Rough Quotes - page 6
Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line
Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine;
Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace,
And copies Ovid's filth without his grace.
In his rough brain a genius might have grown,
Had he not sought to play the brute alone;
But void of shame, he let his wit run wild,
And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child.
Averse to culture, strange to humankind,
He never knew the pleasures of the mind.
Scorning the pure, the delicate, the clean,
His joys were sordid, and his morals mean.
Thro' his gross thoughts a native vigour ran,
From which he deem'd himself the perfect man:
But want of decency his rank decreas'd,
And sunk him to the level of the beast.
Would that his Muse had dy'd before her birth,
Nor spread such foul corruption o'er the earth.
H. P. Lovecraft
To proceed from assumptions about an abstract theoretical set-up and from them to draw conclusions about the observable world and to test - by rough or more refined means - whether the conformity with observations is "good" enough, is indeed the time honoured procedure that all empirical sciences, including the natural sciences, have used. I shall therefore not plead guilty of heresy even if I do work with choice-theory concepts that are not invariant under a general monotonic transformation of the utility indicator.
Ragnar Frisch
You please me much by saying that no other fault [in the portrait Gainsborough recently made and sent] is to be found in your picture than the roughness of the surface; for that part being of use in giving force to the effect at a proper distance.... I urn [earn? ] much better pleased that they should spy out things of that kind than to see an eye half an inch out of its place or a nose out of drawing when view'd at a proper distance. I don't think it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas and say the colours smell offensive than to say how rough the paint lies; for one is just as material as the other with regard to hurting the effect and drawing of a picture. For Sir Godfrey Kneller used to tell them that pictures were not made to smell of..
Thomas Gainsborough
Lacking much historical information and assuming (1) that victims of injustice generally do worse than they otherwise would and (2) that those from the least well-off group in the society have the highest probabilities of being the (descendants of) victims of the most serious injustice who are owed compensation by those who benefited from the injustices, ... then a rough rule of thumb for rectifying injustices might seem to be the following: organize society so as to maximize the position of whatever group ends up least well-off in the society.
Robert Nozick
High up where the poor sat, the people quaked with fear:
they saw the soul stretched on the ground, a votive beast
beaten by the conflicting powers of light and dark,
and their minds shook, nor knew now what great god to choose,
for comfort's road dropped to the right, the rough ascent
rose to the left, and both roads seemed to lead to God,
while at the crossroads stood the human heart, and swayed.
Nikos Kazantzakis
My God and I are horsemen galloping in the burning sun or under drizzling rain. Pale, starving, but unsubdued, we ride and converse.
"Leader!" I cry. He turns his face toward me, and I shudder to confront his anguish.
Our love for each other is rough and ready, we sit at the same table, we drink the same wine in this low tavern of life.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Did you know that you could be wrong
And swear you're right?
Some people been known to do it
All their lives.
But you find yourself alone
Just like you found yourself before.
Like I found myself in pieces
On the hotel floor.
Hard times help me see.I'm a good man with a good heart;
Had a tough time, got a rough start.
But I finally learned to let it go,
Now I'm right here, and I'm right now.
And I'm hoping, knowing somehow
That my shadow days are over.
My shadow days are over now.
John Mayer
This is the correct procedure: Spot who is attacking us. Start investigating them promptly for felonies or worse using our own professionals, not outside agencies. Double curve our reply by saying we welcome an investigation of them. Start feeding lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press. Don't ever tamely submit to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way.
L. Ron Hubbard
Find a cosy table
Inside a restaurant,
Somewhere formidable
Where you'll be très contents.
Let your lady fair know
That she is all you see,
Prime her with a Pernod
Or three.
Watch her crack a lobster
And strip it to the buff,
Rough as when a mobster
Gets tough.
Keep the wine cascading
And you'll ensure
Une petite spécialité called l'amour....
Anthony Burgess
In the West, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now.
Jeanette Winterson
