Notion Quotes - Page 12

• The American notion of family is perhaps the most romanticized, deep-rooted, and misery-producing fantasy of the last hundred years.

  Joy Browne

  Family, Years, Lasts

  Joy Browne, M.D. (2010). “The Nine Fantasies That Will Ruin Your Life (and the Eight Realities That Will Save You)”, p.11, Harmony

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• I was very fierce and very driven at eighteen. But my basic philosophy I think has stayed the same, I'm still an atheist, I still believe strongly in the power of free will (despite the mysticism in my prose). I don't believe in the notion of a pre-ordained destiny, and I think because of the sudden death of my father at sixteen I learnt then that it is essential to live life to the fullest as it could be snatched away at any second.

  Tobsha Learner

  Atheist, Father, Philosophy

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• Winter's notion of poetry is tragedy. It knows nothing of comedy. Its laughter was frozen on its lips long ago.

  William Alfred Quayle

  Laughter, Winter, Long Ago

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• The basic notion of justice, is that the rights of everybody are equals, in principle. In the rights of others, we have to respect our own rights. It is only in that condition that we can reasonnably require that it be respected by others.

  African Spir

  Rights, Justice, Principles

  "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 44), 1937.

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• There is and always has been for me a peculiar need to write. This is very different from wanting to be a writer. To be a writer always seemed something so far removed from my talents and abilities and imaginings that it didn't afflict me at all as a notion when I was young. But I was always conscious that I wanted to write.

  Patricia Wentworth

  Writing, Different, Peculiar

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• Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  People, Mouths, May

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• For some time there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi', a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Ocean, Thinking, Vanity

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• It's a romantic notion that you're going to have one brilliant idea and then everything is going to be great... but the execution and delivery are what's key.

  Sergey Brin

  Keys, Ideas, Execution

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• I think when I started to write The Mysterious Benedict Society that I had that kind of thing in mind - the notion of having to be able to solve puzzles and riddles because enormous stakes rode upon your ability to do that.

  Trenton Lee Stewart

  Writing, Thinking, Mind

  "'Mysterious Benedict': Solve A Puzzle, Save The World". "All Things Considered", www.npr.org. March 26, 2012.

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• Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

  Mark Vonnegut

  Reading, Writing, Way

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• Real Men no longer drive Corvettes. Despite being able to squander gas with the best of them, even today's least enlightened Real Man finds the notion of a $17,000 plastic car with no trunk somewhat absurd.

  Bruce Feirstein

  Real, Men, Car

  Bruce Feirstein, Lionel Trippett (1982). “Real Men Don't Eat Quiche”, New English Library

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• Everyone has the notion that hip-hop is messy and loose, but there's also another level to it.

  Laurieann Gibson

  Hip Hop, Levels, Hips

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• There may be no less original idea than the notion that our hearts hold dominion over our heads.

  Nancy Gibbs

  Heart, Ideas, May

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• Anyone who resists the notion of women preachers is functioning as a tool of the devil.

  Tony Campolo

  Devil, Tools, Preacher

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• I think I've always been drawn to the notion of talk as cinematic.

  Noah Baumbach

  Thinking, Cinematic

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• ... we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.

  George Eliot

  Suffering, Morality, Motive

  George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.538, Wordsworth Editions

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• The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes - that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects - this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once - and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Ignorance, Origin Of Life

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• [The notion of separating church and state with such policies as disallowing prayer in public schools] is a deception from Satan.

  Joyce Meyer

  Prayer, School, Scary

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• You are confronted with abysses of time that are, in a way, unfathomable. You see a painting in charcoal of raindeer and it was left unfinished and somebody else finished it. But through radio carbon dating we know that the next one completed the painting 5,000 years later. You're just blown away by the notion of passage of time. We have no relationship to that kind of depth of time.

  Werner Herzog

  Years, Dating, Radio

  "Cave of Forgotten Dreams (3D) - Werner Herzog interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• The common notions that we find in credit around us and infused into our souls by our fathers' seed, these seem to be the universal and natural ones. Whence it comes to pass that what is off the hinges of custom, people believe to be off the hinges of reason.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Father, Believe, People

  Michel de Montaigne (1979). “Essays”

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• The history of life is more adequately represented by a picture of 'punctuated equilibria' than by the notion of phyletic gradualism. The history of evolution is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of homeostatic equilibria, disturbed only 'rarely' (i.e. rather often in the fullness of time) by rapid and episodic events of speciation.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Events, Stories, History Of Life

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• Honor's a fine imaginary notion, that draws in raw and unexperienced men to real mischiefs.

  Joseph Addison

  Real, Men, Honor

  Joseph Addison (1761). “Preface. Poems on several occasions. Rosamond. An essay on Virgil's Georgics. Cato. The drummer, or, The haunted house. Poemata. Dialogues upon the usefulness of ancient medals”, p.307

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• It is within this fathoms-long carcass, with its mind and its notions, that I declare there is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world and the path leading to the cessation of the world.

  Gautama Buddha

  Long, Mind, World

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• The notion that as a man grows older his illusions leave him is not quite true. What is true is that his early illusions are supplanted by new, and to him, equally convincing illusions.

  George Jean Nathan

  Men, Illusion, Convincing

  George Jean Nathan, Charles Angoff (1998). “The World of George Jean Nathan: Essays, Reviews, & Commentary”, Hal Leonard Corporation

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• Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.

  Marcel Proust

  Simple, Play, Intellectual

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