Quotes about figure (1711 quotes, page 7)

“I'd play at all the talent nights,
I'd finish, they'd applaud.
Some called it muffled laughter,
I just figured they were odd.
So I went up for an encore,
but they screamed they'd had enough.
Or maybe I just need a group
to help me do my stuff.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Six String Orchestra
Song lyrics, Verities & Balderdash (1974)

Laughter , Help , Night

“It is a false idea that drawing in itself can be beautiful. It is only beautiful through the truths and the feelings that it translates. The crowd admires artists, who, strong in subject, elegantly pen contours destitute of significance, and who plant their figures in pretentious poses. It goes into ecstasies over poses which are never seen in nature, and which are considered artistic because they recall the posturings of the Italian models who offer themselves at the studio door. That is what is generally called beautiful drawing. It is really only sleight-of-hand, fit to astonish boobies.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. V. Drawing and Color, p. 95-96

Truth , Beauty , Feeling , Idea

“I try to condense the meaning of this body [of a woman] by drawing its essential lines. The charm will then become less apparent at first glance, but in the long run it will begin emanate from the new image. This image at the same time will be enriched by a wider meaning, a more comprehensively human one, while the charm, being less apparent, will not be its only characteristic. It will be merely one element in the general conception of the figure.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Source: 1900s, Notes d'un Peintre (Notes of a Painter) (1908), p. 411

Time , Drawing

“I suspect it is this Camelot view that leads Miss Croce to be rather unfair to Gene Kelly…I should say the difference starts with their bodies. If you compare Kelly to Astaire, accepting Astaire's debonair style as perfection then, of course, Kelly looks bad. But in popular dance forms, in which movement is not rigidly codified, as it is in ballet, perfection is a romantic myth or a figure of speech, nothing more. Kelly isn't a winged dancer; he's a hoofer and more earthbound. But he has warmth and range as an actor…Astaire's grasshopper lightness was his limitation as an actor - confining him to perennial gosh-oh-gee adolescence;; he was always and only a light comedian and could function only in fairytale vehicles.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Pauline Kael, responding to Croce in her review of Croce's The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, writing in The New Yorker, November 25, 1972, as reproduced in Kael, Pauline. Reeling: Film Writings 1972-1975, Marion Boyars, London - New York, pp. 58-59. ISBN 0-7145-2582-0.

Fairytale , Light , Dance , Perfection

“I think that the figure of the nerd provides a beautiful template for analyzing the transformation of the disciplinary society into the control society. The nerd, in his cliche form, first stepped out upon the world stage in the mid-1970s, when we were beginning to hear the first rumblings of what would become the Cambrian explosion of the information society. The nerd must serve as comic relief for the future-anxieties of Western society. And the transformation I'm talking about is already in full swing: the police gaze of 19th- and 20th-century disciplinary society made visible the individual, which is illuminated by power. In our burgeoning technological control society, the individual is x-rayed and algorithmized. Even worse: the individuals x-ray themselves, willingly putting themselves on display.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2016/04/14/the-story-of-traceroute-about.html

World , Beauty , Thinking , Future

“Barack Obama has failed America. When he took office, the economy was in recession. He made it worse. And he made it last longer. Three years later, over 16 million Americans are out of work or have just quit looking. Millions more are underemployed. Three years later, unemployment is still above 8%, a figure he said his stimulus would keep from happening. Three years later, foreclosures are still at record levels. Three years later the prices of homes continue to fall. Three years later, our national debt has grown nearly as large as our entire economy. Families are buried under higher prices for food and higher prices for gasoline. It breaks my heart to see what's happening in this country. These failing hopes make up President Obama's own misery index. It's never been higher.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Mitt Romney 2012 Presidential Campaign Announcement Speech http://blog.4president.org/2012/2011/06/mitt-romney-2012-presidential-campaign-announcement-speech-june-2-2011-stratham-new-hampshire-remark.html
2011

Family , Food , Hope , Home

“I don't think that the figure 2000 is an important milestone, in the first place. And in the second place, I don't think that this can be determined by public opinion. The righteousness of the war was not demonstrated by public support for it in the beginning, nor its wisdom altered by the evident decline in public support for it. I don't pay attention to the opinion polls, or indeed to the casualty figures, because I know that this is an inevitable war, a war that was going to have to happen — and was, in my opinion, both just and necessary.”

