Superfluous Quotes - Page 8

• Full is the earth of the superfluous; marred is life by the many-too-many. May they be decoyed out of this life by the "life eternal"!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Earth, May, This Life

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1917). “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, p.26, Lulu.com

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• We have these amazing gifts of music and mathematics and painting and Olympic running. I mean, we're the animal that is best of all the animals at long-distance running. Why? It is quite amazing. Superfluous gifts you don't really need to survive.

  Freeman Dyson

  Running, Distance, Mean

  "Legendary physicist Freeman Dyson talks about math, nuclear rockets, and astounding things about the universe". Interview with Elena Holodny, uk.businessinsider.com. September 9, 2016.

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• There is a joy in going without things, a fine tang in eliminating the superfluous.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Joy, Fine, Eliminating

  Elbert Hubbard (2005). “Loyalty in Business: One and Twenty Other Good Things”, p.63, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Superfluous advice is not retained by the full mind.

  Horace

  Advice, Mind

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• It is but a poor establishment where there are not many superfluous things which the owner knows not of, and which go to the thieves.

  Horace

  Thieves, Poor, Owners

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• Mirth is a Proteus, changing its shape and manner with the thousand diversities of individual character, from the most superfluous gayety to the deepest, moat earnest humor.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Character, Diversity, Moats

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• A statue lies hid in a block of marble, and the art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous matter and removes the rubbish. The figure is in the stone; the sculptor only finds it. What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. The philosopher, the saint, or the hero,--the wise, the good, or the great man,--very often lies hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred, and have brought to light.

  Joseph Addison

  Education, Wise, Art

  Joseph Addison (1856). “The works of ... Joseph Addison, with notes by R. Hurd”, p.96

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• When I was an adolescent, I was obsessed with having many commercial things, cars, clothes, stupid things. Now that I have all that, I understand that the superfluous things can turn to you into a very stupid idiot-type. In East Germany there were very few things, but there was also a feeling of solidarity that no longer exists. Now we are up to the neck in consumption, the ego, the individualism. Now before friendship, it is merchandise.

  Till Lindemann

  Stupid, Clothes, East Germany

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• Because the bill vests in the said incorporated church an authority to provide for the support of the poor and the education of poor children of the same, an authority which, being altogether superfluous if the provision is to be the result of pious charity, would be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.

  James Madison

  Religious, Children, Agency

  James Madison, Ralph Ketcham “Selected Writings of James Madison”, Hackett Publishing

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• To recover the fatherhood idea, we must fashion a new cultural story of fatherhood. The moral of today's story is that fatherhoodis superfluous. The moral of the new story must be that fatherhood is essential.

  David Blankenhorn

  Fashion, Ideas, Fatherhood

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• We spoke of ourselves as "emancipated" when we got the vote. Yet we are still slaves to the superficial and the superfluous. We are concerned with the length of our skirts, with the latest lipstick, with the newest thrill in hats. We are impressed by advertisements that insist we must be alluring; we must adopt a time-consuming coiffure, we must spend hours with the "beautician," we must attend fashion shows. As long as women are preoccupied with nonessentials we shall be afflicted with infantilism, passivity, and the eventual disillusionment that results from trivial, unproductive lives.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  Fashion, Long, Thrill

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• Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Fighting, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.59, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Father, Rome

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.170, Simon and Schuster

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• A pure style in writing results from the rejection of everything superfluous.

  Suzanne Curchod

  Writing, Rejection, Style

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• Dress not thy thoughts in too fine a raiment. And be not a man of superfluous words or superfluous deeds.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Money, Men, Dresses

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• Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Writing, Men, Together

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• In nature, all is managed for the best with perfect frugality and just reserve, profuse to none, but bountiful to all; never employing on one thing more than enough, but with exact economy retrenching the superfluous, and adding force to what is principal in everything.

  Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

  Nature, Money, Perfect

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• Everything in the Universe was as the Creator willed it - nothing superfluous, nothing lacking - a harmony.

  Joseph Hertz

  Harmony, Lacking, Creator

  Joseph Herman Hertz (1996). “ספר חמשה חומשי תורה עם ההפטרות: נדפס על פי המסורה ומתורגם אנגלית”

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• It is for the superfluous things of life that men sweat.

  Seneca the Elder

  Motivational, Men, Sweat

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• What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.

  Doris Lessing

  Giving, Grace, Roles

  'Particularly Cats' (1967) ch. 9

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• Joy is there everywhere; it is superfluous, unnecessary; nay, it very often contradicts the most peremptory behests of necessity. It exists to show that the bonds of law can only be explained by love; they are like body and soul. Joy is the realisation of the truth of oneness, the oneness of our soul with the world and of the world-soul with the supreme lover.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  God, Law, Oneness

  Rabindranath Tagore (2016). “SĀDHANĀ - The Realisation of life”, p.64, Rabindranath Tagore

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• My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Mother, Writing, Thoughtful

  Goodreads interview, www.goodreads.com. December, 2008.

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• I don't aspire, but I would be very happy if one of my poems suddenly offered someone a shady rest stop, a breather in our interminable march under the murderous, scorching heat of the superfluous.

  Kiki Dimoula

  Would Be, Heat, March

  Source: blog.yupnet.org

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• None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Writing

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• The superfluous is very necessary.

  Voltaire

  Wisdom

  'Le Mondain' (1736) v.22

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