Quotes about familiar
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“Yesterday, when asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply: America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible… This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance, that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into this century, the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years, despite no one being alive who signed those treaties… But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Ta-Nehisi Coates Makes the Case for Reparations at Historic Congressional Hearing, Democracy Now (20 June 2019)

War, Personality

“Let no one argue against this that we are living in a different century, that much water has flowed under the bridge and that our problems are no longer the same. We are discussing living water which has not yet flowed away. We are familiar with enough historical examples, beginning with that of Spinoza, where men have worked ferociously to wall up for ever and bury deep in the earth sources which were made to quench their thirsts, but which their fear will not tolerate. For nearly a century academic philosophy has buried Marx in the earth of silence, the earth of the cemetery.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (1968), Part One: From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy
A - F, Louis Althusser

Men, Fear, Problem, Silence

“Who is unacquainted with the sparkling eye. The full and quick pulse, the free respiration, the glowing colour, and serene brow of the joyous? Who is not familiar with the trembling aspect, the stammering hesitation, the cold ruffled skin, the bristling hair, the palpitating heart, the uneasiness, the impeded respiration, the paleness, the low pulse, and all the other symptoms occasioned by fear?”

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher

Source: The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838), p. 95 1852 tr

Fear, Heart

“I’ve also scheduled to meet my stepmom … she’s retired now, so she is currently not in danger of any KT attacks. Although I care for her a great deal, I wouldn’t hold it against the KT if she was executed during an attack against UDI, as she used to be a primary tool and category B traitor for the multiculturalist regime of Norway, high treason she should be familiar with.”

Anders Behring Breivik (1979) Norwegian mass murderer

Manifesto 22 July 2011

“His faith in humanity began from an acknowledgement of limitation, not an illusion about perfectibility. He knew that joy flowed from honesty, rather than around it—sound familiar? In a similar way, Christians, whose identity is found apart from our ever-changing and often hopeless abilities and attributes, are free to laugh at ourselves. This is part and parcel of Christian joy.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

About, "The Gospel According to Jim Henson" by David Zahl

Faith, Way, Change, Joy

“Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa are the Indian equivalents of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. The story of Rama, the ideal son and ruler, Sita, the ideal wife, Bharata and Lakshmana, the ideal brothers and Hanuman, the ideal devotee, has been so beautifully stated in the epic poem of Ramayana that even in the remotest village of India, even the most illiterate man, woman or child is familiar with the characters and situations in the story. The credit for this goes to the poetic and dramatic genius of Valmiki.”

Vālmīki Legendary Indian poet, author of the Ramayana

Sri Aurobindo
Valmiki

“The result of the implementation, the logical design, is traditionally shown as a series of block diagrams. These blocks represent in effect a series of statements, Actually, a direct presentation of these statements is more suitable and, although less familiar, more easily understood. The Harvard Mark IV was to large degree designed and described by such statements, as has been the case with several subsequent developments.”

Gerrit Blaauw (1924–2018) Dutch computer scientist

Source: Computer architecture (1972), p. 154

“I paced up and down the little room, a queer thing happened. It was as though my wandering imagination came upon a new quality, different from all that I had ever known; yet one which was also more familiar and intimate than the smell of Plaxy in the mood of love, more piercing sweet than bitches, more hunt-worthy than the trail of a fox.”

Olaf Stapledon book Sirius

Sirius (1944)

Love, Making love, Imagination, Mood

“We are still on yeno lai and baaro nanna magane (Kannada terms for extreme familiarity) terms with him: if we ever forget and address him as Saar (Sir) since he is a rich superstar and we are all poor, ordinary men, he gets most hurt and offended.”

Rajinikanth (1950) Indian actor

S H Prakash, his friend
You can see God in him at times (22 December 1999)

Men, Hurt, Forgetting

“Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it…or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right and wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar.”