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

Scotland Live (2005-10-31): On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2005

Wisdom , War , Support , Thinking

“I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

Truth , Understanding , Thinking , Time

“I always figured that once I wrapped a film, then anything beyond that is none of my business. If I can avoid seeing the final product, then all I have in my head is feeling good about the experience.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

Quoted in Ron Dicker, "Going deep with rebel Johnny Depp," http://www.johnnydeppfan.com/interviews/sunpotcarticle.htm Baltimore Sun (2003-07-08)

Feeling , Business

“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 3
Paper Towns (2008)

Way , Housing , Sea

“The second proposition admits and encourages the very practice we censure so justly, for which the saint [ Augustine of Hippo ] was so famous, and by which he contributed so much to promote contentions in his own days, and to perpetuate them to ours. The practice of deducing doctrines from the scriptures that are not evidently contained in them… Who does not see that the direct tendency of this practice is exactly the same as the event has proved it to be? It composes and propagates a religion, seemingly under the authority of God, but really under that of man. The principles of revelation are lost in theology, or disfigured by it: and whilst some men are impudent enough to pretend, others are silly enough to believe, that they adhere to the gospel, and maintain the cause of God against infidels and heretics, when they do nothing better, nor more, than espouse the conceits of men, whom enthusiasm, or the ambition of forming sects, or of making a great figure in them, has inspired. If you ask now what the practice of the christian fathers, and of other divines, should have been, in order to preserve the purity of faith, and to promote peace and charity, the answer is obvious… They should have adhered to the word of God: they should have paid no regard to heathen philosophy, jewish cabala, the sallies of enthusiasm, or the refinements of human ingenuity: they should have embraced, and held fast the articles of faith and doctrine, that were delivered in plain terms, or in unequivocal figures: they should not have been dogmatical where the sense was doubtful, nor have presumed even to guess where the Holy Ghost left the veil of mystery undrawn.”

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751) English politician and Viscount

Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophical Works http://books.google.com/books?id=E6ATAAAAQAAJ (1754) Vol.III, Essay IV, Sect XVI

Men , God , Peace , Faith

“Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 44

Problem , Science

“The likeness of man above the throne is divided, the upper part being the colour of chashmal, the lower part like the appearance of fire. As regards the word chashmal, it has been explained to be the compound of two words chas and mal, including two different notions, viz., chash signifying "swiftness," and mal denoting "pause." The two different notions are here joined in one word in order to indicate figuratively the two different parts,—the upper part and the lower. We have already given a second explanation, namely, that chashmal includes the two notions of speach and silence; in accordance with the saying of our Sages, "At times they are silent, at times they speak."”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.7

Silence , Appearance , Time , Parting

“And the music came back with the carnival, the music you've heard as far back as you can remember, ever since you were little, that's always playing somewhere, in some corner of the city, in little country towns, wherever poor people go and sit at the end of the week to figure out what's become of them, sometimes here, sometimes there, from season to season, it tinkles and grinds out the tunes that rich people danced to the year before. It's the mechanical music that floats down from the wooden horses, from the cars that aren't cars anymore, from the railways that aren't at all scenic, from the platform under the wrestler who hasn't any muscles and doesn't come from Marseille, from the beardless lady, the magician who's a butter-fingered jerk, the organ that's not made of gold, the shooting gallery with the empty eggs. It's the carnival made to delude the weekend crowd. We go in and drink the beer with no head on it. But under the cardboard trees the stink of the waiter's breath is real. And the change he gives you has several peculiar coins in it, so peculiar that you go on examining them for weeks and weeks and finally, with considerable difficulty, palm them off on some beggar. What do you expect at the carnival? Gotta have what fun you can between hunger and jail, and take things as they come. No sense complaining, we're sitting down aren't we? Which ain't to be sneezed at. I saw the same old Gallery of the Nations, the one Lola caught sight of years and years ago on that avenue in the park of Saint-Cloud. You always see things again at carnivals, they revive the joy of past carnivals. Over the years the crowds must have come back time and again to stroll on the main avenue of the park of Saint-Cloud…taking it easy. The war had been over long ago. And say I wonder if that shooting gallery still belonged to the same owner? Had he come back alive from the war? I take an interest in everything. Those are the same targets, but in addition, they're shooting at airplanes now. Novelty. Progress. Fashion. The wedding was still there, the soldier too, and the town hall with its flag. Plus a few more things to shoot at than before.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

