Significance Quotes - Page 26

• An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain.

  Upton Sinclair

  Long, Events, May

  Upton Sinclair “100%: The Story of a Patriot”, Lulu.com

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• Divine things are too deep to be expressed by common words. The heavenly teachings are expressed in parable in order to be understood and preserved for ages to come. When the spiritually minded dive deeply into the ocean of their meaning they bring to the surface the pearls of their inner significance. There is no greater pleasure than to study God’s Word with a spiritual mind.

  Abdu'l-Bahá

  Spiritual, Ocean, Teaching

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• The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.

  Alain de Botton

  Greek, Rewards, Leisure

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

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• Woman is the symbol to man of the uncleanness of bodily existence, of which he purifies himself by putting her to noble uses. She thus has for him a double, contradictory significance; she is the subject of his bawdry and the subject of his romance.

  Laura Riding

  Men, Romance, Noble

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• Most expositions of Aristotle's doctrines, when they have not been dictated by a spirit of virulent detraction, or unsympathetic indifference, have carefully suppressed all, or nearly all, the absurdities, and only retained what seemed plausible and consistent. But in this procedure their historical significance disappears.

  George Henry Lewes

  Historical, Doctrine, Spirit

  George Henry Lewes (1864). “Aristotle: a chapter from the history of science including analyses of Aristotle's scientific writings”, p.9, London : Smith, Elder and Company

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• In my opinion, neither organisms nor organizations evolve slowly and surely into something better, but drift until some small change occurs which has immediate and overwhelming significance. The special role of the human being is not to wait for these favorable accidents but deliberately to introduce the small change that will have great significance.

  Edwin Land

  Small Changes, Organization, Waiting

  "Generation of Greatness : The Idea of a University in an Age of Science". Edwin Land's Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, groups.csail.mit.edu. May 22, 1957.

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• In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.

  Edwin Land

  Building, International, Wretched

  "Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land" by Victor K. McElheny, (p. 198), 1998.

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• A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

  Stefan Zweig

  Historical, Atmosphere, Values

  Stefan Zweig (1955). “Stories and Legends”

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• Sometimes I have the feeling that you are not quite aware--and this honors you--of the historical greatness of your position, that you think too modestly about yourself. Everything you do is destined to be of historic significance. One day, your letters, your decisions, will belong to all mankind, like those of Wagner and Brahms.

  Stefan Zweig

  Greatness, Thinking, Decision

  Richard Strauss, Stefan Zweig (1977). “A Confidential Matter: The Letters of Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig, 1931-1935”, p.67, Univ of California Press

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• If you look around the world and I can tell you right now that the majority of the planet is focused on certainty and significance. And those two absolutely guarantee unhappiness. Because if you're driven by significance, it doesn't matter what you achieve, it's never enough.

  Tony Robbins

  Two, Majority, Looks

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• The subject may be of first importance to the artist when he starts a picture, but it should be of least importance in the finished product. The subject is of no aesthetic significance.

  John French Sloan

  Artist, May, Firsts

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• The Rebecca Riots by David Williams is an unassuming book, but its significance is universal. The book and its author determined my life; they made me want to be a historian of Wales and of the world.

  Kenneth O. Morgan

  Book, World, Want

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• The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance. Good friendships, online or off, urge us toward empathy; they give us comfort and also pull us out of the prisons of our selves.

  Esther Earl

  Good Friend, Self, Giving

  Esther Earl, Lori Earl, Wayne Earl (2014). “This Star Won't Go Out: The Life and Words of Esther Grace Earl”, p.14, Penguin UK

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• Everyone has a bookplate these days, and the collectors are after it. The fool and his bookplate are soon parted. To distribute one's ex libris is inanely to destroy the only significance it has, that of indicating the past or present ownership of the volume in which it is placed.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Past, Fool, Ownership

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• When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them - without distortion which would mar their exact significances - into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

  William Carlos Williams

  Art, Men, Expression

  William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.54, New Directions Publishing

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• 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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• In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir's shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder. Reserved, shy, but full of significance, it hid whatever it might hold behind a veil, keeping it till the hour should come, and, with the hour, those who were called and chosen.

  Kenneth Grahame

  Islands, Shy, Veils

  Kenneth Grahame, Seth Lerer (2009). “The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition”, p.155, Harvard University Press

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• All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Law, Cosmos, Fundamentals

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “The Classic Horror Stories”, p.453, OUP Oxford

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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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