Unusual Quotes - page 19
I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by "instinct". Not only is his overtendency like mine - namely, to make all knowledge the most powerful affect - but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange!
Baruch Spinoza
Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.
Vladimir Nabokov
This was the evening of the last day of Gordon Way's life ... The weather forecast hadn't mentioned that, of course, that wasn't the job of the weather forecast, but then his horoscope had been pretty misleading as well. It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetary activity in his sign and had urged him to differentiate between what he thought he wanted and what he actually needed, and suggested that he should tackle emotional or work problems with determination and complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention that he would be dead before the day was out.
Douglas Adams
In these frequent talks about the books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give me explanations and ideas respecting civilization, government, morality, mental cultivation, which he required me afterwards to restate to him in my own words. He also made me read, and give him a verbal account of, many books which would not have interested me sufficiently to induce me to read them of myself: among others, Millar's Historical View of the English Government, a book of great merit for its time, and which he highly valued; Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, McCrie's Life of John Knox, and even Sewel's and Rutty's Histories of the Quakers. He was fond of putting into my hands books which exhibited men of energy and resource in unusual circumstances, struggling against difficulties and overcoming them: of such works I remember Beaver's African Memoranda, and Collins's account of the first settlement of New South Wales.
John Stuart Mill
Algren's work was soon attracting attention for its unusual marriage of sumptuous prose and dry humour, describing a subject – the lives of those at the bottom – normally rendered in the dreariest of naturalistic tones. Algren's world, in one of the many phrases he brought into common usage (including "walk on the wild side", "monkey on the back", and "I knew I'd never make it to 21 anyway") was "neon wilderness".
Nelson Algren
During a later period of his life, Rembrandt became bankrupt, mainly through his own extravagance... he could not help but collect things. At this time, his marvelous collection of paintings, jewels, swords, armor and precious costumes were publicly sold for a pittance. He had to leave his big, beautiful house in the fashionable part of Amsterdam and go to a very poor quarter. His original, fine house is now open to view. He dressed his subjects in oriental costumes, weapons and armor to give a rich, romantic and mysterious radiance to his paintings. At the same time he was a very down-to-earth Dutchman with a passion for reality. His art is the synthesis of a tremendous attraction to reality, with a need to draw things as they really were, and a desire for the exotic, the dramatic, the radiant, the unusual and the mysterious. p. 402.
Rembrandt
It was a bank holiday, and Mr Tompkins, the little clerk of a big city bank, slept late and had a leisurely breakfast. Trying to plan his day, he first thought about going to some afternoon movie and, opening the morning paper, turned to the entertainment page. But none of the films looked attractive to him. He detested all this Hollywood stuff, with infinite romances between popular stars.
If only there were at least one film with some real adventure, something unusual and maybe even fantastic about it. But there was none. Unexpectedly, his eye fell on a little notice in the corner of the page. The local university was announcing a series of lectures on the problems of modern physics, and this afternoon's lecture was to be about Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Well, that might be something!
George Gamow
When the conductor Richard Hickox rang me one day in 1984 to ask if I could help with a rather unusual job for which he and his choir had been engaged, I was intrigued. Kate Bush, it transpired, was working on her new album, Hounds of Love, and for one track, Hello Earth, she wanted a chorus to recreate the orthodox singing/chanting that made such a contribution to the film Nosferatu.
Kate Bush
He ran every step of the way this year. That's rather unusual for a star of his caliber. He ran as hard for us in our last game of the season as he did in our first. The way he performed this year, Clemente was one of the greatest players I have ever seen. It seemed to be a matter of pride with him. I really don't know what motivated it. All I know is he had it.
Roberto Clemente
Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.
James Joyce
I used to go over to Howard's house on Sunday mornings for breakfast and it was unusual when he didn't get at least three phone calls while we ate, asking him to keep catastrophes of the night before out of the papers. One star would be picked up drunk in the street, another would have been caught in a raid on a marijuana party, another would have wrapped his car around a tree with someone else's wife in the seat alongside him. The next day I would always look in the papers to see if anything sneaked through. Nothing ever did. That Howard, he sure is a genius.
Clark Gable
I have been reading recently about synesthesia, in this case, the association of music and other sensory information with colors and I realized that I probably have a little or a lot of that current. I don't think it's unusual for songwriters. When I think of other people's songs or albums, a color comes to my mind.
Chris Martin
From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought... Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things... The less the state is able to employ violence in the defense of the interest of the elite groups that effectively dominate it, the more it becomes necessary to devise techniques of ‘manufacture of consent'... Where obedience is guaranteed by violence, rulers may tend towards a ‘behaviourist' conception; it is enough that people obey; what they think does not matter too much. Where the state lacks means of coercion, it is important to control what people think.
Noam Chomsky
