Peculiar Quotations | Page 3

I used to comfort myself with the belief that it was only certain individuals and their peculiar notions that spoilt things for the rest of us. But how many individuals does it take before it's not the individuals who are prejudiced but society itself?

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

The idea of being a single woman in Hollywood is a very peculiar thing.

The essential attribute of a new sense is, not the perception of external objects or influences which ordinarily do not act upon the senses, but that external causes should excite in it a new and peculiar kind of sensation different from all the sensations of our five senses.

The city has become a serious menace to our civilization... It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.

The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.

The sign for which I forge an image has no value if it doesn't harmonize with other signs, which I must determine in the course of my invention and which are completely peculiar to it.

The constant desire of pleasing which is the peculiar quality of some, may be called the happiest of all desires in this that it rarely fails of attaining its end when not disgraced by affectation.

The level of work is just terrific. Perkins' annual photograph exhibition has peculiar prestige. The quality of work just keeps going up.

The citizens of the United States have peculiar motives to support the energy of their constitutional charters.

My sister is a very peculiar lady. When we were young, I wasn't allowed to talk to her friends. Now I'm not allowed to talk to her children, nor are they permitted to see me. This is the nature of the lady. Doesn't bother me at all.

Art itself has become an extraordinary thing - the activity of peculiar people - people who become more and more peculiar as their activity becomes more and more extraordinary.

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.

I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don't necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.

I wanted to work with those boys (producers Andy and Larry Wachowski) because they're so eccentric and peculiar. Larry, of course, is halfway towards being a woman now. It's a crazy world.

We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.

My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines. I'm not a student of the genre. I don't care what anybody else does.

To have peace with this peculiar life; to accept what we do not understand; to wait calmly for what awaits us, you have to be wiser than I am.

His eyes are peculiar. There is nothing in them, like an eclair without the cream filling. It's wrong, lack of cream.

But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.

Set all things in their own peculiar place, and know that order is the greatest grace.

The peculiar circumstances of the moment may render a measure more or less wise, but cannot render it more or less constitutional.

It is the peculiar province of the legislature to prescribe general rules for the government of society; the application of those rules to individuals in society would seem to be the duty of other departments.

Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God.

The Kiss scene was attempted three times. The first was in a peculiar spot of the fort on the ground level. It felt forced to me, and I knew right away that, in spite of what others were saying, it was dead wrong.

People who are different from other people are always called peculiar,' said Anne.

Everything is new in the spring. Springs themselves are always so new, too. No spring is ever just like any other spring. It always has something of its own to be its own peculiar sweetness.

The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.

We should never invoke the spirit of antiquity as our authority. Spirits are peculiar things; they cannot be grasped with the hands and be held up before others. Spirits reveal themselves only to spirits. The most direct and concise method would be, in this case as well, to prove the possession of the only redeeming faith by good works.

No art can be grafted with success on another art. For though they all profess the same origin, and to proceed from the same stock, yet each has its own peculiar modes both of imitating nature and of deviating from it... The deviation, more especially, will not bear transplantation to another soil.

I don't want to become an ivory tower filmmaker. That sounds peculiar, but I want to be a mainstream filmmaker. I want the largest possible audience that I can find - but, of course, on my terms.

I am willing to admit that if the agriculturists are oppressed by peculiar burdens, they ought to be relieved from them, or be allowed a fair and just protection equivalent to all such peculiar burdens.

Even when a film is finished, when I direct a film, sometimes it's a dark profession, but it requires a peculiar form of courage that I admire.

In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.

For a moment he could have sworn he smelled violets, which was very peculiar, since he had no idea what violets smelled like, except somehow he knew they smelled just like Lady Emma.

Oh, this beast? It's...perspicacious loris. 'Perspicacious' meaning 'wise or canny'." "Get stuffed," Bovril said, then giggled. "And it insults people," Telsa said. "How peculiar.

We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.

So one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

For some strange reason, we believe that anyone who lived before we were born was in some peculiar way a different kind of human being from any we have come in contact with in our own lifetime. This concept must be changed; we must realize in our bones that almost everything in time and history has changed except the human being.

For, though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.

But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn’t dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I’d managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter, airier than I’d been in years.

I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists. Neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.

Belief is a very peculiar thing: we tend to put more store in a belief we like than a fact we hate.

Everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.

The conductor is a peculiar person. He turns his back on his friends in the audience, shakes a stick at his players in the orchestra, and then wonders why nobody loves him.

