Quotes about few
page 10

“There are few things as nauseating as pure obedience.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 75, “Interlude—Obedience” (p. 593)

“There are few things harder than being born into the wrong body.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

“It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty…”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Beauty, Intelligence, Learning

“Bad things can happen, and often do--but they only take up a few pages of your story; and anyone can survive a few pages.”

James A. Owen (1969) Illustrator

Source: The Barbizon Diaries: A Meditation on Will, Purpose, and the Value Of Stories

“Laughter rarely lasts longer than a few seconds, it's true. But how enjoyable those few seconds are.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Two Boys Kissing

Laughter

“Too bad, Elizabeth. You're Stuck with me. Not for a few decades, not for centuries. You're tied to me forever. That boy and girl offspring you talked off? They'll come from me--or no one.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Lothaire

Girl, Boy

“Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.”

Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy

Source: Red Mars

People, Thinking, Distant

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Bee, Beauty, Peaceful

“Only those few who are able to surpass their fear of death completely can fully experience the highest forms of life; not the mundane life of the mortal, but the godly life of the resurrected.”

Zeena Schreck (1963) Tantric Buddhist/Sethian

Life, Death, Fear

“When he stopped walking and kissed me a few minutes later, it was like time had stopped, with the air, my heart, and the world all so still. And it was this I remembered every other time I was with Marshall.”

Sarah Dessen Lock and Key

Source: Lock and Key

World, Kiss, Time, Heart

“Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Law

“The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World. I'm sixteen now, so you can imagine that's left me with quite a few days of major suckage.”

Libba Bray Going Bovine

Source: Going Bovine

Life, World, Imagination

“I'm a man of few words."
"If you read more, you might have a larger vocabulary.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Reading

“Nick! Wait!” – Kyrian
‘Wait, my gluteus maximus. Vampire was shy of a few quarts of blood if he thought Nick had any intention of not going Casper on him.’ – Nick”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Waiting

“That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

Law

“Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

“You're far from this. This story is just another few hundred pages of your mind.”

Markus Zusak (1975) Australian author

Source: I Am the Messenger

“Few are guilty, but all are responsible.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: The Prophets

“I’d never seen anything like it. First a trial, then a few murders, then dancing. Life goes on. Or, in this case, death continues.”

Charlaine Harris (1951) American writer

Life, Death, Dance

“Looking back, it seemed like it should have been harder to lose someone, or have them lose you, especially when they were in the same state, only a few towns over.”

Sarah Dessen Lock and Key

Source: Lock and Key

“Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.”

Tony Hoagland (1953–2018) American writer

Way, Sense, Suffering

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Primo Levi (1918–1987) Italian chemist, memoirist, short story writer, novelist, essayist

Men, Question

“Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I…”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Life, People, Thinking, Evil

“Be polite to all, but intimate with few.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

“In the first few seconds an aching sadness wrenched his heart, but it soon gave way to a feeling of sweet disquiet, the excitement of gypsy wanderlust”

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) Russian author primarily known for his novel "Master and Margarita"

Sadness, Way, Feeling, Heart

“What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), unplaced by chapter

Gauge, Reading

“There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Truth, Lying

“This girl (Stephanie) is but a few months away from her seventeenth birthday and already she has saved the world and killed a god. What have you done?”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Death Bringer

God, World, Girl, Birthday

“When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large, scientific method in most cases fails us. One need only think of the weather, in which case prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible. Nevertheless no one doubts that we are confronted with a causal connection whose causal components are in the main known to us.
Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, Science and Religion (1941)

Nature, Thinking, Weather

“Haven't you ever wished that you could steal back just a few hours of your past?" she asked softly. "That's all I want… just a little taste of what might have been.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Again the Magic

Past

“There are a lot of people who will give money or materials, but very few who will give time and affection.”

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Source: Flowers for Algernon (1966)

Money, People, Time

“They say - "they" being the great philosophers, or possibly the cast of Seinfeld - that breaking up is like pushing over a Coke machine. You can't just do it, you have to set the thing in motion, rock it back and forth a few times.”

Jennifer Weiner book Good in Bed

Source: Good in Bed

Time

“There were few things worse than being ordinary, in Evie’s opinion. Ordinary was for suckers.”