27
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

Hunger , War , People , Music

“I have now reached a stage in the argument where I have to choose between being too definite or being too vague. If I set forth a concrete proposal in all its particulars, I expose myself to a hundred criticisms on points not essential to the principle of the plan. If I go further in the use of figures for illustration, I am involved more and more in guess-work; and I run the risk of getting the reader bogged in details which may be inaccurate and could certainly be amended without injury to the main fabric. Yet if I restrict myself to generalities, I do not give the reader enough to bite on; and am in fact shirking the issue, since the size, the order of magnitude, of the factors involved is not an irrelevant detail.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 5 : A Plan for Deferred Pay, Family, Allowances and a Cheap Ration

“In the interpretation of figurative passages, let the following canon be observed. If the passage be preceptive, either forbidding some flagitious deed and some heinous crime, or commanding something useful and beneficent: then such passage is not figurative. But, if the passage seems, either to command some flagitious deed and some heinous crime, or to forbid something useful and beneficent: then such passage is figurative. Thus, for example, Christ says: Unless ye shall eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood; ye shall have no life in you. Now, in these words, he seems to command a heinous crime or a flagitious deed. Therefore the passage is a figure, enjoining us to communicate in the passion of our Lord, and admonishing us to lay it up sweetly and usefully in our memory because, for us, his flesh was crucified and wounded. On the other hand, Scripture says: If thy enemy shall hunger, give him food; if he shall thirst, give him drink.”

George Stanley Faber (1773–1854) British theologian

Here, without all doubt, an act of beneficence is enjoined.
Source: Christ's Discourse at Capernaum: Fatal to the Doctrine of Transubstantiation (1840), pp. 147-149

Life , Hunger , Food , Communication

“In pursuance of my business and professional studies, I use the naked model.A number of my women pupils have for economy studied from each others' figures, and of these some have obtained from time to time my criticism on their work. I have frequently used as models for myself my male pupils: very rarely female pupils and then only with the knowledge and consent of their mothers.One of the women pupils some years ago gave to her lover who communicated it to Mr. Frank Stephens a list of these pupils as far as she knew them, and since that time Mr. Frank Stephens has boasted to witnesses of the power which this knowledge gave him to turn me out of the Academy, the Philadelphia Sketch Club, & the Academy Art Club, and of his intention to drive me from the city.”

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) American painter

Letter to Emily Sartain (1886-03-25). Frank Stephens was Eakins' brother-in-law.

Women , Art , Communication , Lovers

“Heroic figures are now obsolete,
So Demigod and Devil find retreat
In minds of children — as rare beasts and men,
Elsewhere extinct, persist in hill or fen
From man protected — where each form assumes
Gigantic stature and intention, looms
From wind-moved, twilight-woven histories:
For them each flower teems with mysteries.”

Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969) British baronet

"When First the Poets Sung", line 34 (1927).

Men , Children , History , Flowers

“In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.”

Yasunari Kawabata book Snow Country

Snow Country (1948)

World , Beauty , Girl , Mountain

“We have reached the conclusion that what we eat is responsible for a large number of tumors, and that certain foods trigger cancer while others have a protective value. Meat and its derivatives figure among carcinogenic foods of the intestines. Meat, in fact, is particularly rich in saturated fatty acids, substances that lead to damaging activity in regard to our bodies in general. Furthermore, certain forms of tumors, such as intestinal cancer, are directly correlated to the consumption of meat, while others, such as endometrial tumors, are linked to obesity.”

Umberto Veronesi (1925–2016) Italian oncologist and politician

The First Day Without Cancer (2013)

Food

“Oh," the figure settled back down, "those reasons. Well, yes. Clever, even. But still profoundly stupid.”

