Touchstones Quotes - Page 3

• Being for every man the touchstone of faith and love, the Eucharist, like on the Cross, divided the minds as soon as it was announced... Nothing engages a man as much as does the Eucharist

  Francois Mauriac

  Men, Mind, And Love

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• Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

  Joseph Joubert

  Appreciate, Crucible, Criticism

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• Compassion is the litmus test and culminating touchstone of a spirituality of Earth.

  James Conlon

  Compassion, Earth, Tests

  James Conlon (1994). “Earth Story, Sacred Story”, Twenty Third Publications

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• As the touchstone tries gold, so gold tries men.

  Chilon of Sparta

  Men, Trying, Gold

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• ... the image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art -- plastic, musical, poetic, balletic -- serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Art, Memories, Reality

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• Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Death, Gold, Facts

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (2001). “The House of the Seven Gables”, p.367, Applewood Books

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• Every man carries about him a touchstone, if he will make use of it, to distinguish substantial gold from superficial glitterings, truth from appearances. And indeed the use and benefit of this touchstone, which is natural reason, is spoiled and lost only by assuming prejudices, overweening presumption, and narrowing our minds.

  John Locke

  Men, Mind, Gold

  John Locke (1819). “An essay concerning human understanding. Also, extr. from the author's works, i. Analysis of mr. Locke's doctrine of ideas [&c.].”, p.314

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• Experience stands on its own dunghill in medicine, and reason yields it place. Medicine has always professed experience to be the touchstone of its operations.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Yield, Medicine, Reason

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• For me, reggae music and its aesthetic are touchstones in both simple and complex ways. Reggae's capacity to be a folk music that is created in a wholly modern context of the recording studio (and sometimes that is the sole performance space) is riddled with the kinds of contradictory impulses that we have come to expect from the post-modern. I revel in this, for it gives me, shall I say, permission.

  Kwame Dawes

  Simple, Space, Giving

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Adversity is the touchstone of character: it is not in success but in misfortune that hidden powers bear fruit.

  Alec-Tweedie

  Character, Adversity, Fruit

  Ethel Alec-Tweedie, Mrs Alec-Tweedie (1904). “Sunny Sicily: Its Rustics and Its Ruins”

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• The source of each accordant strain
  Lies deeper than the Poet's brain.
  First from the people's heart must spring
  The passions which he learns to sing;
  They are the wind, the harp is he,
  To voice their fitful melody,--
  The language of their varying fate,
  Their pride, grief, love, ambition, hate,--
  The talisman which holds inwrought
  The touchstone of the listener's thought;
  That penetrates each vain disguise,
  And brings his secret to his eyes.

  Bayard Taylor

  Lying, Hate, Spring

  Bayard Taylor (1866). “The Poems”, p.111

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• The touchstone of false friends is the day of need: by way of proof, ask a loan from your friends.

  Saib Tabrizi

  Friendship, Needs, Way

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• What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

  August Wilhelm von Schlegel

  Art, Portraits, Portraiture

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• In time, foods such as hamburgers and ice cream became more than just meals. They became part of American history and culture, touchstones that are almost immediately nostalgic and sentimental no matter how old you are or what part of the country you are from.

  Homaro Cantu

  Country, Ice Cream, Meals

  "How Street Food Become Haute Cuisine" by Homaro Cantu, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 5, 2013.

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• Our problem is that when you lose the touchstone, which is humanity, then when you have something like humans dying, it needs to feel profound.

  Caroline Dries

  Profound, Humanity, Dying

  Source: collider.com

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• If I know what something's about, and I can always have that touchstone, I feel like I can reach for really ridiculous humor and also go really dark in terms of the things I'm afraid of.

  Scott Snyder

  Dark, Ridiculous, Term

  Source: www.denofgeek.com

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• Really, for me, it's important to know who's pitching and who's catching - just what that scene is supposed to accomplish in terms of storytelling. That being said, on the day, basically what you're trying to get yourself into an open place. And if the character is in a state of anxiety or vulnerability, you try to find some touchstone.

  Susan Sarandon

  Character, Anxiety, Important

  Interview with George Saunders, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 27, 2016.

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• The second touchstone for America I think unquestionably was pushing to conclusion the program we had with the Russians to control the Soviet nuclear arsenal. I tend to think that more than anything else, that will come back to haunt us.

  Michael Scheuer

  Thinking, America, Nuclear

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I think the world is more perilous and America is basically undefended. For me the two touchstones after 9/11 for domestic security were our borders. Not for discriminatory reasons or to stop immigration, but simply to allow law enforcement to find out who is in our country without facing an undocumented pool of aliens that increases by the hour.

  Michael Scheuer

  Country, Thinking, Law

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• My touchstone is just fear and anxiety and I know a lot about those two awful emotions.

  Chris Pine

  Two, Anxiety, Awful

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• Working- and Middle-class families sat down at the dinner table every night - the shared meal was the touchstone of good manners. Indeed, that dinner table was the one time when we were all together, every day: parents, grandparents, children, siblings. Rudeness between siblings, or a failure to observe the etiquette of passing dishes to one another, accompanied by "please" and "thank you," was the training ground of behavior, the place where manners began.

  Larry McMurtry

  Children, Sibling, Night

  Larry McMurtry (1999). “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond”

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• Nothing is more important to our shared future than the well-being of children. For children are at our core - not only as vulnerable beings in need of love and care but as a moral touchstone amidst the complexity and contentiousness of modern life.

  Hillary Clinton

  Children, Important, Needs

  Hillary Rodham Clinton (2012). “It Takes a Village”, p.277, Simon and Schuster

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• In all we do we must cultivate faith. Increased faith is the touchstone to improved church performance.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Church, Performances

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• The true touchstone of wit is the impromptu.

  Moliere

  Wit

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• Art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgement.

  John F. Kennedy

  Art, Judgement, Humans

  Remarks upon receiving an honorary degree from Amherst College, Amherst, Mass., 26 Oct. 1963

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