Inadequate Quotes - Page 12

• If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.

  Simone Weil

  Girl, Rights, Sound

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.21, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• Sri Yukteswar used to poke gentle fun at the commonly inadequate conceptions of renunciation."A beggar cannot renounce wealth," Master would say. "If a man laments: 'My business has failed; my wife has left me; I will renounce all and enter a monastery,' to what worldly sacrifice is he referring? He did not renounce wealth and love; they renounced him!"Saints like Gandhi, on the other hand, have made not only tangible material sacrifices, but also the more difficult renunciation of selfish motive and private goal, merging their inmost being in the stream of humanity as a whole.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Fun, Selfish, Sacrifice

  Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda (2008). “Autobiography of a Yogi”, p.425, Diamond Pocket Books (P) Ltd.

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• After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.

  Rebecca West

  War, Thinking, Ideas

  "The Annual Obituary 1983". Book edited by Elizabeth Devine and Marion Stoker Morgan, p. 143, 1984.

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• In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.

  John Buchan

  Heaven, World, Earth

  John Buchan (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)”, p.754, Delphi Classics

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• The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert... a man with a machine and inadequate culture... is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

  Wendell Berry

  Men, Pestilence, Damage

  "What Are People For?". Book by Wendell Berry, 1990.

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• When traveling, I usually keep a notebook: when home at my desk, the notebook serves mainly to remind me how little I saw at the time, or rather how I was noticing the wrong things. But the notes do spur memories, and it's the memories I trust. The wine stain on the page may tell me more than the words there, which usually strike me as hopelessly inadequate.

  Jonathan Raban

  Notebook, Memories, Home

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• The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate.

  Kenneth Tynan

  Artist, Men, Cry

  Kenneth Tynan (1964). “Tynan on theatre”

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• Since no one is always right, always being right is really a role model for his children feeling inadequate.

  Warren Farrell

  Children, Role Models, Feelings

  "Father and Child Reunion". Book by Warren Farrell, 2001.

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• In the judgment of design engineers, the ordinary means of communicating with a computer are entirely inadequate. [...] Graphical communication in some form or other is of vital importance in engineering as that subject is now conducted; we must either provide the capability in our computer systems, or take on the impossible task of training up a future race of engineers conditioned to think in a different way.

  Maurice Wilkes

  Communication, Mean, Thinking

  "Computers Then and Now". Journal of the ACM 15, Sect. 4, (pp. 1-7), January 1968.

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• Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Believe, Mind, Doe

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.55, Lulu Press, Inc

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• But before Derby go, would they mind telling the rest of the Premier League - the league which it has debased with its pathetically-inadequate presence for the past 12 months - where the money has gone? You know, the £30m or so in prize money that every team, even the one at the bottom of the table from August to May, automatically receives by being in the Premier League... So what happened to that money? Or put another way, why was such a meaningless fraction of it spent on recruiting new players? It's one thing not to compete; it's quite another not to even attempt to do so.

  Pete Gill

  Soccer, Football, Team

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• However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.

  William James

  Cat, Night, Ideas

  William James (2007). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.137, Cosimo, Inc.

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• While the word bisexual was technically correct, I would only slowly come to use it to refer to myself in part because of the derisive connotations. But, in addition, it would seem to me woefully inadequate and impressionistically inaccurate.

  Charles M. Blow

  Bisexual, Use, Connotation

  Charles M. Blow (2014). “Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir”, p.221, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Our measure of rewards and punishments is most partial and incomplete, absurdly inadequate, utterly worldly; and we wish to continue it into the next world. Into that next and awful world we strive to pursue men, and send after them our impotent paltry verdicts of condemnation or acquittal. We set up our paltry little rod to measure heaven immeasurable.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Men, Heaven, Wish

  William Makepeace Thackeray (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (Illustrated)”, p.1951, Delphi Classics

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• A mystic is a person who sees the facts as inadequate.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Facts, Mystic, Persons

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• Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

  Vita Sackville-West

  Poor, Prose

  Vita Sackville-West (2015). “Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings”, p.200, Macmillan

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• The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Boxes, Ballots, Mechanism

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• The feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate.

  Mina Loy

  Feminist, Feminism, Movement

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• Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

  Gertrude Atherton

  Years, Civilization, Certain

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• The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.

  Janet Burroway

  Writing, Adequate, Wonderful

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• In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can't buy love with gifts or favors, you can't hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can't be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider.

  B. F. Skinner

  Children, Deserve You, World

  B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.137, Hackett Publishing

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• The Andrians were the first of the islanders to refuse Themistocles' demand for money. He had put it to them that they would be unable to avoid paying, because the Athenians had the support of two powerful deities, one called Persuasion and the other Compulsion.The Andrians had replied that Athens was lucky to have two such useful gods, who were obviously responsible for her wealth and greatness; unfortunately, they themselves, in their small & inadequate land, had two utterly useless deities, who refused to leave the island and insisted on staying; and their names were Poverty and Inability.

  Herodotus

  Powerful, Greatness, Land

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• The rules for reading yourself to sleep are easier to follow than are the rules for staying awake while reading. Get into bed in a comfortable position, make sure the light is inadequate enough to cause slight eyestrain, choose a book that is either terribly difficult or terribly boring-in any event, one that you do not really care whether you read or not-and you will be asleep in a few minutes. Those who are experts in relaxing with a book do not have to wait for nightfall. A comfortable chair in the library will do any time

  Mortimer Adler

  Book, Reading, Sleep

  Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren (2014). “How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading”, p.45, Simon and Schuster

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• To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

  George Steiner

  Poetry, Identity, Naked

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• An inadequate chief executive officer's time at the top is always too long no matter how short.

  Malcolm Forbes

  Long, Matter, Chief Executives

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