Steven Erikson book The Bonehunters

The Bonehunters (2006)

Stupidity

“Supernatural agents are critical components of all religions but not of all ideologies. They are, in part, by-products of a naturally selected cognitive mechanism for detecting agents-such as predators, protectors, and prey-and for dealing rapidly and economically with stimulus situations involving people and animals. This innate releasing mechanism is trip-wired to attribute agency to virtually any action that mimics the stimulus conditions of natural agents: faces on clouds, voices in the wind, shadow figures, the intentions of cars or computers, and so on. Among natural agents, predators such as snakes are as likely to be candidates for deification as are protectors, such as parent-figures.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 15
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

People , Religion , Cars , Nature

“Blessings may appear under the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let him have patience, and he will see them in their proper figures.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 117.
The Guardian (1713)

Pain , Disappointment , Appearance , Loss

“Well, the New York Times editorial board, that reliable abettor of all the liars, haters, and fantasists, aka Democrats, who detest the American South and lust to rewrite America's history into party-serving fiction, has endorsed dumping Andrew Jackson in favor of rewarding a woman with his place on the twenty dollar bill. So fundamentally important to the nation is this switch that the Board’s reputedly adult members have decided that the only group sober and knowledgeable enough to decide how to destroy another piece of American history and further persecute the South is 'the nation's schoolchildren' who should be made to 'nominate and vote on Jackson’s replacement. Why not give them another reason to learn about women who altered history and make some history themselves by changing American currency?' Why of course, what geniuses! And, then, why not let these kids — who cannot figure out that the brim of baseball cap goes in the front — go on to decide other pressing national issues. Maybe they can replace General Washington on the $1 bill with a Muslim woman and thereby end America's war with Islam. As the saying goes, you could not make this stuff up. Now Andrew Jackson was not the most unblemished of men, but he risked his life repeatedly for his country; killed its enemies; expanded U. S. territory in North America; defeated the British at New Orleans; was twice elected president; and faced down and was prepared to hang the South Carolina nullifiers when he believed they were seeking to undermine and break the Union. Jackson is one of those southern fellows, and so he is now a target for banishment from our currency and eventually our history because he did not treat slaves and Indians as if they were his equals and, indeed, inflicted pain on both. But he also was, along with Thomas Jefferson, another insensitive chap toward blacks and Indians, the longtime icon of the Democratic Party and its great self-praising and fund-raising feast, the annual 'Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner', which was, of course, a fervent tribute to those that General Jackson would have hanged without blinking.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention http://non-intervention.com/1689/democrats-scourge-the-south-after-the-battle-flag-it%e2%80%99s-on-to-old-hickory/ (9 July 2015), by M. Scheuer.
2010s

Life , Women , Men , Pain

“I've sort of gotten into the habit of looking for the vulnerable guy, the guy who makes mistakes, the guy who can't figure things out all the time but keeps at it.”

Jimmy Stewart (1908–1997) American film and stage actor

On roles he looks for, as quoted in "Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart dead at 89" at CNN (2 July 1997) http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/9707/02/stewart.obit.7p/

Guy , Time

“Today 'nationalism' is out of fashion among the opinion-formers. Thanks to a superficial misreading of history, it is accused of having been responsible for two world wars and has widely come to be regarded as a political sin of the first magnitude, fortunately found only in such antiquated and obsolete figures as General de Gaulle. In fact the real danger comes from ideologies not nationalism; for while a nation may properly respect the nationhood of others, an ideology knows no frontiers…Once [the Tories] lose their claim to be, in the fullest sense, the 'national party', they are left, as they are in danger of being left today, either as the party of the 'individual' – a noble but to most people an austere and forbidding creed – or else as the party of the middle classes, which condemns them to a permanent minority.”

Nigel Lawson (1932) British Conservative politician and journalist

'A Tract for the Tories', The Spectator (1967), quoted in The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London: Bantam, 1992), p. 8.

