Detail Quotes - page 2

We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities. (Alfred North Whitehead)
How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime. View quote
Ian McEwan
The Hindu religion appears ... as a cathedral temple, half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail but always fantastic with a significance - crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture. View quote
Helen Hayes
One is telling a story about old times when someone breaks in with a little detail that he happens to know, implying that one's own version is inaccurate - disgusting behavior! View quote
Sei Shōnagon
It is a popular error that bureaucracy is less flexible than private enterprise. It may be so in detail, but when large scale adaptations have to be made, central control is far more flexible. It may take two months to get an answer to a letter from a government department, but it takes twenty years for an industry under private enterprise to readjust itself to a fall in demand. View quote
Joan Robinson
The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut. View quote
Dean Koontz
Euclid's manner of exposition, progressing relentlessly from the data to the unknown and from the hypothesis to the conclusion, is perfect for checking the argument in detail but far from being perfect for making understandable the main line of the argument. View quote
George Pólya
I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough. View quote
Nick Hornby
If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as appears in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture. View quote
Gregory Bateson
Forget the infinities: Concentrate on detail. (Larry Niven)
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand. View quote
George Orwell
The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail. View quote
Gregory Benford
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Caress the detail, the divine detail. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be. View quote
Kenneth Clark
No one has rightly denied himself unless he has wholly resigned himself to the Lord and is willing to leave every detail to his good pleasure. If we put ourselves in such a frame of mind, then, whatever may happen to us, we shall never feel miserable or accuse God falsely because of our lot. View quote
John Calvin
Perhaps, if you knew you were going to die, your senses crammed in as much detail as they could while they still had the chance... View quote
Terry Pratchett
We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed. We came to rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being worked. All the time, we find that. And this comes into every detail of our life. View quote
Swami Vivekananda
Any one detail, followed through to its source, will usually reveal the general state of readiness of the whole organization. View quote
Hyman G. Rickover
There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm...Second, there are the hard-working, intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard-working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent, lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office. (Erich von Manstein)
I never regret anything. Because every little detail of your life is what made you into who you are in the end. View quote
Drew Barrymore
Short of climbing aboard a time capsule and peeling back eight and one-half decades, James Cameron's magnificent Titanic is the closest any of us will get to walking the decks of the doomed ocean liner. Meticulous in detail, yet vast in scope and intent, Titanic is the kind of epic motion picture event that has become a rarity. You don't just watch Titanic, you experience it - from the launch to the sinking, then on a journey two and one-half miles below the surface, into the cold, watery grave where Cameron has shot never-before seen documentary footage specifically for this movie. View quote
James Berardinelli
No one has ever used historical examples, near or remote, with the detail, precision, and directness to be found in every page of Shaw. View quote
Jacques Barzun
I have said, and I repeat, at the risk of appearing sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War. ... If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what's called a detail. View quote
Jean-Marie Le Pen