Stephen L. Carter book The Emperor of Ocean Park

All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster.
Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 12, A Special Delivery, II

Hate, Pleasure, Way, Imagination

“Yet we are obliged, to regard a man with so little about him that is ornamental or entertaining, or attractive, as a very considerable personage in the history of his country. Belonging to an age of gigantic intellect and gigantic attainments, he was admired by his contemporaries, and time has in no degree impaired his fame. He is most familiar to us as an author. Smart legal practitioners, who are only desirous of making money by their profession, neglect his works, and sneer at them as pedantic and antiquated; but they continue to be studied by all who wish to know the history and to acquire a scientific and liberal knowledge of our judicial and political institutions. His Opus Magnum is this Commentary upon Littleton, which in itself may be said to contain the whole common law of England as it then existed. Notwithstanding its want of method and its quaintness, the author writes from such a full mind, with such mastery over his subject, and with such unbroken spirit, that every law student who has made, or is ever likely to make, any proficiency, must peruse him with delight.”

Edward Coke (1552–1634) English lawyer and judge

Lord Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices, Vol. 1, 338.
About, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904)

Money, Age, Making love, Law

“Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

… What excellent advice it is, and how it was beaten into my generation of schoolboys... But one may tire of even the best advice, as one may tire of writing according to these precepts. Would we wish to be without the heraldic splendour and torchlight processions that are the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne? Would we wish to sacrifice the orotund, Latinate pronouncements of Samuel Johnson? Would we wish that Dickens had written in the style recommended by the brothers Fowler, who framed the rules I have quoted; what would then have happened to Seth Pecksniff, Wilkins Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, I ask you?
Writing (1990), he here quotes from The King's English (1906) by Henry Watson Fowler & Francis George Fowler

“Replicators are no longer peppered freely through the sea; they are packaged in huge colonies—individual bodies. And phenotypic consequences, instead of being evenly distributed throughout the world, have in many cases congealed into those same bodies. But the individual body, so familiar to us on our planet, did not have to exist. The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 13. The Long Reach of the Gene

Life, World, Universe, Sea

“Literary works do not take as their subjects characters and events which have impressed a writer primarily by the frequency of their appearance. For example, how many Jewish men, as we know them, have come nearly to the brink of plunging a knife into their only son because they believed God had commanded them to? The story of Abraham and Isaac derives its meaning from something other than its being a familiar, recognizable, everyday occurrence. The test of any literary work is not how broad is its range of representation — for all that breadth may be characteristic of a kind of narrative — but the depth with which the writer reveals whatever it may be that he has chosen to represent.”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

Writing About Jews (1963)

Men, God, Appearance

“The aesthetic value of these objects cannot be arrived at by reasoning. Familiarization is necessary.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

En.wikiquote.org - Alexander Calder / Quotes / 1930s / Statement from Modern Painting and Sculpture (1933)
1930s, Statement from Modern Painting and Sculpture (1933)

“The art of cultural translation consists in oscillating between distance and nearness, between one’s own concepts and the native ones, or – to put it differently – making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) Norwegian social anthropologist and professor

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

Making love, Art

“Collectively, the more civilized men are, the more they are actors. They assume the appearance of attachment, of esteem for others, of modesty, and of disinterestedness, without ever deceiving anyone, because everyone understands that nothing sincere is meant. Persons are familiar with this, and it is even a good thing that this is so in this world, for when men play these roles, virtues are gradually established, whose appearance had up until now only been affected. These virtues ultimately will become part of the actor's disposition. To deceive the deceiver in ourselves, or the tendency to deceive, is a fresh return to obedience”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

.

Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 37
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Men, World, Understanding, Appearance

“The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981) according to Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death p 13.
"Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)

Past

“When the noisy tide receded
from the shore
the frozen shiny sands suddenly moved
beneath her feer.
The girl standing knee-deep in water
came to herself and mused:
'How familiar is this moment!'”

