Familiar Quotes - page 5

Mindfulness, though so highly praised and capable of such great achievements, is not at all a "mystical” state, beyond the ken and reach of the average person. It is, on the contrary, something quite simple and common, and very familiar to us. (Nyanaponika Thera)
I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality. View quote
Alban Berg
When I write an original story I write about people I know first-hand and situations I'm familiar with. I don't write stories about the nineteenth century. View quote
Satyajit Ray
The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings. View quote
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a ‘poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself. View quote
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses. View quote
Ernst Mach
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. View quote
Michael Oakeshott
With the eye in a natural state sight follows necessarily ... In the same way the life of blessedness is as a familiar second nature to those who have kept clear the senses of the soul. View quote
Gregory of Nyssa
The elements I need to write are a place, a desk, a familiar room. I need some of my books there, I need quiet. ... I'm picturing as I'm writing. I'm putting together what I need to have this thing alive. View quote
Mark Strand
Learning something new means you have to abandon, for a little while at least, the familiar and comforting. I happen to like this feeling. I remind myself that tomorrow, I will be someone who didn't exist yesterday. (Nick Stone)
The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming. View quote
Robert Greene
I'm not very interested in charting a day-to-day familiar reality. I'm always looking for territory in which to explore the BIG subjects, the life-or-death stories. View quote
Rose Tremain
Wow," came a familiar voice, "Hypochondriac killed the cat." -Dess. View quote
Scott Westerfeld
When you direct your first film, you always start by telling stories that you are familiar with. View quote
Sophie Marceau
Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience-buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello-become new all over again. View quote
Anthony Doerr
One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore. View quote
Charles Cooley
My eyes flew open, and I pushed back against rock-hard shoulders. I let out a little squeak of horror. "It's me," said a familiar voice. ..."Eric, what are you doing here?" "Snuggling. View quote
Charlaine Harris
Ordinary folk prefer familiar tastes - they'd sooner eat the same things all the time - but a gourmet would sample a fried park bench just to know how it tastes. View quote
Walter Moers
What is familiar tends to become a value. View quote
Gordon W. Allport
There is a familiar trio of reactions by scientists to a purportedly radical hypothesis: (a) "You must be out of your mind!", (b) "What else is new? Everybody knows that!", and, later - if the hypothesis is still standing - (c) "Hmm. You *might* be on to something!" Sometimes these phases take years to unfold, one after another, but I have seen all three emerge in near synchrony in the course of a half-hour's heated discussion following a conference paper. (Daniel Dennett)
It is very hard to stay alive just for your own sake. It is very hard to stare into day after day without another familiar face staring back. It turns your heart into a purposeless muscle. View quote
David Levithan
Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer's is coming mocks all one's aspirations - to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one's accomplishments and hard work - in a way that old familiar death does not. View quote
Jane Smiley
And that because the moving parts are a million times smaller than the ones we're familiar with, they move a million times faster, just as a smaller tuning fork produces a higher pitch than a large one. View quote
K. Eric Drexler
The familiar was usually invisible; how many people really noticed everything they saw? View quote
Ilsa J. Bick