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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• Lucidity of speech is unquestionably one of the surest tests of mental precision...In my experience a confused talker is never a clear thinker.

  David Lloyd George

  Confused, Speech, Tests

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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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• He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Crush, Children, Past

  "One Hundred Years of Solitude". Book by Gabriel García Márquez, 1967.

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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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• 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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• 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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• The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Honesty, Hopeful, Intellectual

  Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy (2001). “The Power of Ideas”, p.52, Princeton University Press

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• Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects.

  Honore de Balzac

  Powerful, Passion, Wine

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• Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Insomnia, Paradise, Torture

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• In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.

  Storm Jameson

  Grief, Loss, Thinking

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• Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.

  Albert Camus

  Men, Illustration, Order

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.68, Vintage

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• In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror's attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.

  Albert Camus

  Attitude, Character, Passion

  "The Myth of Sisyphus". Book by Albert Camus, 1942.

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• The secret, or innermost, level of wisdom is pure intuition, clarity, lucidity, innate wakefulness, presence, and recognition of reality. This transcendental wisdom is within all of us—it just needs to be discovered and developed, unfolded and actualized.

  Surya Das

  Wisdom, Reality, Meditation

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• As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.

  Will Self

  Writing, Dark, Landscape

  "Constellation of Genius, 1922: Modernism Year One by Kevin Jackson - review" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. October 19, 2012.

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• God is always present, always available. At whatever moment in which one turns to him the prayer is received, is heard, is authenticated, for it is God who gives our prayer its value and its character, not our interior dispositions, not our fervor, not our lucidity. The prayer which is pronounced for God and accepted by him becomes, by that very fact, a true prayer.

  Jacques Ellul

  Prayer, Character, Giving

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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