War , People , World , History

“Then [speaking of his loosely figurative work of the 1930's, in Germany] I was still under nature, not that I was imitating it; now [1957] I am above nature. But everything comes from nature, I too am part of nature; my memory comes from nature, too.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

Quote in: 'Hans Hofmann', Elizabeth Pollet, (interview of his 1957 Whitney Museum exhibition), Arts Magazine, May 1957 (article: 30-33)
1950s

Nature , Memory , Parting

“What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life. I do not insist upon the details of the face. I do not care to repeat them with anatomical exactness. Though I happen to have an Italian model whose appearance at first suggests nothing but a purely animal existence, yet I succeed in picking out among the lines of his face those which suggest that deep gravity which persists in every human being.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Source: 1900s, Notes d'un Peintre (Notes of a Painter) (1908), p. 413

Life , Feeling , Appearance , Animals

“She's not that attractive. I mean, she was hard to look at at first, but I figured, rough around the edges, but she can sing good.”

Ben Moody (1981) American musician

about Amy Lee.
People

Singing

“I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask "Why are we here?" I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.”

Richard Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Source: No Ordinary Genius (1994), p. 239, from interview in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981): video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwUwWh5Xs4&t=48m10s

Way , Feeling , Thinking , Universe

“While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. It is relatively simple to set up a fantasy campaign, and better still, it will cost almost nothing. In fact you will not even need miniature figures, although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought. A quick glance at the Equipment section of this booklet will reveal just how little is required. The most extensive requirement is time. The campaign referee will have to have sufficient time to meet the demands of his players, he will have to devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his "dungeons" and upper terrain before the affair begins.”

Gary Gygax (1938–2008) American writer and game designer

Preface of the Original Dungeons & Dragons, (1 November 1973)

Game , Time , Past , Future

“Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Diary of an Unknown (1988)

Beauty

“If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved (1987), Ch. 1

Way

“My father was an engineer and I intended to follow in his footsteps, but movies became my real passion. Careful planning is important in engineering, so I used that experience to focus on film preproduction. With the low budgets I had, I couldn’t afford to have the cast and crew waiting around for days on a 10-day picture while I figured out how and what to shoot.”

Roger Corman (1926) American film director and film producer

Roger Corman still the Cult Classic King http://www.thespectrum.com/story/entertainment/2016/10/17/roger-corman-still-cult-classic-king/92296836/ (October 17, 2016)

Passion , Waiting

“When I was repairing the temple of Dwarkadeesh at Dwaraka (on land) I had to demolish a modern building in front of it and I found the 9th Century temple of Vishnu. I got curious and dug further deeper (30 ft) in 1979-80 on land. We found two earlier temples, a whole wall and figures of Vishnu. We dug further and actually found eroded material of a township lying at the bottom. Then arose the question of dating the remains of the township destroyed by the sea. Thermo-luminescence dating revealed a date of 1520 B. C. The Mahabharata refers to Dwaraka …”

Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao (1922–2013) Indian archaeologist

Interview with S. R. Rao at The Hindu, Nov 20 2002.

Lying , Question , Sea

“Figuring out women is harder than topping a ManPro Quiz.”

Chetan Bhagat (1974) Indian author, born 1974

Source: Five Point Someone - What not to do at IIT! (2004), P. 45

Women

“India is free but she has not achieved unity, only a fissured and broken freedom…. The old communal division into Hindu and Muslim seems to have hardened into the figure of a permanent political division of the country. It is to be hoped that the Congress and the nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever settled or as anything more than a temporary expedient. For if it lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled: civil strife may remain always possible, possible even a new invasion and foreign conquest. The partition of the country must go,'it is to be hoped by a slackening of tension, by a progressive understanding of the need of peace and concord, by the constant necessity of common and concerted action, even of an instrument of union for that purpose. In this way unity may come about under whatever form'the exact form may have a pragmatic but not a fundamental importance. But by whatever means, the division must and will go. For without it the destiny of India might be seriously impaired and even frustrated. But that must not be.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

August 15, 1947 (A passage from Sri Aurobindo's message on the occasion of India's independence. August 15 is also Sri Aurobindo's own birthday.)
India's Rebirth

Peace , Hope , Way , Communication

“From 280,000-750,000, Armenians initially raised their death count to 800,000 to test the credibility waters. … They are now testing the waters at 2.5-3 million killed as their chances for a congressional genocide resolution recede. It speaks volumes that champions of the inflated death figures have no explanation for why Armenians on the scene would have erred. Think of the absurdity of discarding the current death count of Afghan civilians in the United States-Afghan war in favor of a number deduced in the year 2109!”

