Instruments Quotes - Page 19

• I think any song should sound good just played on a solitary instrument with the vocal. If you have those basics you have all you need. The production then just polishes that idea into the finished thing.

  Gary Numan

  Song, Thinking, Ideas

  "Gary Numan answers your questions" by Adam Boult, www.theguardian.com. November 30, 2012.

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• A boycott is, inherently, a blunt instrument. It is an imperfect weapon, a carpet bomb, when all involved would prefer a surgical strike.

  Conor Oberst

  Bombs, Weapons, Imperfect

  "Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst responds to Arizona promoter’s boycott concerns" by Katie Hasty, uproxx.com. July 2, 2010.

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• The only instrument I can play is piano. Whenever I make songs at home, I play the piano and make them on the piano.

  Yoko Ono

  Song, Home, Play

  Interview with Andy Battaglia, www.avclub.com. October 16, 2009.

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• I will to my dying day oppose with all the powers and faculties God has given me, all such instruments of slavery on the one hand, and villainy on the other, as this writ of assistance is.

  James Otis

  Hands, Dying, Slavery

  "James Otis: Against Writs of Assistance". James Otis' speech (February 1761), as quoted in William Tudor "James Otis's Speech on the Writs of Assistance", books.google.com. 1906.

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• In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Shining, Hammers

  Ernest Hemingway (2014). “Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition”, p.23, Simon and Schuster

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• The evening ended with dancing. On its being proposed, Anne offered her services, as usual, and though her eyes would sometimes fill with tears as she sat at the instrument, she was extremely glad to be employed, and desired nothing in return but to be unobserved.

  Jane Austen

  Eye, Dancing, Tears

  Jane Austen (2013). “Persuasion In Modern English”, p.207, BookCaps Study Guides

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• You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

  Julian Barnes

  Views, Two, Together

  Julian Barnes (1985). “Flaubert's parrot”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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• Music- what a powerful instrument, what a mighty weapon!

  Maria von Trapp

  Music, Powerful, Weapons

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• The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages.

  Christopher Morley

  Sleep, Average, Doubt

  Christopher Morley (2013). “The Haunted Bookshop”, p.129, Melville House

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• The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism - for that is what the words 'one flesh' would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact - just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Believe, Men

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.94, HarperCollins UK

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• You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.

  Norman Mailer

  Men, Effectiveness, You Like It

  Norman Mailer (2013). “The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition, With a New Introduction by the Author”, p.82, Henry Holt and Company

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• But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.

  Paulo Coelho

  Powerful, Believe, Soul

  Paulo Coelho (1998). “The Alchemist - 10th Anniversary Edition”, HarperSanFrancisco

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• Clarinet n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments worse than a clarinet – two clarinets.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Two, Ears, Cotton

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• The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.

  James Madison

  War, Home, Mean

  James Madison (1787). “The Writings of James Madison: 1787. The journal of the Constitutional convention”, p.317

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• None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.

  Dean Koontz

  Light, Giving, Darkness

  Dean Koontz (2007). “One Door Away from Heaven: A Novel”, p.680, Bantam

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• Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Book, Musical, Different

  FaceBook post by Orhan Pamuk from Feb 12, 2012

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• No woman is a more vibrant instrument in the hands of the Lord than a woman of God who is thrilled to be who she is.

  Sheri L. Dew

  Hands, Lord, Women Of God

  Sheri L. Dew (2001). “No Doubt about it”

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• and we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.

  George Eliot

  Discovery, Agony, Soul

  George Eliot (2016). “Adam Bede: Top Novelist Focus”, p.83, 谷月社

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• A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Art, Believe, Men

  Jorge Luis Borges, Eliot Weinberger (2009). “Seven Nights”, p.120, New Directions Publishing

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• How can non-existence get sick of itself? Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind & our world are the same thing.

  Victor Pelevin

  Morning, Mean, Thinking

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• Government should be a place where people can come together, and no one gets left behind. No one…gets left behind. An instrument of good.

  Aaron Sorkin

  Government, People, Together

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• I repeat the declaration made a year ago, that 'while I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation, nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the Acts of Congress.' If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Mean, Years, People

  Abraham Lincoln (1989). “Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings Part 2: 1859-1865: Library of America #46”, p.661, Library of America

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• The historian of science may be tempted to claim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. even more important, during revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Science, Light, Community

  "Donald Davidson: A Short Introduction". Book by Kathrin Glüer, p. 213, December 5, 2011.

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• The resolution of revolutions is selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net result of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Knowledge, Science, Practice

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.171, University of Chicago Press

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• Lust is the cause of generation
  Appetite is the support of life
  Fear or timidity is the prolongation of life, and
  Fraud the preservation of its instruments.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Fear, Support, Lust

  Leonardo da Vinci (2008). “Notebooks”, p.263, OUP Oxford

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