life”, p.55, Oxford University Press

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• The day when a Frenchman switches from the formality of vous to the familiarity of tu is a day to be taken seriously. It is an unmistakable signal that he has decided - after weeks or months or sometimes years - that he likes you. It would be chulish and unfriendly of you not to return the compliment. And so, just when you are at last feeling comfortable with vous and all the plurals that go with it, you are thrust headlong in to the singular world of tu.

  Peter Mayle

  Taken, Years, Feelings

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• A strip club is one of the few places where two groups voluntarily come together who have such precipitous contrasts in net worth and familiarity with violence, each group with a head-and-shoulders edge in one category. The basic math of a tropical storm.

  Tim Dorsey

  Math, Two, Storm

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• Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,--familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination; knows practically Marshal Saxe's rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  War, Imagination, Soldier

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.132, Harvard University Press

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• The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.

  W. H. Auden

  Eye, Ears, Likes

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• I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether its with Africa or childhood.

  Binyavanga Wainaina

  Ideas, Childhood, Feelings

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• Familiar things are a comfort to us all.

  Andy Rooney

  Comfort, Familiar, Familiar Things

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• How strange it is that Socrates, after having made the children common, should hinder lovers from carnal intercourse only, but should permit love and familiarities between father and son or between brother and brother, than which nothing can be more unseemly, since even without them love of this sort is improper. How strange, too, to forbid intercourse for no other reason than the violence of the pleasure, as though the relationship of father and son or of brothers with one another made no difference.

  Aristotle

  Brother, Children, Father

  Aristotle, (2016). “Aristotle's Politics: Writings from the Complete Works: Politics, Economics, Constitution of Athens”, p.27, Princeton University Press

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• Horse-play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, and indiscriminate familiarity, will sink both merit and knowledge into a degree of contempt. They compose at most a merry fellow; and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Horse, Laughter, Fun

  Lord Chesterfield, David Roberts (2008). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.140, Oxford University Press

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