Human Activity Quotes - Page 7

• The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.

  Thom Mayne

  Thinking, Ideas, Architecture

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• A nervous excitability, a chronic exaltation of the passion, in which commingle the inferior life of the individual and its exterior manifestations, a state in which sentiment, idea, and will are confounded together, where for the lack of the powerful corrective of logic, the flights of imagination know no bounds, where life and human activity are deprived of a regulator, and move outside of material and concrete factors, by the sole interior force of the soul.

  Kadmi Cohen

  Powerful, Moving, Passion

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• Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.

  Abraham Verghese

  Beautiful, Imagination, Alive

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• To become an expert achiever in any human activity, it takes practice... practice... practice.

  W. Clement Stone

  Practice, Experts, Achiever

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

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• It is the acquisition of skills in particular, irrespective of their utility, that is potent in making life meaningful. Since man has no inborn skills, the survival of the species has depended on the ability to acquire and perfect skills. Hence the mastery of skills is a uniquely human activity and yields deep satisfaction.

  Eric Hoffer

  Meaningful, Men, Skills

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Every change in conditions will make necessary some change in the use of resources, in the direction and kind of human activities, in habits and practices. And each change in the actions of those affected in the first instance will require further adjustments that will gradually extend through the whole of society. Every change thus in a sense creates a "problemfor society, even though no single individual perceives it as such; it is gradually "solvedby the establishment of a new overall adjustment.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Practice, Society, Use

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Part I. The Value of Freedom, Chap. 2 : The Creative Power of a Free Civilization, 1960.

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• There is a case for saying that the creation of new aesthetic forms has been the most fundamentally productive of all forms of human activity. Whoever creates new artistic conventions has found methods of interchange between people about matters which were incommunicable before. The capacity to do this has been the basis of the whole of human history.

  John Zachary Young

  People, Matter, Originality

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• This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Military, War, Struggle

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1965). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-1964”, p.931, Best Books on

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• Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.

  H. L. Mencken

  Spiritual, Branches, Poverty

  "A Book of Prefaces". Book by H. L. Mencken, 1917.

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• Business is a creative and therefore spiritual endeavor. Great entrepreneurs enter the field of business in the same way great artists enter the field of art. With their business creation, entrepreneurs express their spiritual desire for self-realization, evolutionary passion for self- fulfillment, and creative vision of a new world. The entrepreneur's business is their artwork. The creation of business is as creative as any creation in art. In fact, building a business may be the most creative human activity.

  Yasuhiko Kimura

  Spiritual, Art, Passion

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• There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.

  Leonard Cohen

  Meaningful, Song, Baby

  "My favourite word in songwriting history is 'that" by Laura Barton, www.theguardian.com. May 31, 2007.

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• Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as a raw material from which to create order.

  Frank Herbert

  Order, Raw Materials, Chaos

  Frank Herbert (1987). “Chapterhouse: Dune”, p.349, Penguin

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• If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Secular Society, Tasks

  "Styles of Radical Will" by Susan Sontag, (p. 45), 1966.

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• When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

  Philip Roth

  Jobs, Writing, Years

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• Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is ... death! Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement.The choice lies with you!

  Peter Kropotkin

  Crush, War, Lying

  "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal". Book by Peter Kropotkin, 1896.

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• Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.

  Gregory Bateson

  Art, Sleep, Goal

  "Mind and Nature - a Necessary Unity". Book by Gregory Bateson, new edition, 1988.

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• Science is the one human activity that is totally progressive.

  Edwin Powell Hubble

  Progressive, Humans, Activity

  "The Realm of the Nebulae". Book by Edwin Powell Hubble, 1936.

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• No longer can we consider what the artist does to be a self-contained activity, mysteriously inspired from above, unrelated and unrelatable to other human activities. Instead, we recognize the exalted kind of seeing that leads to the creation of great art as an outgrowth of the humbler and more common activity of the eyes in everyday life. Just as the prosaic search for information is "artistic" because it involves giving and finding shape and meaning, so the artist's conceiving is an instrument of life, a refined way of understanding who and where we are.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Art, Eye, Self

  Rudolf Arnheim (2004). “Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye”, p.5, Univ of California Press

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• Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.

  Gao Xingjian

  Literature, Moral, Ethical

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• Learning, like love, death and eating, are fundamental human activities. It's at the core of human existence and its character has a resilience of continuity that is part of what makes up human nature. That is not fundamentally going to change.

  Leon Botstein

  Character, Like Love, Resilience

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• Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

  Jean Piaget

  Art, Philosophy, History

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• The activity of God, which is transcendent in blessedness, is the activity of contemplation; and therefore among human activities that which is most akin to the divine activity of contemplation will be the greatest source of happiness.

  Aristotle

  Happiness, Contemplation, Divine

  Aristotle (1934). “The Nicomachean ethics”

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• War is the realm of uncertainty; three-quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. ... war is the realm of chance. No other human activity gives it greater scope; no other has such incessant and varied dealings with this intruder. Chance makes everything more uncertain and interferes with the whole course of events.

  Carl von Clausewitz

  War, Fog, Giving

  Carl von Clausewitz, Michael Howard, Peter Paret (1989). “On War”, p.101, Princeton University Press

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• In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.

  Carl von Clausewitz

  War, Games, Cards

  On War Chapter 1, 21 (p. 86)

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• Writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery. In writing, for the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.

  William Stafford

  Dream, Writing, Space

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