Version Quotes - page 16
The vitality of the individual... depends on his success in fashioning a character resistant to the narrowing of experience, to the rigidity of response, and to the consequent constriction of possibility that surrender to a hardened version of what the self implies. "He was so extremely natural," said Santayana of William James, "that there was no way of telling what his nature was, or what came next." It is an observation that states an ideal, suitable to the ambitions of personality under democracy. The point is not to make war against habit or to make war against one self. It is to fashion a style of existence, a mode of the self, in which we lower our defenses enough to strengthen our readiness for the new, our attachment to life, and our love of the world.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
By marrying experiment to speculation, we put ourselves in a dimmer version of the circumstance of the Creator. We remake nature or we imagine it remade. By this expedient we free ourselves, if only partly and tentatively, from suspicion of our beliefs, and we live once again, unafraid, in the light of the actual.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
But I am no longer trying to formulate a stylised version of anxiety such as we find in the Laocoon group and in so many other sculptures of the Silver Age of antiquity. I feel that these works are always a bit too melodramatic. If you really want to find the sources of my present style [1958] in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses that have been unearthed in Pompeii.... if the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age, I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine.
Marino Marini
It's funny: when people always talk about the importance of role models, I used to think that was so exaggerated, but as I get older, I start to realize I don't feel that way so much anymore. If you see somebody like you who's doing something, an older version of what you are, it does make you feel like it's more possible.
Demetri Martin
My huge monument to the bombing of Rotterdam [in 1940, by the German aircraft], for instance, was the third and final version of this figure. Once the model had been accepted in principle and the scale agreed on, I began working on a new version of it, conceiving it to a great extent in terms of the effects of the changes of lighting in which such a monument would been seen in the open air.
Ossip Zadkine
I spend so much time with the brightest and most talented and well-rounded people. I've had the privilege of having long and very intellectual conversations with people, and sometimes I just sit there and listen. It's like a better version of a class. Even though I'm not sitting at a desk and in school, I'm still learning all the time.
Hayden Panettiere
Although Gwangi had been an allosaurus in Obie's version, I decided to make him more of a tyrannosaurus, and so I used elements from both species to make what I suppose could be called a 'tyrannosaurus al'. This combination allowed me a flexibility between aggressiveness and agility. If you like, he was glamourized.
Ray Harryhausen
It's often said that with enough effort and determination you can do whatever you put your mind to. But saying those words and living them are different things, and my father has lived them. It's one of his defining qualities and I've seen it in action all of my life. Whatever he does, he gives his all and does it well. His desire for excellence is contagious. He possesses a unique gift for bringing that trait out in others, starting with those closest to him. He's always helped me be the best version of myself by encouragement and by example. He motivates me to work my hardest and to always stay true to who I am and what I believe. That's what he does: he draws out the talent and drive in people so that they can achieve their full potential. That's a great quality to have in a father and better yet in the president of the United States.
Tiffany Trump
I came away from the two science surveys superficially acquainted with what was already a rather old-fashioned version of contemporary natural science. Relativity and quantum mechanics were mentioned... but not explained; the stars were still eternal; and both subatomic particles and biochemistry were discreetly omitted. ...The two courses persuaded me that, in some sense, I understood the natural world. The illusion endured, for later in life... I tagged along by reading popular accounts, believing that the natural world out there was somehow within my reach, even without the mathematics that made quantum mechanics so mysteriously plausible.
William H. McNeill
Christian theology was a revised version of Greek philosophy and the effort Plato and his heirs made to discern the permanent behind the sensible, the Ideal and the Real behind the world of individual things - ever in flux, becoming and decaying and never, ever reliably and completely True.
William H. McNeill
But when I do think about religious problems, I think in Hindu categories. When my father died, it was the first time something really terrible happened to me-and Christianity and Judaism were of absolutely no use to me. My Jewish and Christian friends would take me to synagogues and churches, and it didn't help at all. And then I started thinking about the myths I was translating at the time, which were about death-why there is death, how death came into the world, what happens when we die, speculations about karma and rebirth. The Hindu version of it made more sense to me than anything. It just seemed like Shiva as a god was more likely to be responsible for the world the way I knew it than the gods of Judaism and Christianity. Capricious, beautiful, violent, it just made more sense.
Wendy Doniger
