Topography Quotes

• Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
  More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.

  Elizabeth Bishop

  Color, Maps, West

  Elizabeth Bishop (2015). “Poems”, p.5, Macmillan

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• Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure.

  Bill Watterson

  Running, Frustration, Life Is Like

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• Architectural features of true democratic ground-freedom would rise naturally from topography, which means that buildings would all take on the nature and character of the ground on which in endless variety they would stand and be component part.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Character, Mean, Building

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• In battle, topography is fate.

  Rick Atkinson

  Fate, Battle

  Rick Atkinson (2007). “An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, Volume One of the Liberation Trilogy”, p.2, Macmillan

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• The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. For those with the eyes to see and the heart to feel, it remains a rich and complex topography of the spirit.

  Wade Davis

  Heart, Eye, Lenses

  Wade Davis, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (2009). “The wayfinders: why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world”, House of Anansi Pr

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• I don't think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it's more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on.

  Alan Moore

  Thinking, Bricks And Mortar, Construction

  "Alan Moore Gets Psychogeographical With Unearthing". Interview With Scott Thill, www.wired.com. August 9, 2010.

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• Many people don't give a rip about politics and know as much about public affairs as they know about the topography of Pluto.

  Tony Snow

  Rip, People, Giving

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• Science is the topography of ignorance.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

  Ignorance, Science

  Oliver Wendell Holmes (2007). “Medical Essays”, p.211, Reprint Services Corporation

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• Try for a record of emotion, rather than a piece of topography.

  Frederick H. Evans

  Trying, Pieces, Records

  Frederick H. Evans, Anne Hammond (1992). “Frederick H. Evans: selected texts and bibliography”

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• A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

  Charles Lamb

  Dog, Book, Reading

  Charles Lamb (1841). “The Essays of Elia”, p.62

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• We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography.

  Michael Polanyi

  Example, Principles, Introducing

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• But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography.

  Michael Polanyi

  Physics, Defined

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• Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;--and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Art, Angel

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.378, Library of America

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• Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

  Jerry Saltz

  Alternatives, World, Variables

  "Ask an Art Critic: Jerry Saltz Answers Your Questions About George Condo, Online Art Fairs, and What Abstraction Really Is" by Jerry Saltz, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 24, 2011.

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• Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.

  David Abram

  Summer, Rain, Winter

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• Where some may see flat, static narratives, I see a spectrum of tonal gradations and realities. What I am creating is literally black portraiture with ballpoint pen ink. I'm looking for that in-between state in an individual where the overarching definition is lost. Skin as geography is the terrain I expand by emphasizing the specificity of blackness, where an individual’s subjectivity, various realities and experiences can be drawn onto the diverse topography of the epidermis. From there, the possibilities of portraying a fully-fledged person are endless.

  Toyin Odutola

  Reality, Creating, Black

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• The placing of the centre pawns determines the "topography" of a game of chess.

  Alexander Kotov

  Games, Chess, Pawns

  "The Art of the Middle Game".

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• Science is the topography of ignorance. From a few elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details. We cast the lead, and draw up a little sand from abysses we may never reach with our dredges.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Ignorance, Science, Space

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• Whatever strengthens our local attachments is favorable both to individual and national character, our home, our birthplace, our native land. Think for a while what the virtues are which arise out of the feelings connected with these words, and if you have any intellectual eyes, you will then perceive the connection between topography and patriotism.

  Robert Southey

  Home, Character, Eye

  Robert Southey (1872). “The Doctor, &c”, p.157

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• The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We 'cannot afford' to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying topography, or to farm without catastrophic soil erosion. A production-oriented economy can indeed live in this way, but only so long as production lasts.

  Wendell Berry

  Erosion, Long, Environmental

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• That the mere matter of a poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

  Walter Pater

  Art, Poetry, Unity

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• Topography is one of my chief themes in my poetry, about the country, the suburbs and the seaside. Then there comes love... and increasingly; the fear of death.

  John Betjeman

  Country, Fear Of Death, Chiefs

  Radio Talk on BBC Third Programme, 1949.

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• We lived, until I was 12 or so, in communal apartment with five different families and the same kitchen, in two little - my brother and me and my parents. It was hell, but it was a common thing. My father was not general or admiral, but he was colonel. He was teaching in military academy military topography.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  Brother, Father, Military

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• Golf is the only game that pits the player against an opponent, the weather, the minutest details of a large chunk of local topography and his own nervous system, all at the same time.

  Mike Seabrook

  Golf, Player, Games

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• This is what you do now to give your day topography--scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.

  David Levithan

  Character, Reality, Giving

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