Bruce Fein (1947) American lawyer

Lies, Damn Lies, and Armenian Deaths (2009)

Death , War , Thinking , Water

“Seventy percent of all IT projects fail—and scores of books have attempted to help firms measure and manage IT systems and processes better in order to turn this figure around.”

Jeanne W. Ross (1958) American computer scientist

IT governance, 2004

Books , Help

“Then I gathered the éléments of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphaël proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it docs not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 65-67

Life , God , People , Truth

“When the utter absurdity of the Mosaic account of creation became apparent to all thoughtful men, the church changed the reading of the Bible. Then it was pretended that the “days” of creation were vast periods of time. When it was shown to be utterly impossible that the sun revolved around the earth, then the account given by Joshua of the sun standing still for the space of a whole day, was changed into a figure of speech. It was said that Joshua merely conformed to the mode of speech common in his day; and that when he said the sun stood still, he merely intended to convey the idea that the earth ceased turning upon its axis. Is there a sensible man in the world who believes this wretched piece of ignorance?”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

Men , World , Idea , Change

“When the wedding march sounds the resolute approach, the clock no longer ticks, it tolls the hour…. The figures in the aisle are no longer individuals, they symbolize the human race.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Dearly Beloved

Dearly Beloved (1962)

Wedding

“I told him I just want to write some more songs and put them on tape. I figure the content of the songs and how I choose to answer for myself is my business. He says he is sorry, even cut to the heart, but he cannot and will not sign me, as, alas, I cannot say the things he wanted to hear. I say I am sorry he cannot hear the things I'm trying to say.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Life in the Industry: A Musician's Diary

Business , Heart

“Thine eyes are springs in whose serene
And silent waters heaven is seen;
Their lashes are the herbs that look
On their young figures in the brook.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

Oh Fairest of the Rural Maids http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16341/16341-h/16341-h.htm#page91 (1820)

Spring , Water

“I figured that I wasn't as smart or talented as the other kids around, so I just had to work twice as hard. Surprisingly, results showed quickly. I was hooked!”

Philippe Kahn (1952) Entrepreneur, camera phone creator

On what it takes to keep on building company after company and innovating, fire-chat with Stewart Alsop, Agenda Conference.

“A few moments ago, the body was treated to a report from the senator from Iowa about his recent trip to Cuba. Sounded like he had a wonderful trip visiting, what he described as, a real paradise. He bragged about a number of things that he learned on his trip to Cuba that I'd like to address briefly. He bragged about their health care system, medical school is free, doctors are free, clinics are free, their infant mortality rate may be even lower than ours. I wonder if the senator, however, was informed, number one, that the infant mortality rate of Cuba is completely calculated on figures provided by the Cuban government. And, by the way, totalitarian communist regimes don't have the best history of accurately reporting things. I wonder if he was informed that before Castro, Cuba, by the way, was 13th in the whole world in infant mortality. I wonder if the government officials who hosted him informed him that in Cuba there are instances reported, including by defectors, that if a child only lives a few hours after birth, they're not counted as a person who ever lived and therefore don't count against the mortality rate.”

Marco Rubio (1971) U.S. Senator from state of Florida, United States; politician

Speech to the United States Senate http://friesian.com/antiam.htm (24 February 2014).
2010s, 2014

Health , World , School , Way

“But he was a quick study. An autodidact. Anything that was technical, that was logical, that ran according to rules, Peter could figure out. And knew it. Didn’t bother to ask for help. So much quicker to work it out on his own than suffer through someone’s well-meaning efforts to educate him—and to forge an emotional connection with him in so doing. There was something, somewhere, that he could do better than most people.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

People , Education , Effort , Study

“Our work is not so much to treat or to cure feelings, as to accept and celebrate them. This is a critical difference.
Fundamentalists figure things out and anticipate change. Trend followers join the trend of the moment. Fundamentalists try to solve their feelings. Trend followers join their feelings and observe them evolve and dis-solve.
The feelings we accept and enjoy rarely interfere with trading.
Trying to treat or cure feelings adds mass.”

