Peculiar Quotes - Page 9

• It is a peculiar part of the good photographer's adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it.

  James Agee

  Photography, Travel, Lying

  Helen Levitt, James Agee (1989). “A way of seeing”

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• The conductor is a peculiar person. He turns his back on his friends in the audience, shakes a stick at his players in the orchestra, and then wonders why nobody loves him.

  Victor Borge

  Funny, Music, Humorous

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• What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Men, One Direction

  Henry David Thoreau (2006). “Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles”, p.61, Heron Dance Press

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• Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.

  Anatole Broyard

  Sex, Writing, Missing

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• What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.

  Michel Foucault

  Sex, Secret, Shadow

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.35, Vintage

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• There is a fantasy in Redmond that Microsoft products are innovative, but this is based entirely on a peculiar confusion of the words "innovative" and "successful." Microsoft products are successful - they make a lot of money - but that doesn't make them innovative, or even particularly good.

  Robert X. Cringely

  Successful, Confusion, Microsoft

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• According to the celestial multiplication table, once one is three, and three times one is one, and according to heavenly subtraction if we take two from three, three are left. The addition is equally peculiar, if we add two to one we have but one. Each one is equal to himself and the other two.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Two, Religion, Add

  "The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll: Lectures".

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• Jewish cantors employ a peculiar art and method of singing in their delivery. They are unexcelled in the art of covering the voice, picking up a new key, in the treatment of the ritual chant, and overcoming vocal difficulties that lie in the words rather than in the music.

  Enrico Caruso

  Art, Lying, Keys

  Enrico Caruso, Andrew Farkas (1997). “Enrico Caruso: My Father and My Family”, Hal Leonard Corporation

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• Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Thanksgiving, Gratitude, Religious

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.226, 谷月社

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• Patriotism, or the peculiar relation of an individual to his country, is like the family instinct. In the child it is a blind devotion; in the man in intelligent love. The patriot perceives the claim made upon his country by the circumstances and time of her growth and power, and how God is to be served by using those opportunities of helping mankind. Therefore his country's honor is dear to him as his own, and he would as soon lie and steal himself as assist or excuse his country in a crime.

  George William Curtis

  Country, Children, Lying

  George William Curtis (1894). “On the principles and character of American institutions, and the duties of American citizens, 1856-1891”

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• The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.

  William James

  Science, Self, Brain

  William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.146, Courier Corporation

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• The progression of physical science is much more connected with your prosperity than is usually imagined. You owe to experimental philosophy some of the most important and peculiar of your advantages. It is not by foreign conquests chiefly that you are become great, but by a conquest of nature in your own country.

  Humphry Davy

  Country, Philosophy, Science

  Humphry Davy (1840). “The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy (etc.)”, p.358

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• In the world's history certain inventions and discoveries occurred, of peculiar value, on account of their great efficiency in facilitating all other inventions and discoveries. Of these were the art of writing and of printing - the discovery of America, and the introduction of Patent-laws. The date of the first ... is unknown; but it certainly was as much as fifteen hundred years before the Christian era; the second-printing-came in 1436, or nearly three thousand years after the first. The others followed more rapidly - the discovery of America in 1492, and the first patent laws in 1624.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Christian, Art, Writing

  "Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 3" by Abraham Lincoln, New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1953.

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• In order to translate a sentence from English into French two things are necessary. First, we must understand thoroughly the English sentence. Second, we must be familiar with the forms of expression peculiar to the French language. The situation is very similar when we attempt to express in mathematical symbols a condition proposed in words. First, we must understand thoroughly the condition. Second, we must be familiar with the forms of mathematical expression.

  George Polya

  Expression, Order, Two

  George Pólya (1957). “How to solve it: a new aspect of mathematical method”

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• Unless there exist peculiar institutions for the support of such inquirers, or unless the Government directly interfere, the contriver of a thaumatrope may derive profit from his ingenuity, whilst he who unravels the laws of light and vision, on which multitudes of phenomena depend, shall descend unrewarded to the tomb.

  Charles Babbage

  Science, Light, Government

  Charles Babbage (1830). “Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes”, p.19

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• The business of education has lay[ed] the foundations for nurseries of wise and good men, to adapt our modes of teaching to the peculiar form of our government . . . . He must be taught to love his fellow creatures in every part of the world, but he must cherish with a more intense and peculiar affection the citizens of Pennsylvania and of the United States.

  Benjamin Rush

  Education, Wise, Teaching

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• Nothing is more natural to men in office, than to look with peculiar deference towards that authority to which they owe their official existence.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Men, Office, Looks

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2015). “The Federalist Papers: A Collection of Essays Written in Favour of the New Constitution”, p.109, Coventry House Publishing

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• The peculiar fascination of the brain lies in the fact that there is probably no other object of scientific enquiry about which we know at once so much and yet understand so little.

  Gerd Sommerhoff

  Lying, Brain, Enquiry

  Gerd Sommerhoff (1974). “Logic of the living brain”, John Wiley & Sons

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• The Kiss scene was attempted three times. The first was in a peculiar spot of the fort on the ground level. It felt forced to me, and I knew right away that, in spite of what others were saying, it was dead wrong.

  Madeleine Stowe

  Kissing, Kiss Me, Firsts

  "Back from the Wilderness ... Miss Cora Munro". Mohican Press Interview, 2005.

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• The combination of such characters, some, as the sacral ones, altogether peculiar among Reptiles, others borrowed, as it were, from groups now distinct from each other, and all manifested by creatures far surpassing in size the largest of existing reptiles, will, it is presumed, be deemed sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria.

  Richard Owen

  Character, Science, Order

  Report of the Eleventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science "Report on British Fossil Reptiles" (1842)

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• Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.

  Georges Seurat

  Art, Character, Drawing

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• All the more recent work on alkaptonuria has... strengthened the belief that the homogentisic acid excreted is derived from tyrosin, but why alkaptonuric individuals pass the benzene ring of their tyrosin unbroken and how and where the peculiar chemical change from tyrosin to homogentisic acid is brought about, remain unsolved problems.

  Archibald Garrod

  Unbroken, Acid, Belief

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• When we trace the part of which this terrestrial system is composed, and when we view the general connection of those several parts, the whole presents a machine of a peculiar construction by which it is adapted to a certain end. We perceive a fabric, erected in wisdom, to obtain a purpose worthy of the power that is apparent in the production of it.

  James Hutton

  Science, Views, Connections

  James Hutton (1795). “Theory of the Earth: With Proofs and Illustrations”, p.109, Library of Alexandria

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• The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?

  Charles Darwin

  Theory Of Evolution, Facts, Biology

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• The cell, this elementary keystone of living nature, is far from being a peculiar chemical giant molecule or even a living protein and as such is not likely to fall prey to the field of an advanced chemistry. The cell is itself an organism, constituted of many small units of life.

  Oscar Hertwig

  Life, Fall, Science

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