Implicit Quotes

• The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Art, Motherhood, Blood

  D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey (2003). “Studies in Classic American Literature”, p.155, Cambridge University Press

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• The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Eye, Ducks

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• So one reason the science educators panic at the first sign of public rebellion is that they fear exposure of the implicit religious content in what they are teaching.

  Phillip E. Johnson

  Religious, Teaching, Uprising

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• Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Travel, Journey, Seeing

  Cynthia Ozick (1987). “The Messiah of Stockholm: a novel”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• That the Op-Ed page is very important in readers' and the nation's perception of the Times, the perception of its editorial positions, and of its implicit editorial positions as expressed by the publisher's choice of people who are given the freedom to write opinion columns.

  Daniel Okrent

  Writing, People, Choices

  "It's curtains for Okrent". Interview with Steve Kettmann, www.theguardian.com. May 12, 2005.

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• Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Power, Men, Names

  Andrea Dworkin (1989). “Pornography: men possessing women”, Plume

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• When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.

  Walt Disney

  Inspirational, Life, Birthday

  "Perceive This! : How to Get Everything You Want Out of Life by Changing Your Perceptions". Book by Kevin A. Martin, 2004.

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• Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?

  John Calvin

  Church, Conviction, Submit

  John Calvin (2012). “The Institutes Of The Christian Religion (Annotated Edition)”, p.484, Jazzybee Verlag

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• It is implicit in the self that the self will automatically evolve if you can dissolve it. It re-patterns itself after archetypal formations that exist deep within the mind.

  Frederick Lenz

  Self, Mind, Patterns

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• Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.

  Alan Watts

  Unity, Chaos, Duality

  Alan Watts (2017). “Psychotherapy East & West”, p.126, New World Library

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• Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.

  Thomas Sowell

  Government, Littles, Assumption

  Thomas Sowell (1993). “Is Reality Optional?: And Other Essays”, Hoover Inst Press

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• No reference is truly direct — every reference depends on some kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Kind, Schemes, Direct

  "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid". Book by Douglas Hofstadter, 1979.

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• I abhor the word "consumer." Consumers, unlike citizens, have no implicit duties, obligations, or responsibilities to the common good. It's a degrading term. The use of it degrades the public discussion.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Responsibility, Citizens, Use

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

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• Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive.

  Paul Fry

  Criticism, Principles, May

  "Originality matters". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 10, 2012.

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• He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely transcended the everyday. And this would annihilate the effects of the cruel drug, boredom, to which he was addicted although, perhaps, the element of boredom which is implicit in an affair so isolated from the real world was its principle appeal for him.

  Angela Carter

  Art, Real, Order

  Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

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• There is a yearning that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person (dare we call it a soul?) wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. ... There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit in even the most sensual of desires.

  Mark Epstein

  Spiritual, Addiction, Soul

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• In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of the selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Fear, Sleep, Simple

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• Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Sorrow, Mass, Gravitation

  Lawrence Durrell (2015). “The Avignon Quintet: Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian and Quinx”, p.68, Faber & Faber

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• A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

  Alain de Botton

  Art, Majority, Would Be

  Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.156, Vintage

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• There was an implicit conviction that the UN would be stronger than the sum of its constituent member-states.

  Atal Bihari Vajpayee

  Stronger, Would Be, Bihar

  Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Publications Division (2004). “Towards a new world: defining moments”

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• Oftentimes, if you're talking to a seasoned interviewer who asks you a question, they may do a follow-up if they didn't quite get it. It's rare that they'll do a third or fourth or fifth or sixth follow-up, because there's an implicit, agreed-upon decorum that they move on. Kids don't necessarily move on if they don't get it.

  Brian Greene

  Moving, Kids, Talking

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• For a long time I believed the opposite of passion was death. I was wrong. Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Lying, Passion, Past

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• The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don’t want to write anything but takes.

  Julio Cortazar

  Writing, Loss, Perfection

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• And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

  David Foster Wallace

  Powerful, Mistake, Coffee

  David Foster Wallace (2012). “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again”, p.55, Hachette UK

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• Unfortunately, in today's world we have to be reminded that the power of an oath derives from the fact that in it we ask God to bear witness to the promises we make with the implicit expectation that He will hold us accountable for the manner in which we honor them.

  James L. Buckley

  Expectations, Honor, Promise

  James L. Buckley (2010). “Freedom at Risk: Reflections on Politics, Liberty, and the State”, p.245, ReadHowYouWant.com

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