Libba Bray book The Diviners

Source: The Diviners

“They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

Source: Good Poems for Hard Times

People, Sadness

“Carter, not to be unkind," I said, "but the last few months you've been seeing messages about Zia. Two weeks ago, you thought she was sending you a distress call in your mashed potatoes."
"It was a Z! Carved right in the potatoes!”

Rick Riordan book The Throne of Fire

Source: The Throne of Fire

“You know, it’s amazing to me the wounds we carry for eternity. But what has fascinated me most these last few years is how the right person can heal them. I remember a wise man once said to me that everyone deserves to be loved. Even you. (Zarek)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

Love, Personality

“A man must sometimes laugh at himself or go mad,’ said he. ‘Few realize it. That is why there are so many madmen in the world.”

Rafael Sabatini book Captain Blood

Source: Captain Blood

World, Madness

“There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else. Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

Life, People

“I don't expect life to make sense," he said after a few moments, "but it could certainly be pleasant if it would stop kicking us in the balls.”

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

Source: The Republic of Thieves (2013), Chapter 5 “The Five-Year Game: Starting Position” section 1 (p. 250)
Context: Locke put his head in his hands and sighed.
“I don’t expect life to make sense,” he said after a few moments, “but it would certainly be pleasant if it would stop kicking us in the balls.”

Life, Sense

“A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand… well, God put a lot of thought in making you.”

Khaled Hosseini (1965) novelist

God

“It is no coincidence that the words 'trying' and 'dying' are only a few letters apart.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

“The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted (2005)

People, World

“When at last we are sure
You’ve been properly pilled,
Then a few paper forms
Must be properly filled
So that you and your heirs
May be properly billed.”

Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who!

You're Only Old Once! : A Book for Obsolete Children (1986)
Source: Horton Hears a Who!

“Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Life, Game

“We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone forever.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Life, Way, Light, Time

“The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms”

Bruno Latour (1947) French sociologist, philosopher and anthropologist

Source: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

World

“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

Source: The Golden Notebook

People, Truth, Democracy, Freedom

“He knew he was being overbearing as hell, but he couldn't help it. He was a bonded male. With his pregnant female. There were few things on the planet more aggressive or dangerous. And those bastards were called hurricanes and tornadoes.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Awakened

Hell, Help

“I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.”

E.L. Doctorow Ragtime

Source: Ragtime

Question

“They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other”

Michael Chabon book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Source: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Love, Future, Heart

“A great deal of love given to a few is better than a little to many.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Love

“Very few people see their own actions as truly evil,… It is left to their victims to decide what is evil and what is not.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

People, Evil

“She was one if the few souls that made me wonder what's it to live.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Soul

“I roll onto my side and stare out the venetian blinds at the blue sky beyond. After a few minutes I'm lulled into a sort of peace. The sky, the sky--same as it always was.”

Sara Gruen book Water for Elephants

Source: Water for Elephants

Peace

“The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.”

Thomas Merton book No Man Is an Island

Source: No Man Is an Island

Love, Men, God

“And they lived happily (aside from a few normal disagreements, misunderstandings, pouts, silent treatments, and unexpected calamities) ever after.”

Jean Ferris (1939–2015) American children's writer

Source: Twice Upon a Marigold

“He could shred me so easily. A few words, a desperate look, and I was cut wide open.”

Sylvia Day book Bared to You

Source: Bared to You

“a few bad apples is no reason not to visit the orchard.”

Lauren Weisberger book Un anello da Tiffany

Source: Chasing Harry Winston

“Then, bidding farewell to The Knick-Knack, I went to collect the few personal belongings which, at that time, I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Source: Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels

Travel, Cats, Solitude, Time

“Call me a schoolmarm, but few things make me angrier than people not taking good care of library materials.”

Tim Gunn (1953) American actor and fashion consultant

Source: Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work

People

“All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Fear, Peace

“We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”

John Updike book Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

Source: Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

Past

“If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Suffering

“Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Carl Sagan, author interview
PT Staff
Psychology Today
1996
January
01
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199601/carl-sagan?page=3

Nature, Science

“An a priori decision to eliminate spiritual intelligence from consideration is no more justifiable than a decision to admit it by fiat or on faith. After all, once one includes the understanding of the personal realm within a study of intelligence, such human proclivities as the spiritual must legitimately be considered. There certainly are no easy grounds for a decision, but several other intelligences deal with phenomena other than sheer physical matter. If the abstract realm of mathematics constitutes a reasonable area of intelligence (and few would challenge that judgment), why not the abstract realm of the spiritual?”

