Plain Quotes - page 21
The fort of Kalinjar which was celebrated throughout the world for being as strong as the wall of Alexander was taken. 'The temples were converted into mosques and abodes of goodness and the ejaculations of the bead-counters and the voices of the summoners to prayer ascended to the highest heaven, and the very name of idolatry was annihilated.' 'Fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.
Muhammad of Ghor
It is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care for the earth.
This last statement becomes obvious enough when it is considered that the earth is what we all have in common, that it is what we are made of and what we live from, and that we therefore cannot damage it without damaging those with whom we share it. But I believe it goes farther and deeper than that. There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. Between our relation to our own sexuality and our relation to the reproductivity of the earth, for instance, the resemblance is plain and strong. By some connection we do not recognize, the willingness to exploit one becomes the willingness to exploit the other.
Wendell Berry
... I believe I have come to adopt a cybernetic way of thinking... I became aware of this in the many conversations with students who were worrying about their future and asked for advice. I heard myself telling them that it was far more important to know what one did not want to do, than to have detailed plans of what one did want to do. One day it dawned on me that this was plain cybernetic advice; It is more useful to specify constraints rather than goals. - And then I explained it by adding that in one's teens or twenties one usually has already discovered a number of things that one cannot stand, whereas it is quite impossible to foresee what, ten or twenty years later, will provide the satisfactions needed to maintain one's equilibrium.
Ernst von Glasersfeld
I was born near the Po and it is the only respectable river in all Italy. To be respectable, a river must flow through a plain because water was created to stay horizontal and only when it is perfectly horizontal does it preserve its natural dignity. Niagara falls is an embarrassing phenomenon, like a man who walks on his hands.
Giovannino Guareschi
Not only a few men, but oftentimes whole societies, whilst they consider things but very superficially, set such a value upon certain sounds, as if they were the real essence of all religion. ... And yet, as I hinted now, they either signify nothing, or have been invented by some leading men to make plain things obscure.
John Toland
In my opinion the aim of the painter is similar with that of the poet, insofar that both want to affect the feelings of the viewer or reader. As soon as their scenes.... are lacking the mark of nature, of truth, than both will fail to realize it. The Dutch painter feels - as well as the Germans do - the influence of sublime nature, but the Dutch painter first wants to be acquainted with 'plain truth', to combine it afterwards with the poetic..
Barend Cornelis Koekkoek
![Do you like to see what can be transformed from a flat, elementary rural scene - bearing the stamp of nature, the mark of truth - into something most beautiful and graceful? Look at the works of our great [painter] Schelfhout. There you will find represented plain nature at the most elegant, but moreover with a faithfulness and truth, which only Schelfhout can represent. (Barend Cornelis Koekkoek)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/01/barend-cornelis-koekkoek-bearing-953601.webp)
How suburban!' cried Elvira. I was in Hampstead the other day: in front of one of the richest houses was a crazy pavement: they paid about £35 for it, doubtless. The man who would have done it best was in an asylum : he would have done it for nothing, happy to do it, and the more there is of it, the more dull and plain it looks, just an expanse of conventional craziness, looking as stupid as a neanderthal skull. That's the suburbs all over. That's what we are, you see: suburban, however wild we run. You know quite well, in yourself, don't you, two people like us can't go wild? Still, it's nice to pretend to, for a while.
Christina Stead
When the Armistice came back no one took time to tell us about it; November 11 was just another day of drilling on the Plain. I found out that the war was over only by courtesy of our "barrack policemen", the janitor who looked after the division of the old South Barracks where my "beast" company was quartered, who reported the war's end a couple of days after the fact.
Maxwell D. Taylor
There is a scale in the meaning of the word socialist. In France it means about the same thing as a communist, when one uses plain language. When one uses the language of Monsieur Drumont, it means a Jew. In England a socialist is equal to a French conservative republican. In America it means a thief. In Germany it means an ingenious individual of restricted financial resources, who generally fails to blow up some important personage with wet dynamite. In Italy a socialist is an anarchist pure and simple, who wishes to destroy everything existing for the sake of dividing a wealth which does not exist at all. It also means a young man who orders a glass of water and a toothpick at a cafe, and is able to talk politics for a considerable time on this slender nourishment.
Francis Marion Crawford
There was excitement for us all in the fact that I had a job in the mechanical field, so that my education would count.... Well, I am bound to admit the first sight of my opportunity was disappointing... Not far from a city dump on a weed-grown, marshy plain was an old weather-worn building, like an overgrown barn. In its indefinite yard there was a small mound of coal and a great mound of reddish-gray cinders and ashes; also a disorderly accumulation of discarded machinery... Once the factory had been painted brown. Only one word describes it: "dirty." Smoke from the dump carried an acric odor. Eventually across the wall nearest the railroad track there was lettered in black this legend: HYATT ROLLER BEARING COMPANY.
Alfred P. Sloan
I've always been a bit of a decorator. I think if I wasn't a singer I'd probably be in stage setting or interior design or something. I like clutter and I'm quite visually greedy. I can't have things to be plain; I have to have things looking interesting... maybe I'm just a frustrated interior designer stuck in a singing career.
Florence Welch
