Vague Quotes - Page 13

• Melody and harmony are like lines and colors in pictures. A simple linear picture may be completely beautiful; the introduction of color may make it vague and insignificant. Yet color may, by combination with lines, create great pictures, so long as it does not smother and destroy their value.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Music, Beautiful, Simple

  Krishna Dutta, Rabindranath Tagore (1991). “Purabi: A Miscellany in Memory of Rabindranath Tagore 1941-1991”

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• The hypothesis of the supernatural and/or a supreme being is vague, unfounded, and inapplicable in any practical fashion

  PZ Myers

  Fashion, Hypothesis, Practicals

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• Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Art, Soul, Improvement

  Wassily Kandinsky (1914). “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, p.54, Courier Corporation

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• I like to keep my private stuff pretty vague.

  Thomas Haden Church

  Stuff

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• I find that goal setting, when done this way, leads to goal achieving. The chronic failure to achieve goals lowers self-esteem. Show me a failure to achieve a goal, and usually I can show you the violation of one or more of the above criteria. Imposed goals, vague goals, and unrealistic goals tend to produce only partial successes and outright failures.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Self Esteem, Generosity, Goal

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• Who is this vague "they" we blame for so many of our problems? "They" is the obscure party we use as our whipping boy to camouflage the fact that we - you and I and other specific human beings just like us - have to start doing things differently. "They" can't fix anything. We can.

  Price Pritchett

  Party, Boys, Justice

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• Some people ask: "Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?" Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general-but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  Women, Rights, Expression

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2014). “We Should All Be Feminists”, p.41, Vintage

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• I don't see that there is a credible threat for American action - the rhetoric of the U.S. President is too vague, very amorphous. I don't see that Obama's words will be translated into more tangible intentions and therefore this is probably why the Iranians don't take it seriously. They speak out against it and they dismiss it.

  Tzachi Hanegbi

  Israel, Speaks Out, President

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• "Children, don't speak so coarsely," said Mr Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters' speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it. He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.

  Robertson Davies

  Daughter, Running, Children

  "Tempest-Tost" by Robertson Davies, (Part 1), 1951.

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• But what's your ultimate goal, you'll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting, as one works more seriously, as one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first fugitive, passing thought, unless it becomes firm.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Ideas, Goal, Shapes

  Vincent van Gogh (2009). “Saint-Rémy-de-Provence - Auvers-sur-Oise, 1889-1890, [772-902]”

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• Another advantage of a mathematical statement is that it is so definite that it might be definitely wrong; and if it is found to be wrong, there is a plenteous choice of amendments ready in the mathematicians' stock of formulae. Some verbal statements have not this merit; they are so vague that they could hardly be wrong, and are correspondingly useless.

  Lewis Fry Richardson

  Math, Choices, Merit

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• The bird Gamayun was related to Alkonost and Sirin in some vague fashion-even the most casual observer would've noticed that all three of them were not entirely birds; they had the faces and breasts of women, severe but beautiful. And when their lips opened, they sand in women's voices, deep and rich and bittersweet.

  Ekaterina Sedia

  Beautiful, Fashion, Voice

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• I lay there for three whole days, totally paralyzed. My friends helped me to the bathroom and anywhere else I needed to move; but I have very vague impressions of those days because it was a time of complete darkness for me. Somebody told me later that what I had was a form of hysteria: my body and my mid fled into paralysis. There was nothing wrong with me organically, but somewhere inside I suffered a complete breakdown.

  Diet Eman

  Moving, Hysteria, Darkness

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• The Geneva Convention . . . says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It’s very vague. What does that mean, ‘outrages upon human dignity’?

  George W. Bush

  Mean, Doe, Dignity

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• Healing does not come through intense affirmation of divinity, or by simply pouring out love and the expression of a vague mysticism.It comes through mastering an exact science of contact, impression, of invocation plus an understanding of the subtle apparatus of the etheric vehicle.

  Alice Bailey

  Healing, Expression, Understanding

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• The past slips from our grasp. It leaves us only scattered things. The bond that united them eludes us. Our imagination usually fills in the void by making use of preconceived theories...Archaeology, then, does not supply us with certitudes, but rather with vague hypotheses. And in the shade of these hypotheses some artists are content to dream, considering them less as scientific facts than as sources of inspiration.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Dream, Inspiration, Artist

  "Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons". Book by Igor Stravinsky, 1947.

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• When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.

  Robert Greene

  Powerful, Saying Less, People

  "The 48 Laws Of Power". Book by Robert Greene, 2010.

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• You can't love by desiring an extremely vague desire of a very vague moon.

  Leonard Woolf

  Moon, Desire

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• The problem for a lot of people is that they don't really know what they want. They have vague desire: to 'do something creative' or to earn more money or 'to be free', but they can't really pin down what it is precisely that they want.
  So they drift from one thing to another, enjoying some moments and hating others, but never really finding fulfillment or success. (..)
  This is why it's hard to lead a successful life (whatever that means to you) when you don't know what you want.

  John C. Parkin

  Hate, Mean, Successful

  John C. Parkin (2010). “F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way”, p.105, Hay House, Inc

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• Every crazy fad from the 1800s comes back or they never go away. It’s like fashion, like everything’s already been invented, and somebody stumbles onto it and people will always, always be looking for an answer for some vague illness they can’t get a diagnosis for.

  Mary Roach

  Fashion, Crazy, People

  "Why “Asshole” Is High Praise - and Other Anatomy Lessons With Mary Roach". Interview with Sarah Zhang, www.motherjones.com. April 2, 2013.

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• Have we not all, amid life's petty strife, Some pure ideal of a noble life That once seemed possible? Did we not hear The flutter of its wings, and feel it near, And just within our reach? It was. And yet We lost it in this daily jar and fret, And now live idle in a vague regret; But still our place is kept, and it will wait, Ready for us to fill it, soon or late. No star is ever lost we once have seen, We always may be what we might have been.

  Adelaide Anne Procter

  Stars, Regret, Wings

  "A Legend of Provence" l. 284 (1861)

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• When I start writing, I'll have a vague concept or I'll just have a title, and the song just goes on its own direction. Usually it goes in many directions within each song. They get really convoluted sometimes.

  Juliana Hatfield

  Song, Writing, Titles

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• The planet Mars -- crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms -- has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin.

  David Grinspoon

  Long, Mars, Invasion

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• On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.

  A. E. Housman

  Drinking, Beer, Two

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• There are two men in Tolstoy. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion.

  William Ernest Henley

  Character, Men, Two

  William Ernest Henley (1906). “Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation: Literature”

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