Howard Gardner (1943) American developmental psychologist

Source: Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century, 1999, p. 51

Faith, Intelligence, Mathematics, Understanding

“Jordan also takes seriously our moral obligations to others. Despite scarce resources, the people of Jordan have opened their arms to refugees fleeing regional violence. Jordan has taken in thousands of Iraqi Christians over the past year. This is in addition to giving shelter to 1.4 million Syrian refugees, which is 20 per cent of the population, over the past few years. This is more than the equivalent of France hosting the entire population of Belgium. My small country is now the world’s third-largest refugee host and I thank all of you who are helping us to uphold this global responsibility.”

Abdullah II of Jordan (1962) King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Address to the European Parliament (2015)

People, World, Past, Help

“When the ceremony ended Anne and I stayed on the field to greet friends, many of whom had traveled to share the ceremony with us. In one respect it was a difficult day at the end of a difficult month. But in the broader view of life, it was a magical evening at the end of an incredible journey we shared. We walked back over to the quarters we would move out of a few days later, and found friends in the yard and almost every room. At one point I saw Mike Hall, Charlie Flynn, Shawn Lowery, and Casey Welch standing in the fading summer light. I thought of my father, of my first day at West Point, and of our cold Christmas Eve flight over Afghanistan seven months before. The final words of my last speech in uniform, spoken just an hour before were repeated in my mind: "If I had it to do over again, I'd do some things in my career differently, but not many. I believed in people, and I still believe in them. I trusted and I still trust. I cared and I still care. I wouldn't have it any other way… To the young leaders of today and tomorrow, it's a great life. Thank you."”

Stanley A. McChrystal (1954) American general

Closing words, p. 394
My Share Of The Task (2013)

Life, People, Way, Travel

“Bangladesh is heavily invested in advertising itself to Americans and other potential trading partners as a "moderate Muslim country."… Over the last few decades, however, they have come more and more under the thumb of radical jihadis. Yet, they have not stopped trying to portray themselves as what they perhaps were at one point, and few Americans know that the reality is not what they are saying it is.”

Richard Benkin American journalist

Benkin, Richard L. (2012). A quiet case of ethnic cleansing: The murder of Bangladesh's Hindus. New Delhi: Akshaya Prakashan. p.300.

Reality, Country

“Well, I'm not a member of the permanent political establishment. And — I've learned quickly these past few days that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone. But — now here's a little news flash. Here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion. I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

[Alex Johnson, Palin fires back at media, ‘Washington elite’, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26525268/, MSNBC, 2008-09-04, 2008-09-04]
2008, 2008 Republican National Convention

People, Learning, Past, Country

“Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians," who in effect said this is a complicated issue of seeing how little we can give away, how much we can extract from the other side; it's highly specialized. Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons, the delivery systems, the targeting, the nature of the MIRV and the CRUISE, on down, and the MX. This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism (1986)

People, Way, Understanding, Nature

“It was a time of transition, which few recognized, and glutting national satisfaction. Students and scholars were silent.”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 6

Time

“I once said that Raúl is like a Ferrari and now I think he is like a McLaren, Fernando Alonso's car. and he is also one of the few guy's that if i ever have a problem i would go to him rather than my own mother”

Raúl González (1977) Spanish footballer

Fernando Hierro 2007, http://www.masress.com/en/filgoalen/36235 <br class="br">About

Cars, Guy, Problem, Thinking

“A few musical notes can morph into countless new songs, and a small set of vocabulary can create a congeries of poems. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Music

“I'd had a long talk with Bob Silverberg, who was very influential on my early career. He'd, out of the kindness of his heart, at a convention told me that he thought I'd made several mistakes in the way I was disposing of my stories. And I said, "I don't understand what you mean, but I'll be glad to buy you a few drinks, if you'll tell me about it". So we adjourned to the bar and sat there a couple of hours. He was drinking Bloody Marys back then; I was drinking Black Russians. And he told me all sorts of things which carried me over the next several years; it was a lot of information for a couple of drinks. He told me that the first thing I should do if I wanted to write full-time was to get a really good agent. He said that after a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end.
Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

