Preconceptions Quotes - Page 2

• I really like acting in French. It's actually quite different for me, from acting in English. It's fun acting in a foreign language. You're liberated or freed from preconceptions.

  Kristin Scott Thomas

  Fun, Acting, Different

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• I've never been a fan of directors who clutter a piece with all sorts of crazy preconceptions or weird ideas.

  Dan Stevens

  Crazy, Ideas, Directors

  "STAGE TO SCREENS: Dan Stevens, From "Downton Abbey" Heir to Broadway's The Heiress". Interview with Brandon Voss, www.playbill.com. November 13, 2012.

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• Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

  Jessamyn West

  Friendship, Being Alone, Writing

  Jessamyn West (1973). “Hide and Seek: A Continuing Journey”, Harcourt

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• We are doomed to failure without a daily destruction of our various preconceptions.

  Taiichi Ohno

  Destruction, Various, Doomed

  Taiichi Ohno (2012). “Taiichi Ohnos Workplace Management : Special 100th Birthday Edition: Special 100th Birthday Edition”, McGraw Hill Professional

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• Once you embark on a road of imagination and creating, all bets are off. All preconceptions about what you must do, make, think, assume, and believe are yesterday’s news.

  Jon Rappoport

  Believe, Thinking, Yesterday

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• I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn't expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything - fortune, love, even a limb - if I could simply survive.

  Guy Sajer

  Love, Disappointment, War

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• Say it, no ideas but in things - nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident - split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained - secret - into the body of the light!

  William Carlos Williams

  Light, Ideas, House

  William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.263, New Directions Publishing

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• Constant reminding ourselves that we not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.

  David Eagleman

  Eye, Perception, Brain

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• The science of systematics has long been affected by profound philosophical preconceptions, which have been all the more influential for being usually covert, even subconscious.

  George Gaylord Simpson

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Science

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• I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see, I swallow immediately. Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful.

  Sylvia Plath

  Truthful, Dislike

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath”, p.33, Faber & Faber

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• Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.

  Jessamyn West

  Courage, Writing, Helpful

  Jessamyn West (1986). “Woman Said Yes: Encounters with Life and Death”, Harcourt on Demand

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• Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, People, Giving

  Georg Brand, Virginia Woolf, Koizumi Yakumo, Hernández Felisberto (2017). “ON READING: Le plaisir de lire”, p.34, Pieffe Edizioni via PublishDrive

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• Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.

  Alan Watts

  Self, Mind, Wish

  "The Wisdom of Insecurity".

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• First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.

  Jesse Ball

  Moving, Wine, Simple

  FaceBook post by Jesse Ball from Aug 21, 2013

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• A remarkable tour de force that will hopefully end forever the argument that science and the spiritual are opposed to one another. This wonderful collection of facts and arguments, written in a good-natured, almost conversational style, makes it easy to loosen yourself from your preconceptions and enjoy seeing reality more clearly and completely. We have needed such a book for a long time.

  James Fadiman

  Spiritual, Book, Reality

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• Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Memories, Five Senses, Minorities

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.31, Faber & Faber

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• I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.

  Clarice Lispector

  Knowing, Mind, Territory

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• If theater is ritual, then dance is too... It's as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.

  Paulo Coelho

  Luxury, Dancing, World

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• The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.

  Carl Sagan

  Mind, Unbiased, Way

  Carl Sagan, Jerald F. TerHorst, Allan J. Mayer, Sharon S. McKern, Laurence J. Peter (1980). “Broca's brain: reflections on the romance of science”

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• Values and verdicts never bother me half as much as people trying to weasel their way around them, or people compromising their reason to pander to their own prejudices and preconceptions, which they are so rarely competent to look in the face.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, People, Trying

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• Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Life, Beauty, Spiritual

  Peter Matthiessen (1998). “Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982”, p.8, Shambhala Publications

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• Hardly any one is able to see what is before him, just as it is in itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through the veil of his preconception, he criticizes before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself.

  Arthur Symons

  Vision, Veils, Able

  Arthur Symons (1924). “The collected works of Arthur Symons”

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• Once you free your mind about the concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want. So nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do.

  Giorgio Moroder

  Free Your Mind, Want, Harmony

  FaceBook post by Giorgio Moroder from Nov 21, 2013

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• Like this gas tank, you are overflowing with preconceptions, full of useless knowledge. You hold many facts and opinions, yet know little of yourself. Before you can learn, you'll have to first empty your tank.

  Dan Millman

  Tanks, Useless, Littles

  Dan Millman (2009). “Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives”, p.28, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• SF has at least the advantage of not depending on preconceptions.

  John Thomas Sladek

  Advantage

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