Lucidity Quotes - Page 2

• A poem is an instant of lucidity in which
  the entire organism participates.

  Charles Simic

  Instant, Organisms

  Charles Simic (1985). “The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry”

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• You who look at everything through your perpetually open eyes, is your lucidity never bathed in tears?

  Michel Serres

  Eye, Tears, Looks

  Michel Serres (2016). “The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies”, p.52, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting, are all controlled by a constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist's feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian's scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequalled.

  Walter Millis

  Strong, War, Character

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• The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become--and such lucidity is a form of joy.

  Eva Hoffman

  Joy, Perception, Form

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• Peter Kropotkin...was recognized by friend and foe as one of the greatest minds...of the nineteenth century...The lucidity and brilliance of his mind combined with his warm-heartednes s into the harmonious whole of a fascinating and gracious personality.

  Emma Goldman

  Personality, Mind, Century

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• No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Clouds, Vagueness

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.50, Modern Library

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• I'm actually a great fan of lucidity.

  Henry Flynt

  Artist, Fans, Great Fans

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• Eutrapelia . "A happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners.

  Matthew Arnold

  Mind, Quality, Prejudice

  "Irish Essays. A Speech at Eton" by Matthew Arnold, 1882.

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• A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Book, Reading, Past

  Charles Horton Cooley (2017). “Human Nature and the Social Order”, p.308, Routledge

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• Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

  Matthew Arnold

  Fate, Soul, Chance

  Matthew Arnold (1869). “Poems: Dramatic and lyric poems”, p.141

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• I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.

  Olaf Stapledon

  Stars, Philosophy, Men

  Olaf Stapledon (1975). “To the End of Time”, Macmillan Reference USA

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• He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind. He does not have to struggle... with the crowded pulsations of a fecund imagination. On the contrary he is almost devoid of imagination.

  Aneurin Bevan

  Struggle, Imagination, Mind

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• Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Monday, Crazy, Splinters

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• … he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.

  Arundhati Roy

  Lying, Rage, Born

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• Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Reality, Hypocrisy, Spokes

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• Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

  T. S. Eliot

  Typewriters, Long, Crafts

  T. S. Eliot (2011). “The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 1: 1898-1922”, p.240, Faber & Faber

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• We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight. The product of their impassioned intervention in public affairs is more often confusion than lucidity.

  Conrad Black

  Commitment, Numbers, Views

  "A Brief to the Special Senate Committee on the Mass Media from the Sherbrooke Record". 1969.

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• The essence of chastity is not the suppression of lust, but the total orientation of one's life towards a goal. Without such a goal, chastity is bound to become ridiculous. Chastity is the sine qua non of lucidity and concentration.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Essence, Goal, Lust

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1967). “Letters and Papers from Prison”

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• Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Despair, Tasks, Ferocity

  Emile M. Cioran (1999). “All Gall is Divided: Gnomes and Apothegms”, p.26, Arcade Publishing

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• A damnably readable, streamlined, yet deeply researched work. Skipping the ancestors and aftermath of conventional biography, Max gives us the man, his work, and his times-the niceties of which (so complicated, so exquisitely intertwined) Max articulates with, well, Wallace-like lucidity and wit. Above all this is the story of a touching young man who insisted on being something better than simply the smartest person in the room.

  Blake Bailey

  Men, Giving, Touching

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• Moskin has brought together with care and lucidity an inside history of American diplomacy written through the eyes of the many diplomats who conceived and carried it out over 225 years. You experience the challenges, successes, and foibles. Over time, the Foreign Service evolved into a professional cadre serving the public and presidents, often at the peril of their lives. Anyone interested in understanding our diplomacy, what makes it tick, and how it strives to serve the public interest should read this masterful history.

  Thomas R. Pickering

  Eye, Years, Understanding

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• Depressive lucidity, usually described as a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns, generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest. Thus it is possible to imagine a depressed lover, while the idea of a depressed patriot seems frankly inconceivable.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Ideas, Profound, Ordinary

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• In language that is searing and lyrical, evocative and precise, this exceptional book thinks with the zombies, specters, felons, slaves, dogs, cadavers, and other entities that are the remnants of loss and dispossession in the law. Dogs and people are abundantly present here, even as the legal fictions they are made to inhabit are exposed with acid lucidity. These are hard histories made readable by Dayan's precious acts of writing.

  Donna J. Haraway

  Dog, Book, Writing

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• America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  America, Independence, Pieces

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• Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing.

  Yann Martel

  Might, Losing, Enough

  Yann Martel (2012). “Life Of Pi, Illustrated”, p.211, Canongate Books

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