Ed Seykota (1946) American commodities trader

Source: FAQ http://www.seykota.com/tribe/pages/2003_Mar/Mar_09-15/index.htm

Feeling , Change

“Jelliffe changed from an enumerator of visits to the out-patient dept to the most dynamic figure in American Psychiatry”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Grinker (1933) cited in: John Chynoweth Burnham, William McGuire, Sigmund Freud (1983) Jelliffe, American Psychoanalyst and Physician. p. 166

Change

“In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for"… On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to [by both] the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959), p. 111

Time

“Entertainers and sports figures achieve fame and wealth but find the world empty and dull without the solace and stimulation of drugs.”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

Address at Iona College (1984)

World , Sport , Wealth

“Through three terms in the Lower House and two terms here, Mr. President, he has earned the reputation as a lawmaker with a head for numbers, and an eye for figures – whether tax, budgetary, and perhaps in a previous lifetime, of the female kind.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2013, Speech: Nomination of Senator Ralph Recto as Senate Pro Tempore

Housing

““The practice of employing images as ornaments and memorials to decorate the temple of the Lord is in a most especial manner approved by the Word of God himself. Moses was commanded to place two cherubim upon the ark, and to set up a brazen figure of the fiery serpent, that those of the murmuring Israelites who had been bitten might recover from the poison of their wounds by looking on the image. In the description of Solomon's temple, we read of that prince, not only that he made in the oracle two cherubim of olive tree, of ten 83 Vide supra, p. 17. 101 cubits in height, but that ‘all the walls of the temple round about he carved with divers figures and carvings.’ “In the first book of Paralipomenon (Chronicles) we observe that when David imposed his injunction upon Solomon to realise his intention of building a house to the Lord, he delivered to him a description of the porch and temple, and concluded by thus assuring him: ‘All these things came to me written by the hand of the Lord, that I may understand the works of the pattern.’ “The isolated fact that images were not only directed by the Almighty God to be placed in the Mosaic tabernacle, and in the more sumptuous temple of Jerusalem, but that [132] he himself exhibited the pattern of them, will be alone sufficient to authorise the practice of the Catholic Church in regard to a similar observance.”—(Hierurgia, p. 371.) All this may be briefly answered. There was no representation of the Jewish patriarchs or saints either in the tabernacle or in the temple of Solomon, as is the case with the Christian saints in the Roman Catholic and Græco-Russian Churches; and the brazen serpent, to which the author alludes, was broken into pieces by order of King Hezekiah as soon as the Israelites began to worship it.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Source: A Treatise of Relics (1543), pp. 100-101

God , Books , Understanding , Tree

“[The Constructive idea.. ] has revealed a universal law that the elements of a visual art such as lines, colours, shapes, possess their own forces of expression independent of any association with the external aspects of the world; that their life and action are self-conditioned psychological phenomena rooted in human nature; that those elements are not chosen by convention by any utilitarian or other reason as words and figures are, they are not merely abstract signs, but they are immediately and organically bound up with human emotions. The revelation of this fundamental law has opened up a vast field in art giving the possibility of expression to those human impulses and emotions which have been neglected.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Naum Gabo (1937) 'Editorial', p. 7 as cited in: W. Rotzler (1989) Constructive Concepts - A History of Constructive Art from Cubism to the Present, Rizzoli.
1936 - 1977, Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, 1937

Life , World , Law , Art

“My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don't really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don't believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and some other guys who can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it's about who is smarter, and honestly, I don't care.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

God , Faith , Guy , Time

“digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud
- PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, …
- Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator's dilemma)
- Google and Microsoft are further along on the technology, but haven't quite figured it out yet
- tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

email sent to his managers staff in 2010, which went public during trial against Samsung http://fr.scribd.com/doc/216405190/Apple-outline?_ga=1.21582200.27979217.1396947917
2010s

Universe

“The movie industry is run by accountants in Hollywood and it's as simple as this; everyone has a number on their computer. They can look up Jeremy Irons and see what my last five movies have made. Say you want to make a $20m picture, which is relatively cheap. If Jeremy makes $9m, the director makes $5m, then you need a leading lady, and they just go through those figures - that's how casting happens. And none of my movies has made a lot of money.”

