Idiom Quotes - Page 3

• My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.

  Sergei Prokofiev

  Musical, Virtue, Imitation

  "Sergei Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences". Book by Sergei Prokofiev, Edited by S. Shlifstein and translated by Rose Prokofieva, p. 7, 1960.

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• There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.

  Peter Medawar

  Philosophy, Example, Minors

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.3, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Because so many poets have chosen a political idiom right now in the US and so many poets have assigned value and inherent knowledge to their racial identity and used that as a form of argumentation, I'm thinking now's a good time to buy low for my own poems and write poems that are deeply in the interior and the psyche. There are plenty of people out there working on subjects of political poetry, partisan poetry, all the way through to crossing the threshold of propaganda. I start thinking now's a good time for me to start writing about the myths of my own psyche.

  David Biespiel

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My favorite phrase, that a friend of mine who worked on the Potter films and was a lot older than me would use in front of me, and I picked up from him many great phrases - the English have a lot of great idioms for sweating. I don't know why that is. But that's what we do. I feel like it's particularly our country; probably everywhere has a lot of idioms for sweating. He always said, "I'm sweating like a glassblower's asshole," which I always found an incredibly strange and yet vivid image.

  Daniel Radcliffe

  Country, Strange, Film

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• With theatre, you can interpret the most complex play on stage for it have meaning to an audience because you're dealing in images, you're dealing in action, you can use different idioms to interpret and clarify something which is obscured in the reading and of course there are different kinds of play, there are mythological plays, there are what I call the dramatic sketches, direct political theatre which is virtually everybody, but I find that you can use the stage as a social vehicle, you know, which any kind of audience.

  Wole Soyinka

  Reading, Play, Political

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

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• Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.

  Lincoln Kirstein

  Dance, Vocabulary, Color

  Lincoln Kirstein (1970). “Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks”, p.5, Courier Corporation

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• Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

  Lester Bangs

  Real, Past, Islands

  Lester Bangs (2013). “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N'Roll”, p.74, Anchor

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• The [Nobel] award [of Bob Dylan] is no affront to literature; it is an insult to pop music. It is a condescending ruffle of pop's hair while handing it a lollipop. An act of beaming condescension whose transparent message is: "This one guy, and just this one guy, he's so good, he transcends his trivial idiom and elevates himself into our significant one."

  David Bennun

  Awards, Hair, Guy

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

  William A. Dembski

  Intelligent, Design, Information

  "Signs of intelligence: A primer on the discernment of intelligent design". Touchstone Magazine 12 (4), July/August, 1999.

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• It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Differences, Different, Influence

  Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker (1979). “I Love Myself when I Am Laughing ... and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader”, p.68, Feminist Press at CUNY

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• The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

  William A. Dembski

  Philosophy, Intelligent, Reality

  "Signs of intelligence: understanding intelligent design". Book by William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner, March 2001.

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• As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling.

  Bernard Herrmann

  Art, Inspiration, Writing

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• You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

  Charlaine Harris

  Love, Life, Optimistic

  Charlaine Harris (2009). “Dead and Gone: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel”, p.29, Penguin

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• If you do not know where your competitor is, or overconfident and snobbish about your competitor, or are unable to comprehend how yourcompetitor became a real threat, you will surely fall behind him. Don't be the "they" in this idiom: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

  Jack Ma

  Leadership, Business, Real

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• French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.

  Peter Medawar

  Philosophy, Prose Poetry, Use

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.2, Oxford University Press, USA

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• A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

  George Orwell

  Lying, Latin, Real

  George Orwell, Peter Hobley Davison (2001). “Orwell and politics: Animal farm in the context of essays, reviews and letters selected from the complete works of George Orwell”, Penguin Modern Classics

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• The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Reality, Drawing, Color

  Cormac McCarthy (2007). “The Road”, p.75, Vintage

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• For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

  James Fenton

  Art, Vanity, Hands

  "An Introduction to English Poetry". Book by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. June 15, 2002.

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• [T]here is a methodological bias in favor of taking natural discourse literally, other things being equal. For example, unless there are clear reasons for construing discourse as ambiguous, elliptical, or involving special idioms, we should not so construe it.

  Tyler Burge

  Philosophical, Special, Favors

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• Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom.

  Linton Kwesi Johnson

  Voice, Resistance, Spirit

  "Trust between the police and the black community is still broken" by Linton Kwesi Johnson, www.theguardian.com.

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• Indigenous people have discovered that Christianity is not inherently Western but universal - 'translatable' into any cultural idiom.

  Nancy Pearcey

  People, Christianity, Indigenous

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• When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.

  Jim Woodring

  Character, America, Ties

  Interview with Jason Heller, www.avclub.com. July 8, 2010.

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• Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom.

  Karen Joy Fowler

  Earth, Pheromones

  Karen Joy Fowler (2014). “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”, p.194, Serpent's Tail

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• Like Karl Kraus [Wittgenstein], was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear - particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.

  Thomas Szasz

  Confused, Men, Race

  "Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry". Book by Thomas Szasz and Karl Kraus (p. 67), March 1, 1990.

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• Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein.

  Quentin Crisp

  Fashion, Cutting, Work Out

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