According to the celestial multiplication table, once one is three, and three times one is one, and according to heavenly subtraction if we take two from three, three are left. The addition is equally peculiar, if we add two to one we have but one. Each one is equal to himself and the other two. Nothing ever was, nothing ever can be more perfectly idiotic and absurd than the dogma of the Trinity.

We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)

All the lessons of history and experience must be lost upon us if we are content to trust alone to the peculiar advantages we happen to possess.

To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.

One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.

God is gracious to some very peculiar people.

Conscience is that peculiar faculty of the soul which may be called the religious instinct.

We may all be a peculiar lot...often broke, often dissatisfied because we're not doing more and better work...but we know how to have a ball that makes the rest of the world seem square.

The most intangible, and therefore the worst, kind of a lie is a half truth. This is the peculiar device of a conscientious detractor.

A Christian minister is a person who in a peculiar sense is not his own; he is the servant of God, and therefore ought to be wholly devoted to Him.

Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.

Life is really very fantastic, and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it. [Virtue]

Public charities and benevolent associations for the gratuitous relief of every species of distress, are peculiar to Christianity; no other system of civil or religious policy has originated them; they form its highest praise and characteristic feature.

Very great personages are not likely to form very just estimates either of others or of themselves; their knowledge of themselves is obscured by the flattery of others; their knowledge of others is equally clouded by circumstances peculiar to themselves. For in the presence of the great, the modest are sure to suffer from too much diffidence, and the confident from too much display.

Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world - the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine. It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented hair from turning gray, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack.

When she had gone upstairs, he walked to a window and stood looking up at the sky. His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one's head.

Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.

The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?

Odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight or the hearing.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

Mr Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence . . . Mr Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him.

. . . I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions. Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner.

Someone once said that every form of government has one characteristic peculiar to it and if that characteristic is lost, the government will fall. In a monarchy, it is affection and respect for the royal family. If that is lost the monarch is lost. In a dictatorship, it is fear. If the people stop fearing the dictator he'll lose power. In a representative government such as ours, it is virtue. If virtue goes, the government fails. Are we choosing paths that are politically expedient and morally questionable? Are we in truth losing our virtue? . . . If so, we may be nearer the dustbin of history than we realize.

The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arise from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost

The good must merit God's peculiar care; But who but God can tell us who they are?

Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot, To draw nutrition, propagate and rot.

The pressure to succeed has a lot to do with why people overstep the line. It is a peculiar weakness of western culture where we have made a fetish of success.

SCARABAEUS, n. The sacred beetle of the ancient Egyptians, allied to our familiar "tumble-bug." It was supposed to symbolize immortality, the fact that God knew why giving it its peculiar sanctity. Its habit of incubating its eggs in a ball of ordure may also have commended it to the favor of the priesthood, and may some day assure it an equal reverence among ourselves. True, the American beetle is an inferior beetle, but the American priest is an inferior priest.

Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.

Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

What's his offense? Groping for trout in a peculiar river.

Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors.

Fix'd like a plan on his peculiar spot, to draw nutrition, propagate, and rot.

The weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which worthily used, will be a gift to his race forever

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

It is the peculiar boast of our country, that her happiness is alone dependent on the collective wisdom and virtue of her citizens, and rests not on the exertions of any individual

Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty.

He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.

... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

The publicity I have been getting, a good deal of which is untrue, and the rest of it ill considered, has done me more harm than good. The only way you get on in this profession is to have the reputation of doing what you are told as thoroughly as possible. So far I have been able to accomplish that, and I believe I have gotten quite a reputation from not kicking at peculiar assignments.

Carlyle must undoubtedly plead guilty to the charge of mannerism. He not only has his vein, but his peculiar manner of working it.He has a style which can be imitated, and sometimes is an imitator of himself.

Science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary-an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal; and immediate care; a world in which you are His peculiar concern.

There is no one so insufferable as a person who gives no other excuse for a peculiar action than saying he had been directed to it in a dream.

The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether-Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.

I ask of each Mason, of each member, of each brother, that he shall remember ever that there is upon him a peculiar obligation to show himself in every respect a good citizen; for after all, the way he can best do his duty by the ancient order to which he belongs is by reflecting credit upon that order by way in which he performs his duty as a citizen of the United States.

The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.

... the weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which, worthily used, will be a gift also to his race forever.

Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.

All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.

We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.

In all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point. To this end the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.

You remember my ideal cat has always a huge rat in its mouth, just going out of sight - though going out of sight in itself has a peculiar pleasure.