Phlogiston interview (1995)

Money, Way, Feeling, Drink

“The challenge now presented is more than a challenge to our Constitution — it is a blatant affront to the conscience of this generation of Americans. Discrimination based on race or color is reprehensible and intolerable to the great American majority. In every national forum, where they have chosen to test popular sentiment, defenders of discrimination have met resounding rejection. Americans now are not willing that the acid of the few shall be allowed to corrode the souls of the many.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Special message to Congress on the right to vote (1965)

Color, Soul

“Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. […] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Double Trouble", pp. 38–40
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Books, Hope, Imagination, Nature

“He had seen enough of the world to be a coward, and above all he had an uneasy distrust of bankers. Even dead men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Men, World, Dead

“He [the naturalist] looks upon every species of animal and plant now living as the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth's history; and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily render obscure this invaluable record of the past.”

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist

(1863) "On the physical geography of the Malay Archipelago." The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 33:217-234.

Life, History, Past, Animals

“In cantoning the troops and drawing supplies for their subsistence, it may not be amiss to have an eye to the affair of next campaign. The expense and difficulty of transportation from the Western States, your Excellency is perfectly acquainted with. You are also sensible that the long tract of barren country, through which the supplies must come, will only admit of a certain quantity of transportation; therefore I conceive, that good policy points out the necessity of keeping as many stores in reserve in this State as possible. This is necessary, not only to be prepared for any emergency that may happen from the enemy's turning their force against the Eastern States, but to have a magazine in readiness for a secret purpose, which your Excellency hinted to me a few days since.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (November 1779)

Secret, Drawing, Country

“As a full-time longshoreman I am necessarily more a scribbler than a writer. But I am also so by inclination. The writing I can enjoy is the sketching of an idea in a few dozen words — two hundred at most. Elaboration and expansion are for me hard going. An article of several thousand words becomes inevitably a mosaic of ideas — a series of ideas stuck together.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1962)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Idea, Time

“The stamp of great minds is to suggest much in few words; by contrast, little minds have the gift of talking a great deal and saying nothing.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Comme c’est le caractère des grands esprits de faire entendre en peu de paroles beaucoup de choses, les petits esprits au contraire ont le don de beaucoup parler, et de ne rien dire.
Maxim 142.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

“Very few writers of verse can read their work to keep their listeners aware of the beauty of sense, that sense of beauty from the powerful, delicate ways in which sense is made by poetry.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

'Poetry' September 1995

Beauty, Way, Sense, Reading

“The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Essay on the Principle of Population (1798; rev. through 1826)

World, Food

“I can think of a few microorganisms, possibly the tubercle bacillus, the syphilis spirochete, the malarial parasite, and a few others, that have a selective advantage in their ability to infect human beings, but there is nothing to be gained, in an evolutionary sense, by the capacity to cause illness or death. Pathogenicity may be something of a disadvantage for most microbes, carrying lethal risks far more frightening to them than to us. The man who catches a meningococcus is in considerably less danger for his life, even without chemotherapy, than meningococci with the bad luck to catch a man.”

Lewis Thomas book The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

"Germs"
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Life, Death, Bad luck, Thinking

“The investigation of the form and brightness of the rings or rays surrounding the image of a star as seen in a good telescope, when a diaphragm bounded by a rectilinear contour is placed upon the object-glass, though sometimes tedious is never difficult. The expressions which it is necessary to integrate are always sines and cosines of multiples of the independent variable, and the only trouble consists in taking properly the limits of integration. Several cases of this problem have been completely worked out, and the result, in every instance, has been entirely in accordance with observation. These experiments… have seldom been made except by those whose immediate object was to illustrate the undulatory theory of light. There is however a case of a somewhat different kind; which in practice recurs perpetually, and which in theory requires for its complete investigation the value of a more difficult integral; I mean the usual case of an object-glass with a circular aperture. The desire of submitting to mathematical investigation every optical phænomenon of frequent occurrence has induced me to procure the computation of the numerical values of the integral that presents itself in this inquiry: and I now beg leave to lay before the Society the calculated table, with a few remarks upon its application.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Star, Mathematics, Problem, Light

