Fragment Quotes

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. (Anaïs Nin)
I am persuaded that every time a man smiles - but much more so when he laughs - it adds something to this fragment of life. View quote
Laurence Sterne
Don't let the sun go down on me. Although I search myself, it's always someone else I see. I'd just allow a fragment of your life to wander free. But losing everything is like the sun going down on me. View quote
Elton John
Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and aretes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared. View quote
George Mallory
Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic. View quote
Kenneth Clark
The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase. View quote
William F. Buckley
There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. View quote
John Muir
Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn. View quote
Victor Hugo
Back in 1927, an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said that the American people would never vote for socialism but he said under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program. View quote
Ronald Reagan
Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost...perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that precious little fragment as well. View quote
Philip K. Dick
My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem. (Bill Viola)
All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern of the truth which from the separate approaches every true scholar is striving to descry. View quote
Abbott Lawrence Lowell
Normally, we are happy to find a fragment of jaw, a few isolated teeth, a bit of an arm, a bit of a skull. But to find associated body parts is extremely rare. View quote
Donald Johanson
The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world. View quote
Edgar Quinet
He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance. View quote
Sinclair Lewis
If, in each hour, a man could learn a single fragment of some branch of knowledge, a single rule of some mechanical art, a single pleasing story or proverb (the acquisition of which would require no effort), what a vast stock of learning he might lay by. Seneca is therefore right when he says: "Life is long, if we know how to use it." It is consequently of importance that we understand the art of making the very best use of our lives. View quote
John Amos Comenius
Aristotle found support for his thesis in facts drawn from geopolitics or ‘natural law'. Greek superiority had to be proved demonstrably innate, a gift of nature. In one celebrated fragment he counsels Alexander to be ‘a hegemon [leader] of Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants'. View quote
Peter Green
Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes). View quote
Vladimir Lenin
.. the elements of form have a particular aspect; every fragment, every plane, every line has its proper character. View quote
Piet Mondrian
..the personification of the close-up detail, the individualisation of the fragment, where the drama takes shape, moves and have it being. Film concurs with this aspect for life. The hand is a multiple, transformable object. Before I saw it in a film, I did not know what a hand was! The object in itself is capable of becoming an absolute, moving, tragic thing. View quote
Fernand Léger
Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power. (Fernand Léger)
I myself have employed the close-up, which is the cinema's only real invention. The fragment of the object has also been of use to me; by isolating it you personalize it. All this work has led me to regard the phenomenon of objectivity as a new and highly contemporary value in itself [quote of c. 1927]. View quote
Fernand Léger
The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of "liberalism" they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened. View quote
Norman Thomas
We are Muslims; Muslims constitute a whole, they are in unity and they do not fragment. God deemed separation among Muslims unlawful. Fragmentizing Muslims is one of the gravest unlawful acts. It is unacceptable for Muslims to be fragmented under any name. ** 4 January 2014. View quote
Adnan Oktar
The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal. View quote
Pope Paul VI