Significance Quotes - Page 22

• Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.

  Jane Addams

  Men, Hands, Tools

  Jane Addams (2012). “Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes”, p.45, Courier Corporation

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• What will matter is not your success but your significance.

  Michael Josephson

  Success, Matter

  "What Will Matter". Poem by Michael Josephson, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2003.

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• And last of all we have the secondary forms of crystals bursting in upon us, and sparkling in the rigidity of mathematical necessity and telling us, neither of harmony of design, usefulness or moral significance, nothing but spherical trigonometry and Napier's analogies. It is because we have blindly excluded the lessons of these angular bodies from the domain of human knowledge that we are still in doubt about the great doctrine that the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Law, Design, Doubt

  James Clerk Maxwell (1990). “The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell: 1846-1862”, p.383, CUP Archive

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• I think men of science as well as other men need to learn from Christ, and I think Christians whose minds are scientific are bound to study science that their view of the glory of God may be as extensive as their being is capable. But I think that the results which each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonize his science with his Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance except to the man himself, and to him only for a time, and should not receive the stamp of a society.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Christian, Men, Thinking

  James Clerk Maxwell (2002). “The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell:”, p.188, Cambridge University Press

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• Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful.

  J. G. Ballard

  Meaningful, Art, Sex

  "JG Ballard: Theatre of Cruelty". Interview with Jean-Paul Coillard, www.jgballard.ca. 1998.

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• Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?

  William James

  Religious, Order, Doe

  William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.24, Courier Corporation

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• Mead's anthropology had many other red, white and blue- blooded virtues. One was the common anthropological conceit, out of which she made a career, to the effect that the ultimate value of studying other cultures was the use we could make of them to reconstruct our own - a heady kind of intellectual imperialism, as if the final meaning of others' lives was their significance for us.

  Margaret Mead

  Blue, Other Cultures, Careers

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• The Hindu religion appears ... as a cathedral temple, half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail but always fantastic with a significance crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Real, Unseen, Details

  Sri Aurobindo (1970). “Letters on Yoga”, Lotus Press (WI)

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• I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things. "The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize." "Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I'm not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat."

  Alan Bennett

  Beautiful, Mother, Land

  "Writing Home". Book by Alan Bennett, 1994.

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• In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind - not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.

  Maurice Ravel

  Art, Writing, Should Have

  "Ravel: Man and Musician". Book by Arbie Orenstein, p. 126, 1975.

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• The dream of man's heart ... is that life may complete in significant pattern.

  Saul Bellow

  Dream, Heart, Men

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• The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.

  Bernard DeVoto

  Individuality, Sacred, Trouble

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• If travel has taught me nothing more, and it certainly has, it's this: you never know when some trifling incident, utterly without significance, may pitchfork you into adventure or, by the same token, may not.

  S. J. Perelman

  Travel, Adventure, May

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• The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

  James A. Baldwin

  Views, Generations, Students

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• There is nothing insignificant-nothing.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Insignificant

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1836). “The Poetical and Dramatic Works of S. T. Coleridge. With a Life of the Author”, p.146

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• When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance.

  Ben Hecht

  Money, Blessing, People

  "A child of the century".

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• I've never worked to make money. I understand we've got to eat and all that, but I never said I want to be a multimillionaire or a billionaire. To me, that's of no significance. I work to have the accomplishment.

  Bob Parsons

  Accomplishment, Want, Making Money

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• Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Sex, Waiting Rooms, Preamble

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.4, Grove Press

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• Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that 'all people are really interested in' are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong.

  Alastair Campbell

  Views, Media, People

  "The Bill Clinton I knew" by Alastair Campbell, www.theguardian.com. June 26, 2004.

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• Those who have never suffered the iniquities of exile cannot possibly understand the significance, the gravitas, of a mattress.

  Ariel Dorfman

  Gravitas, Mattresses, Exile

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• It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?

  Jonathan Franzen

  Nice, Book, Writing

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• The main purpose of a significance test is to inhibit the natural enthusiasm of the investigator.

  Frederick Mosteller

  Science, Purpose, Enthusiasm

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• Social historians of the future no doubt will be amused by the fact that we late-twentieth-century Americans found it acceptable to discuss publicly in detail the most intimate aspects of personal life, while maintaining an almost prudish reserve concerning the political significance of family life.

  Mary Ann Glendon

  Political, Doubt, Details

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• The process that I want to call scientific is a process that involves the continual apprehension of meaning, the constant appraisal of significance accompanied by a running act of checking to be sure that I am doing what I want to do, and of judging correctness or incorrectness. This checking and judging and accepting, that together constitute understanding, are done by me and can be done for me by no one else. They are as private as my toothache, and without them science is dead.

  Percy Williams Bridgman

  Running, Science, Judging

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• I fancy you give me credit for being a more systematic sort of cove than I really am in the matter of limits of significance. What would actually happen would be that I should make out Pt (normal) and say to myself that would be about 50:1; pretty good but as it may not be normal we'd best not be too certain, or 100:1; even allowing that it may not be normal it seems good enough and whether one would be content with that or would require further work would depend on the importance of the conclusion and the difficulty of obtaining suitable experience.

  William Sealy Gosset

  Science, Giving, Would Be

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