Description Quotes

However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction. (J. L. Austin)
The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it. View quote
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's. View quote
Stephen King
Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be. View quote
Benjamin Tucker
I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall. View quote
Eleanor Roosevelt
A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world. View quote
John Locke
War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. View quote
John McCain
The type of figleaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes. View quote
Freda Adler
Uncertainty means that we do not have a complete description of the world which we fully believe to be true. View quote
Kenneth Arrow
What girls do to each other is beyond description. No chinese torture comes close. View quote
Tori Amos
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture. (Oscar Wilde)
Less really is more. It's a tendency of beginning writers to want to prove what they're talking about by going too far with description. I think you've got to keep it short, crisp and clean. View quote
Brad Thor
I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor. View quote
John McGahern
No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery. View quote
Harriet Ann Jacobs
The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks. View quote
William James
The generation of Isaiah did not require the detailed description; his account, "I saw the Lord," &c., sufficed. The generation of the Babylonian exile wanted to learn all the details. ...Isaiah was so familiar with it that he did not consider it necessary to communicate it to others as a new thing, especially as it was well known to the intelligent. View quote
Maimonides
In the vivid description of the Gospel, it would seem that we must help the Christ hidden in every poor man, in every prisioner, in every sufferer. But if we paraphrased the marvelous scene and applied it to the child, we should find that Christ goes to help all men in the form of the child. View quote
Maria Montessori
I hope for an America where neither "fundamentalist" nor "humanist" will be a dirty word, but a fair description of the different ways in which people of good will look at life and into their own souls. View quote
Ted Kennedy
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. View quote
Potter Stewart
In 1915 Sophie Taeuber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper [without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting]. These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous. View quote
Jean Arp
Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature. (Stephen Jay Gould)
It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time! View quote
Roger Penrose
The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description. View quote
Anthony de Mello
Satanism encourages its followers to indulge in their natural desires. Only by doing so can you be a completely satisfied person with no frustrations which can be harmful to yourself and others around you. Therefore, the most simplified description of the Satanic belief is: indulgence instead of abstinence. View quote
Anton LaVey