Vividness Quotes

• Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."

  Epictetus

  Feet, Waiting, Trying

  "Discourses". Book by Epictetus. Book II, Chapter 18,

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.

  Richard Holloway

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Art

  "God's Priorities for Your Life for Teens". 2006.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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, Surroundings

  6 Copy quote

• Everyone remembers his past with greater vividness as the present becomes more important. Dying men in their last delirium are supposed to see their whole life spread out before them.

  Italo Svevo

  Fear, Past, Men

  6 Copy quote

• The intensity of vision in the artist and of vividness in his creations are the sole tests of his imaginative power.

  George Henry Lewes

  Artist, Vision, Tests

  George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Principles of Success in Literature”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Heart, Light, May

  1851 Twice- Told Tales,'The Haunted Mind'.

  65 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation, and healing.

  Jon Kabat-Zinn

  Powerful, Healing, Mindfulness

  137 Copy quote

• For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted.

  George Eliot

  Sorry, Passion, Self

  'Middlemarch' (1871-2) bk. 3, ch. 29

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Real, Character, Mean

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2015). “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)”, p.204, Library of America

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.

  James M. Cain

  Country, Writing, Character

  16 Copy quote

• The artist does not see both eyes alike. There is always 'the eye' and the other eye... It adds life and plasticity to the drawing if the eye in the light is darker than the one in the shadow. It gives the head vividness.

  John French Sloan

  Eye, Artist, Light

  7 Copy quote

• The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

  John Irving

  Jobs, Memories, Cities

  John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The things that we preceive as beautiful may be different, but the actual characteristics we ascribe to beautiful objects are similar. Think about it. When something strikes us as beautiful, it displays more presence and sharpness of shape and vividness of color, doesn't it? It stands out. It shines. It seems almost iridescent compared to the dullness of other objects less attractive.

  James Redfield

  Beautiful, Thinking, Color

  James Redfield (2009). “Celestine Insights - Limited Edition of Celestine Prophecy and Tenth Insight”, p.31, Hachette UK

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Dream, Reality, Brain

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2014). “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time”, p.49, Google Publishing

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Heart, Dark, Grieving

  1851 Twice- Told Tales,'The Haunted Mind'.

  60 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Thinking, Self, Perception

  8 Copy quote

• You must assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled until your assumption has all the sensory vividness of reality. You must imagine that you are already experiencing what you desire. That is, you must assume the feeling of the fulfillment of your desire until you are possessed by it and this feeling crowds all other ideas out of your consciousness.

  Neville Goddard

  Reality, Ideas, Feelings

  Neville Goddard (2013). “The Power of Awareness”, p.11, Courier Corporation

  249 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the case of drama (stage, movies, television ), there appear to be people in almost every audience who never quite fully realize that a play is a set of fictional, symbolic representations. An actor is one who symbolizes other people, real or imagined. [...] Also some years ago it was reported that when Edward G. Robinson, who used to play gangster roles with extraordinary vividness, visited Chicago, local hoodlums would telephone him at his hotel to pay their professional respects.

  S. I. Hayakawa

  Real, Drama, Years

  "Language in Thought and Action". Book by S. I. Hayakawa (p.27-28), 1991.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is probably no finer prose writer alive in Britain now, no-one better at making a sentence, no-one better at descriptive writing, no-one who can get so close to the vividness of other peoples interior selves.

  Linda Grant

  Writing, Self, Alive

  3 Copy quote

• No skill, no special apti­tude, no vividness of imagination or precision of thinking would go unrecognized because the child who possessed it was of one sex rather than the other. No child would be relentlessly shaped to one pattern of behavior, but instead there should be many patterns, in a world that had learned to allow to each individual the pattern which was most congenial to his gifts.

  Margaret Mead

  Sex, Children, Thinking

  "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies". Book by Margaret Mead, 1935.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.

  William Hazlitt

  Reading, Romance, Facts

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1501, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I like a much more Japanese style of blood, where it's red and it almost has a paint kind of quality to it. You can put it on metal, and it has this vividness. Because, normally, what they use in Hollywood is this stuff that looks like strawberry pancake syrup or raspberry pancake syrup.

  Quentin Tarantino

  Blood, Style, Quality

  9 Copy quote

• The genius keeps all his days the vividness and intensity of interest that a sensitive child feels in his expanding world.

  Dorothea Brande

  Children, Genius, World

  Dr. Robert C. Worstell, Napoleon Hill, Dorothea Brande, Claude M. Bristol, Earl Nightingale “Earl Nightingale's "Strangest Secret" Library”, Lulu.com

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• Writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery. In writing, for the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.

  William Stafford

  Dream, Writing, Space

  25 Copy quote

• Consistency in opinion is the slow poison of intellectual life, the destroyer of its vividness and energy.

  Humphry Davy

  Consistency, Intellectual, Energy

  Sir Humphry Davy (1858). “Fragmentary remains, literary and scientific, of Sir Humphry, Davy, bart., late president of the Royal society, etc: with a sketch of his life and selections from his correspondence”, p.53

  8 Copy quote

  Show source