Stiffness Quotes

The weed crushed and pressed by the heavy rock may slowly and gently grow up anew helped by the fresh air, sunshine, and sympathetic rain. On the other hand, the rock is often broken through exposure to nature and weathering. Life is a strong power to grow in tenderness; this fact may be considered as having a close relation with human life. At the same time tenderness has sometimes stronger power against stiffness or hardening due to extreme strain. (Kyuzo Mifune)
Eutrapelia. "A happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians... lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners.
Matthew Arnold
The winter oak... is very useful in buildings but when in a moist place it takes in water to its centre... and so it rots. The Turkey oak and the beech both... take in moisture to their centre and soon decay. White and black poplar, as well as willow, linden, and the agnus castus... are of great service from their stiffness. ...they are a convenient material to use in carving.
Vitruvius
The public must suffer untold pangs from the stiffness, the deliberate stifling of emotion, on the part of many British actors.
Ivor Novello
Since 1929 I have suffered from an extremely painful disease [arthritis deformans] which gets worse every year. Little by little my arms and hands have become stiff and bent and I have terrible pain. This stiffness in my elbows and wrists has tremendously hindered my painting and I have had to find a new technique. My art in the last period has all been in small format, but my paintings have become even deeper and more spiritual..
Alexej von Jawlensky
I was expecting Pop Bassett to give an impersonation of a bomb falling on an ammunition dump, but he didn't. Instead, he continued to exhibit that sort of chilly stiffness which you see in magistrates when they're fining people five quid for boyish peccadilloes.
P. G. Wodehouse
No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.
Edwidge Danticat
The elm and the ash... when put in shape for use in buildings... are tough and having no stiffness... soon bend. But when they become dry with age, or are allowed to lose their sap... they get harder, and from their toughness supply a strong material for dowels to be used in joints and other articulations.
Vitruvius
Those were the days of "Florodora" and of sextets, of pinched-in waists and blown-out sleeves, of almost bustles and absolute ballet skirts, but here, without doubt, disguised as she might be by the unaccustomed stiffness and old fashion of her costume, was a butterfly of butterflies. Here was the gayety of the period - the soft wine of eyes, the songs that flurried hearts, the toasts and tie bouquets, the dances and the dinners. Here was a Venus of the hansom, cab, the Gibson girl in her glorious prime. Here was...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Prolonged sitting can cause stiffness in your lower back.
Denise Austin
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerised the subject. (Henry Adams)
The Greeks believed that true beauty (as opposed to mere prettiness) was the offspring of these two opposing tendencies, which they personified in Apollo and Dionysus, their two gods of art. Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance, when our dreams of order and abandon come together. One tendency uninformed by the other can bring forth only coldness or chaos-the stiffness of a Triumph tulip, the slackness of a wild rose.
Michael Pollan
For a number of years the deeds and actions of party and government bodies trailed behind the needs of the times and of life. The problems in the country's development built up more rapidly than they were being solved. The inertness and stiffness of the forms and methods of administration, the decline of dynamism in our work and an escalation of bureaucracy - all this was doing no small damage. Signs of stagnation had begun to surface in the life of the society. The situation called for change, but a peculiar psychology - How to improve things without changing anything? - took the upper hand. But that cannot be done, comrades. Stop for an instant, as they say, and you fall behind a mile.
Mikhail Gorbachev