“On the rock stars: Rock stars don’t talk to each other. They’re too important to talk to another one. They’ve all got their own little palace, their own universe, of which they are the head. So how can they possibly go to somebody else’s universe? They can’t handle it. I will one day write the book that shows just how massive some of these egos are. Because I was a slow success, I was meeting people socially whose records I had at home, who were now talking to me on a what-strings-do-you-use level. And very few of them have not disappointed. [Pink Floyd’s] Dave Gilmour is the only one that [hasn’t disappointed]. That paints everyone else as a cunt. Which they are. But Gilmour is fabulous.”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

Henry Yates (2015 December 1) " An Interview With The Straight-Talking, No-F**ks-Given Chris Rea http://teamrock.com/feature/2015-12-01/chris-rea-straight-shooter" by TeamRock <br class="br">2015

People, Books, Disappointment, Home

“Nobody who has lived through the rise of the violent anti-Semitism which led to Hitler can refuse Mrs. Thatcher admiration for her courageous and outspoken warning. When I grew up in Vienna the established Jewish families were a generally respected group and all decent people would frown upon the occasional anti-Jewish outbursts of a few popular politicians. It was the sudden influx of large numbers of Galician and Polish Jews [during World War I] … which in a short period changed the attitude. They were too visibly different to be readily absorbed.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

Letter to The Times after Thatcher claimed that British people were afraid of being "swamped" by people of a different culture. (11 February 1978), p. 15
1960s–1970s

War, People, World, Family

“A few years ago I had to answer some searching questions to a Customs official about a book which I had with me, printed in Latin, and which the official suspected to be Russian; it was a jestbook, as a matter of fact, and I was so foolish as to say so, forgetting that a Latin joke is as strange to the modern imagination as a unicorn or an amphisbaena.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Books, Imagination, Search, Question

“Carl Schmitt in theory is one thing; confined to a few conservatives on the right and a somewhat greater number of envious postmodernists on the left, Schmitt’s ideas have not reached the informed reading public. Schmitt’s books are destined to be confined to the political theory sem inar room for some time to come.”

Alan Wolfe (1942) American political scientist

The Future of Liberalism (2009), Ch. 5 : Mr. Schmitt Goes to Washington

Books, Idea, Time, Reading

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

As quoted by Raymond Lonergan in Mr. Justice Brandeis, Great American (1941), p. 42.
Extra-judicial writings

Democracy, Wealth

“A very bold political measure of Lycurgus is his redistribution of the land. For there was a dreadful inequality in this regard, the city was heavily burdened with indigent and helpless people, and wealth was wholly concentrated in the hands of a few. Determined, therefore, to banish insolence and envy and crime and luxury, and those yet more deep-seated and afflictive diseases of the state, poverty and wealth, he persuaded his fellow-citizens to make one parcel of all their territory and divide it up anew, and to live with one another on a basis of entire uniformity and equality in the means of subsistence, seeking preëminence through virtue alone, assured that there was no other difference or inequality between man and man than that which was established by blame for base actions and praise for good ones.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Lycurgus, sec. 8. The bolded phrase is often quoted in a paraphrase by Ugo Foscolo: "Wealth and poverty are the oldest and most deadly ailments of all republics" (Le ricchezze e la povertà sono le più antiche e mortali infermità delle repubbliche), Monitore Italiano, 5 February 1798.
Parallel Lives

People, Disease, Affliction, Envy

“Many who have visited me in Washington in the past few months may have been surprised when I have told them that personally and because of my own daily contacts with all manner of difficult situations I am more concerned and less cheerful about international world conditions than about our immediate domestic prospects.
I say this to you not as a confirmed pessimist but as one who still hopes that envy, hatred and malice among Nations have reached their peak and will be succeeded by a new tide of peace and good-will.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Address at Chautauqua, New York (1936)

