Conception Quotes

There is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress, as well as others, than I had any conception [of], before I became President of the U. S. (James K. Polk)
Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain. View quote
David Hume
All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas! View quote
T. E. Lawrence
The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting. View quote
Edward Hopper
Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly. View quote
Thomas Hobbes
Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech. View quote
Thomas Hobbes
We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory. View quote
F. Scott Fitzgerald
We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception. View quote
John Rawls
Neutrality has increasingly become obsolete and, except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception. View quote
John Foster Dulles
Our lives our guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. (William Kingdon Clifford)
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid. View quote
James D. Watson
I would like to thank the people who encouraged me to draw army cartoons at a time when the gag man's conception of the army was one of mean ole sergents and jeeps which jump over mountains. View quote
Bill Mauldin
It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law. View quote
Franz Kafka
Peter was dull he was at first Dull,oh so dull, so very dull Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed, Still with this dulness was he cursed Dull,beyond all conception, dull. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact. View quote
William Boyd
It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science. View quote
James Henry Breasted
Nothing is more important in the preservation of peace than to secure among the great mass of the people living under constitutional government a just conception of the rights which their nation has against others and of the duties their nation owes to others. View quote
Elihu Root
We need no messiah and no sterile conception of a god menacing us with hell and purgatory. View quote
Federica Montseny
In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us. View quote
Dag Hammarskjöld
A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be. (Edward Snowden)
Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized – the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.... When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception. View quote
Ted Kennedy
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes. View quote
Theodor Adorno
It is much to my advantage that several of my pictures should be seen together, as it displays to advantage their varieties of conception and also of execution, and what they gain by the mellowing hand of time which should never be forced or anticipated. Thus my pictures when first coming forth have a comparative harshness which at the time acts to my disadvantage. View quote
John Constable
As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception' painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness. View quote
Max Beckmann