Superfluous Quotes - Page 2

• My goal is to omit everything superfluous so that the essential is shown to best possible advantage.

  Dieter Rams

  Goal, Essentials, Advantage

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• We live in an age in which superfluous ideas abound and essential ideas are lacking.

  Joseph Joubert

  Business, Ideas, Age

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

  Alan Greenspan

  Business, Past, Derivatives

  "Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy" by Peter S. Goodman, www.nytimes.com. October 8, 2008.

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• All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements.

  Henri Matisse

  Art, Mind, Essentials

  Henri Matisse, John M. Jacobus (1973). “Henri Matisse”, Harry N Abrams Inc

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• Also a great part of Polish industry proved to have existed only to support the Soviet military industry, and it became superfluous and incapable of being transformed into anything else. We did not foresee that or the magnitude of these phenomena.

  Andrzej Wajda

  Military, Support, Magnitude

  "'Why Not Have Our Own World?' Interview with Andrzej Wajda". Interview with Renata Murawska, sensesofcinema.com. July 2005.

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• It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, - superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

  Seneca the Younger

  Men, Sweat, Togas

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• In order to be deep, we sometimes have to cut through and cut apart. That is to be seen in the common phrase, 'Cut it out!' The reason is that this thing is seen as superfluous and therefore it should be excised, as a growth, unnecessary, should be excised.

  Eli Siegel

  Cutting, Order, Understanding

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• Titles have never given a just idea of things; were it otherwise, the work would be superfluous.

  Gustave Courbet

  Ideas, Titles, Would Be

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• The motif must always be set down in a simple way, easily grasped and understood by the beholder. By the elimination of superfluous detail, the spectator should be led along the road that the artist indicates to him, and from the first be made to notice what the artist has felt.

  Alfred Sisley

  Artist, Simple, Simplicity

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• While sincerity and over-anxiety can spoil a picture, through superfluous elaboration and unnecessary correction, the carelessness that would leave it in an unfinished state is even more reprehensible.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Anxiety, Finishing, Unnecessary

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• If Christianity were only a development, then Christ was not needed. If Christianity were only a scheme of morals, then the divine incarnation was a thing superfluous.

  Herrick Johnson

  Development, Moral, Christianity

  Herrick Johnson (1881). “Christianity's Challenge: And Some Phases of Christianity Submitted for Candid Consideration”

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• There are, while human miseries abound, A thousand ways to waste superfluous wealth, Without one fool or flatterer at your board, Without one hour of sickness or disgust.

  John Armstrong

  Way, Waste, Fool

  John Armstrong (2011). “John Armstrong's The Art of Preserving Health: Eighteenth-century Sensibility in Practice”, p.72, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

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• Dry happiness is like dry bread. We eat, but we do not dine. I wish for the superfluous, for the useless, for the extravagant, for the too much, for that which is not good for anything.

  Victor Hugo

  Wish, Extravagance, Useless

  Victor Hugo (1863). “Les misérables”

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• When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.

  Eric Hoffer

  Animal, Men, Society

  Eric Hoffer (1969). “Working and Thinking on the Waterfront: A Journal, June 1958-May 1959”

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• I'm a Nietzschean about human nature. The bulk of humanity is exhausted and superfluous, miscreant, confused, latently criminal, opportunistic. I rely on that. That's leverage, man.

  Cody Wilson

  Confused, Men, Humanity

  Source: motherboard.vice.com

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• I don't live in Los Angeles and I don't do a lot of superfluous press.

  Mary-Louise Parker

  Los Angeles, Presses

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Through your life, most people peel away the junk that's not useful, that's superfluous. You are determined to peel that away. I do one thing at a time. One man at a time. One car. One house. One child. One job.

  Grace Slick

  Jobs, Children, Men

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• Let us assume that the ideal were reached; let us imagine a state of international life in which the danger of war no longer exists. Then no one would dare to demand a penny for obviously completely superfluous armaments.

  Ludwig Quidde

  War, Demand, Pennies

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• He had not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, and leanness goes a great way towards gentility.

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Body, Flesh, Way

  Elizabeth Gaskell (2015). “Wifes And Daughters”, p.39, Elizabeth Gaskell

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• A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what's true.

  Eddie Redmayne

  Thinking, People, Theatre

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• Simplicity in its essence demands neither a vow of poverty nor a life of rural homesteading. As an ethic of self-conscious material moderation, it can be practiced in cities and suburbs, townhouses and condominiums. It requires neither a log cabin nor a hairshirt but a deliberate ordering of priorities so as to distinguish between the necessary and superfluous, useful and wasteful, beautiful and vulgar.

  David Shi

  Beautiful, Self, Essence

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• Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Expression, Land

  Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound (2009). “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition”, p.9, Fordham Univ Press

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• Everything that is superfluous overflows from the full bosom.

  Horace

  Overflow, Bosoms

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 311-13, Ars Poetica, 337, 1922.

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• It is superfluous to be humble on one's own behalf; so many people are willing to do it for one.

  Celia Green

  Humble, People, Behalf

  Celia Elizabeth Green (1976). “The decline and fall of science”, Hamish Hamilton

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• Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous.

  Adam Osborne

  Adequacy, Sufficient

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