Surroundings Quotes - Page 3

• Curiosity’s primal. Our senses scan our surroundings, alerting us most urgently about sudden change. Useful, that. Change can mean opportunity. It can mean danger. Finding lunch or being lunch. We’re hard-wired to notice the unexpected, then take action.

  Julie Czerneda

  Mean, Opportunity, Lunch

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• Serious work gets done ... in congenial surroundings, which tend to make you laugh.

  Ian McDiarmid

  Laughing, Serious Work, Done

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• When we dream, we create. All of life is a dream or a series of waking dreams. We dream our surroundings. We dream our friends, our relations. We dream our bodies. We dream our dreams.

  Frederick Lenz

  Dream, Body, Waking

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• New buildings should fit naturally into their surroundings, both architecturally and historically, without denying or prettifying the concerns of our time

  Gottfried Bohm

  Fit, Building, Should

  Gottfried Böhm, Hyatt Foundation (Los Angeles, Calif.) (1986). “The Pritzker Architecture Prize 1986, presented to Gottfried Böhm”

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• Family and the natural surroundings played a big role in shaping my values.

  Gabrielle Reece

  Roles, Natural, Bigs

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• It's really kind of hard to be a suburb of nothing. If you don't have a downtown, you really don't have anything. It's hard to build a community around parking lots and subdivisions.

  Ed McMahon

  Community, Downtown, Kind

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• My advice to young wrestlers is that your surroundings really make a difference. You want to put yourself in good, positive surroundings.

  Dan Gable

  Wrestling, Differences, Advice

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• Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

  Rose Tremain

  Real, Research, Periods

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• Obviously, therefore, we must be able to transcribe what is in us into our mental and objective consciousness, by establishing a relationship between the life in us and observation of that life in Nature. This we find supremely well expressed by the ancient Egyptians. It is a knowledge of magic, pure and sane, which can lead rapidly toward the spiritual goal of our lives, owing to the fact that we can evoke, by means of the sympathy of analogues in our surroundings, the consciousness of the heart latent in us.

  R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz

  Spiritual, Heart, Mean

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• Happiness isn't something that depends on our surroundings... It's something we make inside ourselves.

  Corrie Ten Boom

  Happiness, Hiding Place, Depends

  "The Hiding Place". Book by Corrie Ten Boom, John Sherrill and Elizabeth Sherrill, November 1971.

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• So many different things make me come alive: performing for people, making people laugh, music and dancing or any kind of physical activity that gets me out of my head and into my body. I'm constantly inspired by my surroundings and people I see that are "killing it."

  Xosha Roquemore

  Laughing, People, Dancing

  "The Mindy Project’s Xosha Roquemore: Just Being Herself". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity. (pg.192-193, People, Land, and Community)

  Wendell Berry

  Thinking, Order, Land

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.192, Counterpoint

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• The worst surroundings in the world can be tolerated if the people in them are interesting and kind.

  Daniel Handler

  People, Interesting, World

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• The more an object is polished or brilliant, the less you see its own color and the more it becomes a mirror reflecting the color of its surroundings.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Mirrors, Color, Brilliant

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• The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Clever, Rip, Passion

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• I'm trying to do something that is real. What I mean is this; my sense of being in the world starts with a physical relationship with my surroundings, their weight, texture, density, transparency, and so forth.

  Andrew Forge

  Real, Mean, Trying

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• If someone remains in a peaceful and tranquil state of mind, external surroundings can cause them only a limited disturbance.

  Dalai Lama

  Peaceful, Mind, Causes

  His Holiness The Dalai Lama (1998). “Path To Tranquility”, p.51, Penguin Books India

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• Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.

  Gerhard Richter

  Effort, Painting, Blind

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

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• When the artist activates his being, awakens to his surroundings, and sets himself the task of creating, connections are made out of conscious awareness that return coalesced as inspiration.

  Eric Maisel

  Inspiration, Artist, Creating

  Eric Maisel (1996). “Affirmations for Artists”, Tarcher

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• If we cannot meet our everyday surroundings with equanimity and pleasure and grow each day in some useful direction, then... life is on the road toward misfortune, misery and destruction.

  Luther Burbank

  Everyday, Each Day, Misery

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• Mindfulness is being aware of yourself, others, and your surroundings in the moment. When consciously and kindly focusing awareness on life as it unfolds minute by precious minute, you are better able to savor each experience. Also, being closely attentive gives you the opportunity to change unwise or painful feelings and responses quickly. In fact, being truly present in a mindful way is an excellent stress reducer and, because of that, can be seen as consciousness conditioning, a strengthening workout for body, mind, heart, and spirit.

  Sue Thoele

  Workout, Stress, Heart

  Sue Patton Thoele (2008). “The Mindful Woman: Gentle Practices for Restoring Calm, Finding Balance, and Opening Your Heart”, p.9, New Harbinger Publications

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• Now the tech community is popping up and saying, 'We do need to be involved in our surroundings.'

  Ron Conway

  Knitting, Community, Needs

  "Ron Conway: S.F. mover and shaker" by Heather Knight, www.sfgate.com. August 27, 2012.

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• I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.

  Chinua Achebe

  Home, Weight, Able

  "Chinua Achebe: A life in writing" by Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. December 13, 2010.

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• Contact with like-minded painters - a group means a great deal to me: nothing comes in isolation. We have worked out our ideas largely by talking them through. Shutting myself away in the country, for instance, would do nothing for me. One depends on one's surroundings. And so the exchange with other artists - and especially the collaboration with Lueg and Polke - matters a lot to me: it is part of the input that I need.

  Gerhard Richter

  Country, Art, Mean

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

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• From the moment we are born, the world tends to have a box already built for us to fit inside. Our umbilical cord never seems to be severed; we only find new needs to fill. If we disconnected and severed our attachments, would we shatter our confinements and expand beyond our shell? Would the world look different? Would we recognize ourselves? Are we the box that we are inside, and to be authentically 'un-contained' would we still be able to exist? This is the irony of containment. As long as we don't push on the walls of our surroundings, we may never know how strong we really are.

  Paige Bradley

  Strong, Wall, Attachment

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