Instance Quotes - Page 33

• Cruelty is no more the cure of crimes than it is the cure of sufferings; compassion, in the first instance, is good for both; I have known it to bring compunction when nothing else would.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Compassion, Suffering, Cuckoos

  Walter Savage Landor (1856). “Selections from the Writings of Walter Savage Landor”, p.18

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• We've lost an edge that we used to have in scientific innovation applications to goods to be sold. In many ways, that is also changing in the electronic field. Almost all of the materials that we use now are of advanced technology, I have an iPad and also an iPod, both of which are made in China. Although we have designed them here with Apple, for instance, they are manufactured overseas.

  Jimmy Carter

  Technology, Ipads, Apples

  "Big Think Interview With Jimmy Carter". Interview with Andrea Useem, bigthink.com. November 30, 2010.

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• I think references, where they fit organically, are great. It's great to do a show that's real and relatable, and so much of what is real, is using real things and instances that are specific. Specificity is the best tool you can have, as a writer.

  Mindy Kaling

  Real, Thinking, Tools

  "Mindy Kaling Talks Acting in and Producing THE MINDY PROJECT, Returning to THE OFFICE, GAME OF THRONES Obsessions and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. July 30, 2012.

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• I did New York, I Love You which is a very personal film for me. My most personal film, but it's not like a film I've ever made. I would never do that film as a feature, for instance, because it's not very commercial of an idea.

  Brett Ratner

  New York, Love You, Ideas

  Source: collider.com

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• Heat can also be produced by the impact of imperfectly elastic bodies as well as by friction. This is the case, for instance, when we produce fire by striking flint against steel, or when an iron bar is worked for some time by powerful blows of the hammer.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

  Powerful, Blow, Fire

  Hermann von Helmholtz, David Cahan (1995). “Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays”, p.116, University of Chicago Press

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• I am of course getting angry if biologists try to use the general concept 'chance' in order to explain phenomena which are so typical for living organisms as, for instance, those appearing in the biological evolution.

  Wolfgang Paul

  Order, Trying, Typical

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• We should not shrink from opportunities where our faith may be tried. The more I am in a position to be tried in faith, the more I will have the opportunity of seeing God’s help and deliverance. Every fresh instance in which He helps and delivers me will increase my faith. The believer should not shrink from situations, positions, or circumstances in which his faith may be tried, but he should cheerfully embrace them as opportunities to see the hand of God stretched out in help and deliverance. Thus his faith will be strengthened.

  George Muller

  Opportunity, Hands, May

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• Somehow, in many of those near-miss instances, I've managed to fight through and continue. But in all these situations, even when they're apparently going well, I feel I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive.

  Scott Stossel

  Fighting, Missing, Alive

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• Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Attachment, Play

  "A Room of One's Own". Essay by Virginia Woolf (Chapter 3, pp. 43-44), October 24, 1929.

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• Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie.

  George Santayana

  Confused, Lying, Competition

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana”

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• In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.

  George Santayana

  Justice, Heaven, World

  "Interpretations of Poetry and Religion" by George Santayana, (p. 54), 1900.

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• I have no little insight into the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with a reasonable consideration. How some people use their pictures, for instance, is a mystery to me; very revolting all the same--portraits obliged to face each other for ever--prints put together in portfolios.

  Robert Browning

  Book, People, Feelings

  Robert Browning (2015). “Love Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett”, p.267, e-artnow sro

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• With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?

  Yehuda Berg

  Irreparable Harm, Toxic Waste, Climate

  "What the @#$% is Going On?" by Yehuda Berg, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 10, 2010.

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• And what, for instance, would have happened had Romeo and Juliet lived to middle age, their silhouettes broadened by pasta?

  Anita Loos

  Age, Pasta, Silhouettes

  Anita Loos, Ray Pierre Corsini (1985). “Fate keeps on happening: adventures of Lorelei Lee and other writings”

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• Men of real talents in Arms have commonly approved themselves patrons of the liberal arts and friends to the poets, of their own as well as former times. In some instances by acting reciprocally, heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.

  George Washington

  Art, Real, Hero

  George Washington, Fred Anderson, Philander D. Chase (2004). “George Washington Remembers: Reflections on the French and Indian War”, p.92, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Who isn't frustrated and does not prove it by his actions - if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.

  William Carlos Williams

  Art, Men, Frustrated

  William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.53, New Directions Publishing

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• How sad, that the group with the most access to the truth chose in several strategic instances to look the other way.

  John Ashcroft

  Groups, Looks, Way

  "Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice". Book by John Ashcroft, 2006.

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• Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.

  William James

  Letting Go, Spiritual, College

  "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature". Book by William James, 1902.

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• an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell... the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.

  Mark Twain

  Book, Cat, Dust

  Mark Twain (2016). “The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain”, p.55, Chartwell

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• We see many instances of cities going down like sinking ships to their destruction. There have been such wrecks in the past and there surely will be others in the future, caused by the wickedness of captains and crews alike. For these are guilty men, whose sin is supreme ignorance of what matters most.

  Plato

  Ignorance, Past, Men

  Plato (1952). “Plato's Statesman”

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• Anyone who knows of a provable instance of colour discrimination ought always to expose it.

  George Orwell

  Discrimination, Colour, Ought

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: As I please, 1943-1945”

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• Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.

  George Orwell

  Doctrine, Persons

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: I have tried to tell the truth, 1943-1944”

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• No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels. Broadly, we can afford to sink those sorts of knowledge which continue to be true regardless of changes in the environment, but we must maintain in an accessible place all those controls of behavior which must be modified for every instance. The economics of the system, in fact, pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatic of particular instances.

  Gregory Bateson

  Levels, Matter, Facts

  "Steps to an Ecology of Mind". Book by Gregory Bateson, 1972.

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• no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.

  Karl Popper

  Swans, White, Doe

  Karl Popper (2005). “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, p.4, Routledge

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• When suicide is out of fashion we conclude that none but madmen destroy themselves; and all the efforts of courage appear chimerical to dastardly minds ... Nevertheless, how many instances are there, well attested, of men, in every other respect perfectly discreet, who, without remorse, rage, or despair, have quitted life for no other reason than because it was a burden to them, and have died with more composure than they lived?

  David Hume

  Suicide, Fashion, Men

  David Hume (1799). “ESSAYS ON SUICIDE AND THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL”, p.60

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