Immediacy Quotes - Page 2

• The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.

  Muhammad Iqbal

  Mean, Literature, Entity

  Sir Muhammad Iqbal (2000). “The religious thought in Islam”

  40 Copy quote

  Show source

• Do not allow obligation or immediacy to bind you to physical things or specific actions.

  Mary Anne Radmacher

  Sunshine, Redemption, Action

  Mary Anne Radmacher (2008). “Live Boldly: Cultivate the Qualities That Can Change Your Life”, Conari Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Films are artifice. We're telling stories on film. At the same time, when it works, there is a real tough immediacy and spontaneity to it, and a punch.

  Paul McGann

  Real, Telling Stories, Tough

  7 Copy quote

• The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. ... The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room.

  Vivian Gornick

  Loneliness, Writing, Empty Rooms

  9 Copy quote

• Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.

  John Berger

  Wall, Shopping, Shadow

  John Berger (2008). “Selected Essays of John Berger”, p.896, Vintage

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

  John Banville

  Summer, Long, Childhood

  John Banville (2008). “The Sea”, p.94, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• [W]hat suffers in the atmosphere of immediacy is analysis. What suffers in this search for speed is depth. The media in the wealthy world are becoming increasingly simplistic, superficial, and celebrity-focused.

  Laurie Garrett

  Media, Atmosphere, Suffering

  52 Copy quote

• In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful.

  Timothy Leary

  Communication, Creativity, Successful

  Timothy Leary (2010). “The Politics of Self-Determination”, p.74, Ronin Publishing

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• And what is a kiss, specifically? A pledge properly sealed, a promise seasoned to taste, a vow stamped with the immediacy of a lip, a rosy circle drawn around the verb 'to love.' A kiss is a message too intimate for the ear, infinity captured in the bee's brief visit to a flower, secular communication with an aftertaste of heaven, the pulse rising from the heart to utter its name on a lover's lip: 'Forever.

  Edmond Rostand

  Love, Flower, Communication

  Edmond Rostand (1995). “Cyrano de Bergerac”, Talonbooks Limited

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Reading, Week

  4 Copy quote

• "The people" is that massive portion of a society that lives by its pathetic subjection to sheer immediacy or self-obviousness, and that therefore uncritically seizes upon the most simplistic and abstract ways of filling its vacuous self-consciousness. Not philosophy but dogma and rhetoric, not rationality but indoctrination and conditioning, provide the cultural junkfood by which the Many perfunctorily slake their thirst and hunger.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Self, People

  4 Copy quote

• Time in China has no immediacy as in America. Here I find the swift passage of our few earthly years accepted as naturally as the fall of flower and leaf. ... I hear and speak a language in which grammar has no tense. Both scholars and illiterates, in ordinary daily speech, tell an event of centuries ago as casually as an incident of the hour. Only as my knowledge has accumulated have I been able to know whether something related happened just then or in some past dynasty.

  Nora Waln

  Time, Flower, Fall

  4 Copy quote

• Curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the most outstanding characteristic of modern thinking ... Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity, and the less they are deflected by the consideration of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare, but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest, which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.

  Abraham Flexner

  Passion, Thinking, Curiosity

  31 Copy quote

• Photography speaks a universal language that does not need translation, and with an immediacy that the written word lacks. It freezes a moment in time, leaving an indelible image.

  Bianca Jagger

  Photography, Leaving, Doe

  55 Copy quote

• It is characteristic of the barbarian ... to insist upon seeing a thing "as it is." The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Mean, Men, Giving

  5 Copy quote

• There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classicsdid the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.

  Paul Horgan

  Writing, Night, Thinking

  7 Copy quote

• There's also an immediacy to everything that has changed everybody's expectations. Now if I can't get a hold of somebody on their cell phone I'm, like, angry with them. And in my mind, all the things that I really value in terms of art, really good novels or films or comics, I know they all take a long, long time to create, and they take a lot of concentration and dedication...and I just feel like the training for that is becoming more and more rare when people are used to seeing things like YouTube clips, and being able to acquire things instantly.

  Adrian Tomine

  Art, Dedication, Phones

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Religious, Next, Spirit

  "Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, p. 504, February 28, 1846.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• My favorite part is being engaged with somebody's story and life, and getting a laugh with people I have a tremendous amount of respect for or not, and being challenged by the immediacy of conversation.

  Marc Maron

  People, Laughing, Stories

  Interview with Kyle Dowling, www.believermag.com.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.

  Iain Banks

  Scholar

  Iain Banks (2002). “Look to Windward”, p.213, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Killing Lincoln is a must-read historical thriller. Bill O'Reilly recounts the dramatic events of the spring of 1865 with such exhilarating immediacy that you will feel like you are walking the streets of Washington DC on the night that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. This is a hugely entertaining, heart-stopping read.

  Vince Flynn

  Spring, Heart, Night

  7 Copy quote

• Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short.

  Irving Howe

  Writing, Unity, Doe

  6 Copy quote

• They [photographs] teach you about your own unraveling past, or about the immediacy of yesterday. They show you what you look at. If you take a photograph, you've been responsive to something, and you looked hard at it. Hard for a thousandth of a second, hard for ten minutes. But hard, nonetheless. And it's the quality of that bite that teaches you how connected you were to that thing, and where you stood in relation to it, then and now.

  Joel Meyerowitz

  Past, Yesterday, Quality

  7 Copy quote

• Trying to run away is never the answer to being a fully human. Running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life.

  Pema Chodron

  Running, Trying, Answers

  Pema Chodron (2000). “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times”, p.94, Shambhala Publications

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• In stark contrast to two nights ago, when I felt Peeta was a million miles away, I'm struck by his immediacy now. As we settle in, he pulls my head down to use his arm as a pillow; the other rests protectively over me even when he goes to sleep. No one has held me like this in such a long time. Since my father died and I stopped trusting my mother, no one else's arms have made me feel this safe.

  Suzanne Collins

  Mother, Father, Sleep

  Suzanne Collins (2011). “The Hunger Games Trilogy”, p.392, Scholastic Inc.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source