Raw Materials Quotes - Page 2

• The raw material from which social institutions are fashioned is always more or less recalcitrant and any human society will tend to produce a caricature of itself.

  Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth

  Social, Institutions, Recalcitrant

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• I think God is the creative force of the universe. I think it is the raw material from which life emerges.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Thinking, Creative, Force

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• The raw materials of reality without the glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind.

  Ken Kesey

  Airplane, Reality, Wind

  Ken Kesey (2006). “Sometimes a Great Notion”, p.160, Penguin

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• Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.

  Boris Pasternak

  Self, People, Principles

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• He [Thomas Edison] considered [money] as a raw material, like metal, to be used rather than amassed, and so he kept plowing his funds into new projects. Several times he was all but bankrupt. But he refused to let dollar signs govern his actions.

  Charles Edison

  Dollars, Plowing, Action

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• Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.

  P. D. James

  Crafts, Increase, Materials

  "Ten rules for writing fiction" by P. D. James, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

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• The trebling of the population in this small and impoverished country, flowing with milk and honey but not with sufficient water, rich in rocks and sand dunes but poor in natural resources and vital raw materials, has been no easy task: Indeed, practical men, with their eyes fixed upon things as they are, regarded it as an empty and insubstantial utopian dream.

  David Ben-Gurion

  Country, Dream, Eye

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• Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Writing, Dust, Order

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• One man's trash is another man's treasure is a third man's raw materials for their planet-buster earthquake machine.

  Mira Grant

  Men, Earthquakes, Machines

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• It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.

  William Ernest Henley

  Artist, Confusion, Select

  William Ernest Henley (1921). “The Works of William Ernest Henley: Views and reviews”

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• And the reward when good people die - her mother paused, swallowed, paused again - the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven't been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have - they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it's up to the new ones, once they're born, what they'll use and what they won't but that's what everyone who dies is doing, I think.

  Dara Horn

  Mother, Thinking, People

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• One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Philosophical, Animal, Oxen

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• Dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also in great part dupes.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Lying, Dupes, Dishonesty

  Thomas Carlyle, Chris Vanden Bossche (2002). “Historical Essays”, p.43, Univ of California Press

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• The fact is that seven per cent of the global population emits 50 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, and the proportions are the same for the use of energy and raw materials, meat, wood, etc. Simply put, an infinitesimal minority consumes the most and imposes damage on the overwhelming majority, while asking it to change.

  Yann Arthus-Bertrand

  Majority, Population, Minorities

  "Spotlight: Yann Arthus-Bertrand, cinematographer and Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme". UN News Centre Interview, www.un.org. February 7, 2011.

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• The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Essence, Might

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.75, Modern Library

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• The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid's theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.

  G. H. Hardy

  Science, Tasks, Euclid

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.99, Cambridge University Press

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• Civilization grew in the beginning from the minute that we had communication - particularly communication by sea that enabled people to get inspiration and ideas from each other and to exchange basic raw materials.

  Thor Heyerdahl

  Communication, Inspiration, Sea

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• The physical fabric of the world had to be such as to enable that ten billion year preliminary evolution to produce the raw materials of life. Without it there would not have been the chemical materials to allow life to evolve here on earth.

  John Polkinghorne

  Years, Fabric, World

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• A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Hands, Broken, Unity

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• Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself - clay to be available for future use.

  David Byrne

  Emotional, Creative, Clay

  David Byrne (2010). “Bicycle Diaries”, p.192, Faber & Faber

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• I always write a draft version of the novel in which I try to develop, not the story, not the plot, but the possibilities of the plot. I write without thinking much, trying to overcome all kinds of self-criticism, without stopping, without giving any consideration to the style or structure of the novel, only putting down on paper everything that can be used as raw material, very crude material for later development in the story.

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  Writing, Thinking, Self

  Mario Vargas Llosa (2013). “A Writer's Reality”, p.48, Faber & Faber

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• How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Memories, Daily Work, Clutch

  Lawrence Durrell (2012). “The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea”, p.129, Faber & Faber

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• With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. I realize it may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

  Francine Prose

  Reading, Sight, Temptation

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• This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.

  Michael Cunningham

  Hands, Materials

  Michael Cunningham (2010). “A Home at the End of the World: A Novel”, p.106, Macmillan

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• I put out a lot of different kinds of material, and maybe people read that as egotistical. Or maybe, since a lot of it does involve some aspect of me, they find it self-aggrandizing. But there’s a long tradition of artists using themselves. Look, I know I’m not perfect. And, who knows, maybe a part of it has to do with self-obsession. But it’s also about using this weird thing that is a public persona as raw material for creative projects.

  James Franco

  Artist, Self, Long

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