Ingenious Quotes - Page 5

• I like A&E. I like those corny intimate-portrait things. They're so kind of ingenious and artificial and soothing.

  Mary-Louise Parker

  Portraits, Kind, Corny

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• Many ingenious lovely things are gone / That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.

  William Butler Yeats

  Miracle, Lovely, Gone

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.210, Simon and Schuster

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• Companies are not ingenious, it's the people in them that are.

  James Dyson

  People, Company

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• GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Writing, Character, Science

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.78, 谷月社

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• Hollywood is ten million dollars worth of intricate and high ingenious machinery functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney.

  George Jean Nathan

  Skins, Hollywood, Dollars

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• You cannot show real respect to your parents by perpetuating their errors.... Do you consider that the inventor of a steel plow cast a slur upon his father who scratched the ground with a wooden one? I do not consider that an invention by the son is a slander upon the father; I regard each invention simply as an improvement; and every father should be exceedingly proud of an ingenious son. If Mr. Talmage has a son, it will be impossible for him to honor his father except by differing with him.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Real, Father, Son

  Joseph Lewis, Robert Green Ingersoll (1957). “Ingersoll the Magnificent: To which Has Been Added a Special Arrangement of Some Gems from Ingersoll for Inspiration, Wisdom, and Courage”

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• An authentic and ingenious account of the ingeniously counterfeit in art and in life.

  D. J. Enright

  Art, Accounts, Counterfeit

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• Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in.

  George Eliot

  Believe, Leisure, Vacuums

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.834, ShandonPress

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• What avails it that indulgent Heaven
  From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come,
  If we, ingenious to torment ourselves,
  Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own?
  Enjoy the present; nor which needless cares
  Of what may spring from blind misfortune's womb,
  Appal the surest hour that life bestows.
  Serence, and master of yourself, prepare
  For what may come; and leave the rest to Heaven.

  John Armstrong

  Spring, Eye, Heaven

  John Armstrong (2011). “John Armstrong's The Art of Preserving Health: Eighteenth-century Sensibility in Practice”, p.116, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

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• The Japanese are virtuosos. They make just the little accent that makes all the difference. So much there is so beautiful - just a shop window display is a work of art. Just the way they make all kinds of things out of bamboo that are so ingenious. Just the way this little bamboo drain or latch is so beautiful. The masonry around the streams to hold the bank are beautiful - and not all one kind and not just cement.

  Jane Jacobs

  Beautiful, Art, Differences

  Source: www.metropolismag.com

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• Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

  James Joyce

  Reading, Writing, Reason Why

  James Joyce (2016). “The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more”, p.3562, e-artnow

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• The profession of magician, is one of the most perilous and arduous specializations of the imagination. On the one hand there is the hostility of God and the police to be guarded against; on the other it is as difficult as music, as deep as poetry, as ingenious as stage-craft, as nervous as the manufacture of high explosives, and as delicate as the trade in narcotics.

  William Bolitho

  Hands, Imagination, Police

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• The Jews had, as a matter of fact, long been all along the most ingenious entrepreneurs. It was only our own future that we had never built upon a business basis.

  Theodor Herzl

  Long, Entrepreneur, Mind Your Own Business

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• Immensely clever and libidinously hilarious.The most astonishing thing about Love in a Dead Language is its ingenious construction. Insofar as any printed volume can lay claim to being a multimedia work, this book earns that distinction.

  Paul Di Filippo

  Clever, Book, Language

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• There are, indeed, few kinds of composition from which an author, however learned or ingenious, can hope a long continuance of fame.

  Samuel Johnson

  Writing, Long, Kind

  Samuel Johnson (1827). “The Rambler”, p.43

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• Do you dare to accuse wine of clouding the reason? Quote me more marvelous effects than those of wine. Look! when a man drinks, he is rich, everything he touches succeeds, he gains lawsuits, is happy and helps his friends. Come, bring hither quick a flagon of wine, that I may soak my brain and get an ingenious idea.

  Aristophanes

  Wine, Men, Ideas

  Aristophanes (2013). “The Eleven Comedies”, p.23, Simon and Schuster

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• DEBT, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave-driver. As, pent in an aquarium, the troutlet Swims round and round his tank to find an outlet, Pressing his nose against the glass that holds him, Nor ever sees the prison that enfolds him; So the poor debtor, seeing naught around him, Yet feels the narrow limits that impound him, Grieves at his debt and studies to evade it, And finds at last he might as well have paid it.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Grieving, Glasses, Aquariums

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2379, Delphi Classics

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• Rather than earn money, it was Thoreau's idea to reduce his wants so that he would not need to buy anything. As he went around preaching this ingenious idea, the shopkeepers of Concord hoped he would drop dead.

  Richard Armour

  Money, Ideas, Needs

  Richard Armour (1970). “American Lit Relit”

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• Besides, we weren't made to battle villains, because there weren't any. No nation, creed, or race was any better or worse than another; all were flawed, all were equally doomed to suffering, mostly because they couldn't see that they were all alike. Mortals might have been contemptible, true, but not evil entirely. They did enjoy killing one another and frequently came up with ingenious excuses for doing so on a grand scale-religions, economic theories, ethnic pride-but we couldn't condemn them for it, as it was in their mortal natures and they were too stupid to know any better.

  Kage Baker

  Stupid, Pride, Race

  Kage Baker (2005). “In the Garden of Iden”, p.51, Macmillan

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• Nothing is more dreadful than private duels in America. The two adversaries attack each other like wild beasts. Then it is that they might well covet those wonderful properties of the Indians of the prairies - their quick intelligence, their ingenious cunning, their scent of the enemy.

  Jules Verne

  Two, America, Enemy

  Jules Verne, Jules VERNE (2016). “From The Earth To The Moon / De la terre à la lune (Bilingual Edition: English - French / Édition bilingue: anglais - français)”, p.79, Jules Verne

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• To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, - while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Ambition, Men, Primitive Man

  "New Lamps for Old". Nine articles by Sri Aurobindo in the "Indu Prakash" (a Bombay daily newspaper), December 4, 1893.

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• Agriculture is the foundation of manufactures; since the productions of nature are the materials of art. Under the Roman empire, the labour of an industrious and ingenious people was variously, but incessantly employed, in the service of the rich. In their dress, their table, their houses, and their furniture, the favourites of fortune united every refinement of conveniency, of elegance, and of splendour, whatever could soothe their pride or gratify their sensuality.

  Edward Gibbon

  Art, Pride, Agriculture

  Edward Gibbon (1841). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1: With Maps”, p.33

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• Obviously neither 'American Idol' nor 'Dancing With the Stars' is a variety show in the classic sense, but the way they incorporate elements of drama, comedy and suspense is moderately ingenious.

  Tom Shales

  Stars, Drama, Idols

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• The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity's ancient campaign against pagan nature.

  Camille Paglia

  Christian, Sex, Ideas

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

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• There is hardly anything that an ingenious mind cannot bring itself to doubt, granted sufficient industry and application.

  Frances Noyes Hart

  Doubt, Mind, Granted

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