Parveen Shakir (1952–1994) Pakistani writer and poet

Sessions of Sweet, Silent Thought: translated by Mirza Nehal Ahmad Baig, Poem no. 16, p. 26
Poetry, Familiarity

Girl, Water

“Naturally UK. I know the British, know their language, whereas elsewhere I will have to get myself familiar with the people and learn their language refresh.”

Sam Manekshaw (1914–2008) First Field marshal of the Indian Army

To the hypothetical question where outside India I would like to stay, I said: <br><br>An Interview With The Field Marshal - Apr 03, 2016, https://swarajyamag.com/from-the-archives/an-interview-with-the-field-marshal

People, Nature, Learning

“A non-mathematical presentation has necessary limitations; and the reader who wishes to learn how certain exact results follow from Einstein's, or even Newton's, law of gravitation is bound to seek the reasons in a mathematical treatise. ...[T]he geometry of relativity in its perfect harmony expresses a truth... which my bowdlerised version misses.
But the mind is not content to leave scientific Truth in a dry husk of mathematical symbols, and demands that it shall be alloyed with familiar images.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Space, Time and Gravitation (1920)

Truth, Law, Mathematics, Learning

“We learn about worlds when they do not accommodate us. Not being accommodated can be pedagogy. We generate ideas through the struggles we have to be in the world; we come to question worlds when we are in question. When a question becomes a place you reside in, everything can be thrown into question: explanations you might have handy that allow you to make sense or navigate your way through unfamiliar as well as familiar landscapes no longer work.”

Sara Ahmed (1969) Australian and British academic

Source: "An Affinity of Hammers" (2016), p. 22

World, Making love, Way, Idea

“As Miss Universe I can reach people who are usually not interested in politics and are not familiar with the problems of the Mideast. In that way I can make a modest contribution to peace. And another thing: as Miss Universe I can show the world that life in Israel is not all war.”

Rina Mor (1956) Israeli lawyer and former Miss Universe

"Miss Universe Captivates New York" (1976)

Life, War, People, World

“Russians would be, or are, willing to agree to a partition of the world into ‘orbits’ or ‘spheres of influence,’ along familiar lines of power politics. Those who hold this hope have been confusing Stalin with Hitler. Hitler was for the partition of the world, and tried to sell that idea to the British. But Stalin is a Bolshevist—that is, a totalist.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "Let the Record Speak" 1939, “The Truth about Communism” https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015051180423&view=1up&seq=5 (1948), p.12

World, Hope, Idea

“Familiarity is the enemy of admiration.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

“I suppose we would be monsters to a Venusian. [...] We depicted the outer space creature as something strange rather than as a monster. He was from a strange place and therefore out of place in our familiar surroundings.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

On 20 Million Miles to Earth
Harryhausen on Horror

“Each one of us has to take responsibility for reality, and present it so that kids will grow up familiar with that and say, OK. I've seen that before. I'm not afraid of it.”

Thuy Trang (1973–2001) Vietnamese actress (1973-2001)

Reality

“The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Way, Feeling, Learning, Science

“I have to ask... are you familiar with the word “synergy?””

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Presentation to U.S. Congressional Sub-Committee on World Game (1969)

“If we formulate the fundamental theory of nature in a timeless language, we have then the problem of recovering the familiar notion of time.”

Carlo Rovelli (1956) Italian physicist

"Forget time" (Aug, 2008)

Nature, Problem, Time

“Familiarity breeds kontempt.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

This only applies tew men, not tew hot bukwheat slapkakes, well buttered and sugared.
Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

“With the eye in a natural state sight follows necessarily ... In the same way the life of blessedness is as a familiar second nature to those who have kept clear the senses of the soul.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

On Infants' Early Deaths

Life, Way, Soul, Nature

“The conversations about human rights in China, they can be a little numbingly familiar after you talk about it.”

Ti-Anna Wang (1989) Chinese dissident

"A Real-Life Fight For Freedom In 'Nine Days'" in NPR https://www.npr.org/2013/04/17/176779468/a-real-life-fight-for-freedom-in-nine-days (17 April 2013)