Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alfred Stieglitz

I detest tradition for tradition's sake; the half-alive; that which is not real. I feel no hatred of individuals, but of customs, traditions; superstitions that go against life, against truth, against the reality of experience, against the spontaneous living out of the sense of wonder-of fresh experience, freshly seen and communicated.

Alfred Nobel

Contentment is the only real wealth

Alfred North Whitehead

Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgements; ... But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.

Alfred North Whitehead

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

Alfred North Whitehead

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable.

Alfred North Whitehead

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

Alfred North Whitehead

A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Alfred North Whitehead

It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.

Alfred North Whitehead

But in the prevalent discussion of classes, there are illegitimate transitions to the notions of a 'nexus' and of a 'proposition'. The appeal to a class to perform the services of a proper entity is exactly analogous to an appeal to an imaginary terrier to kill a real rat. Process and Reality

Alfred North Whitehead

In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.

Alfred North Whitehead

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.

Alfred North Whitehead

Value is coextensive with reality.

Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

Alfred Kinsey

Few males achieve any real freedom in their sexual relations even with their wives. Few males realise how badly inhibited they are on these matters.

Alfred Kinsey

If biologists so often forget the most universal of all biologic principles [variation], it is not surprising that men and women in general expect their fellows to think and behave according to the pattern that may fit the law-maker, or the imaginary ideals for which the legislation was fashioned, but which are ill-shaped for all real individuals who try to live under them.

Alfred Marshall

But if inventions have increased man's power over nature very much, then the real value of money is better measured for some purposes in labour than in commodities.

Alfred Jarry

Blind and unwavering undisciplined at all times constitutes the real strength of all free men.

Alfred Korzybski

What we call progress consists in coordinating ideas with realities.

Alfred Korzybski

To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.

Alexander Downer

The protection of human rights to promote the dignity of the individual is too important a matter for symbolic gestures alone. It is only through the pursuit of practical and effective efforts to promote human rights that we show our real commitment to the welfare of individuals and society.

Alexander Calder

The universe is real, but you can't see it. You have to imagine it.

Alexander Calder

If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space then you can make it... The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Then you can be realistic about reproducing it.

Alex Berenson

The most distinguishing element of my novels is that I try as hard as I can - within the context of a popular commercial thriller - to make them feel authentic. Drawing on real locations and real events is part of that authenticity.

Alex Borstein

I don't do sketch anymore and sometimes I miss it. But I think what I really miss is that time in my life, it was kind of like college. No kids, no real responsibilities, just comedy, food and late nights.

Alex Cox

The way that a handful of corporations in Los Angeles dictate how our stories are told creates a real poverty of imagination and it's a big problem.

Alex Garland

Personally I don't think there's any real intrinsic difference between comic books, movies, theatre, novels. I know there's sure to be some differences of some sorts. I've worked on novels, films, and video games, and in an adaptation, I guess one of the issues is that I have to be in love with the thing I'm adapting before I do it. So that can cause a problem. You can be too scared of it. You could be too reverential. But at the same time you want to try to capture this thing that you're obsessed by. You're fixated for a reason. What's the reason? You try to get ahold of it.

Alex Ferguson

It's great news. The reality of negotiations today is that they take time. But these have always been conducted in a good spirit and we are very pleased with the outcome. We can now look forward to the future.

Aldrich Ames

The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intelligence officials because they don't understand what the real problems are.

Alec Baldwin

To me, the Republican Party is the real great tragedy of the last 25 years because there are lot of good and decent people and a lot of good political points [that have] come from the Republican Party in the post-war period, but it has been hijacked by these fundamentalist wackos.

Aldo Leopold

Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.

Aldous Huxley

When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.

Aldous Huxley

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

Aldous Huxley

Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.