Foils Quotes

• Humanity is a natural foil for inhumanity, and humanity is what will ultimately keep us going when all else has failed.

  Margaret Cho

  Compassion, Humanity, Natural

  Margaret Cho (2005). “I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight”, Riverhead Books (Hardcover)

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• Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

  John Ruskin

  Beauty, Light, Shadow

  John Ruskin (1888). “Modern Painters (Complete)”, p.743, Library of Alexandria

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• Our mind is dark in some way, and so we use rhetoric as a kind of prop or foil.

  Martha Ronk

  Dark, Mind, Use

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• He that plays the king shall be welcome- his Majesty shall
  have tribute of me; the adventurous knight shall use his foil and
  target; the lover shall not sigh gratis; the humorous man shall
  end his part in peace; the clown shall make those laugh whose
  lungs are tickle o' th' sere; and the lady shall say her mind
  freely, or the blank verse shall halt fort.

  William Shakespeare

  Kings, Humorous, Men

  William Shakespeare (1867). “The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere: Comedies / ... Shakspere”, p.122

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• If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself.

  Karl Rove

  Politics, Want, Ifs

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• How often, when we have been nearest each other bodily, have we really been farthest off! Our tongues were the witty foils with which we fenced each other off.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Witty, Tongue, Conversation

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Familiar Letters (Annotated Edition)”, p.32, Jazzybee Verlag

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• I'm a pretty convenient foil for a lot of people.

  Kevin Costner

  People, Convenient

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• You teach kids how to succeed when they successfully foil the educational system.

  Arlo Guthrie

  Educational, Kids, Succeed

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• Every step you take, a million doors open in front of you like poppies; your next step closes them, and another million bloom. You get on a train, you pick up a lamp, you speak, you don’t. What decides why one thing gets picked to be the way it will be? Accident? Fate? Some weakness in ourselves? Forget your harps, your tin-foil angels—the only heaven worth having would be the heaven of answers.

  Mark Slouka

  Angel, Fate, Doors

  Mark Slouka (2014). “Brewster: A Novel”, p.255, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I need thy presence every passing hour; What but thy grace can foil the tempter's power?

  Henry Francis Lyte

  Grace, Needs, Hours

  Henry Francis Lyte (1850). “Remains of ... H.F. Lyte. With a memoir by the ed”, p.120

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• I'm sure that there must have been times when you have read books or watched films and found yourself secretly wishing for the villain to win. Why? Isn't that against the rules by which our society lives? Why should you feel this way? It's simple, really; the villain is the true hero of these tales, not the well-intentioned moron who somehow foils their diabolical scheme. The villain get's all the best lines, has the best costumes, has unlimited power and wealth- why on earth would anyone not want to be the villain?

  Mark Walden

  Book, Hero, Winning

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• Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.

  William Hazlitt

  Nature, Strong, Book

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1091, Delphi Classics

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• For me too, the periodic table was a passion. ... As a boy, I stood in front of the display for hours, thinking how wonderful it was that each of those metal foils and jars of gas had its own distinct personality.

  Freeman Dyson

  Passion, Science, Thinking

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• Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.

  William Hazlitt

  Common Sense, Substitutes, Cases

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1091, Delphi Classics

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• I thought no more was needed
  Youth to prolong
  Than dumb-bell and foil
  To keep the body young.
  O who could have foretold
  That the heart grows old?

  William Butler Yeats

  Heart, Sadness, Dumb

  'A Song'

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• Another vampire pushed her way through the crowd to stand at his side—a pretty blue-haired Asian girl in a silver foil skirt. Clary wondered if there were any ugly vampires, or maybe any fat ones. Maybe they didn't make vampires out of ugly people. Or maybe ugly people just didn't want to live forever.

  Cassandra Clare

  Girl, Blue, People

  Cassandra Clare (2011). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instrument Series (4 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels”, p.245, Simon and Schuster

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• There is not a day but sin foils or is foiled, prevails or is prevailed on; and it will be so whilst we live in this world.

  John Owen

  World, Sin, This World

  John Owen (2001). “Temptation and Sin”, p.11, Sovereign Grace Publishers,

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• It's not common for a woman on television, especially if she's the mom of the family, to be funny. She's usually a straight man or foil.

  Martha Plimpton

  Funny, Mom, Men

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• A second variety concentrated on presumed major transformations of the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which the whole earlier point of time served as a mythologized foil against which to treat the empirical reality of the present.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Reality, Transformation, Treats

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.7, Verso

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• Some months ago we discovered that certain light elements emit positrons under the action of alpha particles. Our latest experiments have shown a very striking fact: when an aluminium foil is irradiated on a polonium preparation [alpha ray emitter], the emission of positrons does not cease immediately when the active preparation is removed: the foil remains radioactive and the emission of radiation decays exponentially as for an ordinary radio-element. We observed the same phenomenon with boron and magnesium.

  Frederic Joliot-Curie

  Science, Light, Preparation

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• [Barack Obama] was comfortable when he had the foil.

  Chuck Todd

  Barack, Comfortable

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil.

  Barack Obama

  United States, Want, Lasts

  "CBS's Smith: Cheney and Bush See Obama As 'Treacherous'". www.newsbusters.org. June 22, 2009.

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• There is no land like England,
  Where'er the light of day be;
  There are no hearts like English hearts,
  Such hearts of oak as they be;
  There is no land like England,
  Where'er the light of day be:
  There are no men like Englishmen,
  So tall and bold as they be!
  And these will strike for England,
  And man and maid be free
  To foil and spoil the tyrant
  Beneath the greenwood tree.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Heart, Men, Light

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• With two sons born eighteen months apart, I operated mainly on automatic pilot through the ceaseless activity of their early childhood. I remember opening the refrigerator late one night and finding a roll of aluminum foil next to a pair of small red tennies. Certain that I was responsible for the refrigerated shoes, I quickly closed the door and ran upstairs to make sure I had put the babies in their cribs instead of the linen closet.

  Mary Blakely

  Baby, Son, Night

  Mary Kay Blakely (1995). “American Mom: Motherhood, Politics, and Humble Pie”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

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• The trouble is that the expression 'material thing' is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for 'sense-datum'; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he 'perceives.

  J. L. Austin

  Men, Expression, Data

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