World, Peace, Hope, Past

“During the last few years it has become apparent that the concept of "machine" must be very greatly extended if it is to include the most modern developments. Especially is this true if we are studying the brain and attempting to identify the type of mechanism that is responsible for the brain’s outstanding powers of thought and action. It has become apparent that when we used to doubt whether the brain could be a machine, our doubts were due chieﬂy to the fact that by ‘‘machine’’ we understood some mechanism of very simple type. Familiar with the bicycle and the typewriter, we were in great danger of taking them as the type of all machines. The last decade, however, has corrected this error. It has taught us how restricted our outlook used to be; for it developed mechanisms that far transcended the utmost that had been thought possible, and taught us that ‘‘mechanism’’ was still far from exhausted in its possibilities. Today we know only that the possibilities extend beyond our farthest vision.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

W. Ross Ashby (1951), "Statistical Machinery". In: Thales Vol 7. p.1 as cited in: Peter M. Asaro (2008) " From Mechanisms of Adaptation to Intelligence Ampliﬁers: The Philosophy of W. Ross Ashby http://cybersophe.org/writing/Asaro%20Ashby.pdf"

Error, Study

“At Wal-Mart, a co-worker once advised me that, although I had a lot to learn, it was also important not to "know too much," or at least never to reveal one's full abilities to management, because "the more they think you can do, the more they'll use you and abuse you." My mentors in these matters were not lazy; they just understood that there are few or no rewards for heroic performance. The trick lies in figuring out how to budget your energy so there'll be some left over for the next day.”

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941) American writer and journalist

Evaluation (p. 195)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001)

Thinking, Learning

“Consider some of the qualities of typical modernistic poetry: very interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation, "texture"; extreme intensity, forced emotion — violence; a good deal of obscurity; emphasis on sensation, perceptual nuances; emphasis on details, on the part rather than on the whole; experimental or novel qualities of some sort; a tendency toward external formlessness and internal disorganization — these are justified, generally, as the disorganization required to express a disorganized age, or, alternatively, as newly discovered and more complex types of organization; an extremely personal style — refine your singularities; lack of restraint — all tendencies are forced to their limits; there is a good deal of emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the thoroughly subjective; the poet's attitudes are usually anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, anti-public — he is, essentially, removed; poetry is primarily lyric, intensive — the few long poems are aggregations of lyric details; poems usually have, not a logical, but the more or less associational style of dramatic monologue; and so on and so on. This complex of qualities is essentially romantic; and the poetry that exhibits it represents the culminating point of romanticism.”

Randall Jarrell book Five Young American Poets

"A Note on Poetry," preface to The Rage for the Lost Penny: Five Young American Poets (New Directions, 1940) [p. 49]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Age, Dreams, Sense, Parting

“Demanding that wolf populations be allowed to continue to increase is not only a false conservation goal, but also a counterproductive tactic that is bound for short-term failure. It is strategically preferable to promote wolf range expansion and to accept reduction of unacceptable levels of conflict through scientifically planned and managed culling rather than through uncontrolled poaching. Full protection of wolf populations living near, or interspersed with, human settlements leads sooner or later to surplus wolves being killed, legally or illegally. Opposing wolf killing altogether implies accepting that all wolves will eventually be removed from these areas, whereas accepting some wolf control will allow wolves over much larger ranges. This vision requires a fundamental shift in the way wolves are perceived by folks who consider every wolf a symbol of the conservation battle or an animal with special rights among all other species. In the end, this approach probably will yield many more wolves than we could afford to keep in a few fully protected areas, no matter how large.”

L. David Mech (1937) American Biologist , Ecologist

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation (2003)

Way, Failure, Wolf, Animals

“In one experience I remember vividly, there was a rich range of shades. It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p. m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others - the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.”

Daniel Kahneman (1934) Israeli-American psychologist

Nobel Prize Autobiographical Information http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/kahneman-bio.html (2002).

Money, People, Fear, Home

“We're more comfortable in that kind of business. It means we miss a lot of very big winners. But we wouldn't know how to pick them out anyway. It also means we have very few big losers - and that's quite helpful over time. We're perfectly willing to trade away a big payoff for a certain payoff.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1999 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, as quoted in "Why Won't Buffett Invest in Tech Stocks?" at Motley Fool (6 March 2000) http://www.fool.com/boringport/2000/boringport000306.htm

Business, Time, Help

“I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

"Araby"
Dubliners (1914)

Quotes about few page 10

Quotes about few
page 10