Jeremy Irons (1948) English actor

Lipworth, Elaine, "King of all his castles"

Money

“As a teacher, I have seen time and again a certain kind of American middle-class girl who projects winsome malleability, a soft, unfocused help-me-please persona that, in adult life, is a recipe for disaster. These are the ones who end up with a string of abusive boyfriends or in sticky situations with overfamiliar male authority figures who call them “honey.””

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 36

Life , Girl , Teachers , Time

“Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Anxiety and Instinctual Life (Lecture 32)
1930s, "New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis" https://books.google.com/books/about/New_Introductory_Lectures_on_Psycho_anal.html?id=hIqaep1qKRYC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false (1933)

Thinking

“There is imagery. Symbolism is a difficult idea. I'm not a symbolist. In other words, these are painting experiences. I don't decide in advance that am going to paint a definite experience, but in the act of painting, it becomes a genuine experience for me. It's not symbolism any more than it's calligraphy. I'm not painting bridge constructions, skyscrapers or laundry tickets.... I don't paint a given object – a figure or a table; I paint an organization that becomes a painting.... it's not these things that get me started on a painting.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1958
1960's, Talks with Seventeen Artists, 1962

Idea , Painting

“For as the blood of Christ had been shed on this earth, and had ascended to heaven for the salvation of sinners, and was now returning to earth again in the form of dew - and as the leaves on the trees bore the impression of the figures I had seen in the heavens, it was plain to me that the Saviour was about to lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and the great day of judgement was at hand.”

Nat Turner (1800–1831) American slave rebellion leader

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831)

Men , Tree , Christ

“For almost all of us, recognizing a crisis can be difficult unless we have significant warning, or are prepared before-hand to deal with change. It is also important in an emergency, as it was in Dan's situation, to identify and focus on the actual crisis, not the cause. It is time to "put out the fire" not waste precious time figuring out how the fire started.”

Wheeler L. Baker (1938) President of Hargrave Military Academy

Source: Crisis Management: A Model For Managers (1993), p. 7

Change , Time

“In view of the fact that the Royal Family of Britain is one of the wealthiest families in the world and this country is almost sleeping rough, so to speak, figuratively, would you ask the Queen if she might make a contribution towards her own bed and breakfast costs to assist the unfortunate taxpayers, and go easier on them?”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

JOE http://joe.ie/news-politics/current-affairs/td-joe-higgins-says-queen-should-pay-bed-and-breakfast-for-visit-0011580-1, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/05/16/ireland.uk.queen.higgins/

World , Family , Sleep , Country

“If it came on the evening news tonight that there were five grizzly bears roaming around Cobb County, do you know what would happen by six o'clock in the morning? They would all be dead. Because every redneck in four states would be out there with a rifle, trying to shoot one, right? And whoever could shoot the biggest one would be a hero. They would have his picture on the front page, "Bubba shot the Grizzly Bear" and saved the village. That is exactly what happened to the dragons. If you could figure out a way to kill a dragon, they would be telling stories about you around the campfire. People killed dragons for meat, because they were a menace, to prove that you were a hero, or to prove that you are superior, in competition for land, or for medicinal purposes. Many ancient recipes call for dragon blood, dragon bones, dragon saliva, why? Gilgamesh is famous for slaying a dragon. A Chinese legend tells about a guy named Yu that surveyed the land of China. It says, that after the Flood he surveyed the land, he divided it off into sections. He built channels to drain water off to sea and make the land livable again. Many snakes and dragons were driven from the marshlands. You know that's normal that if you want to build a city. You have to drive off the dragons, then build your city. It was expected that you have got to drive the dragons away or kill them. Why would the Chinese calendar have eleven real animals: the pig, the duck, the dog, and … the dragon? Why would they put just one "mythical" animal in there? Could it be at the time they that they came up with these animals there were 12 real animals? There is one of the oldest pieces of pottery on Planet Earth. It's a piece of slate from Egypt; the first dynasty of United Egypt. It shows long necked dragons […] Why would they put long necked dinosaurs on pottery 3,800 years ago? Here are two long necked dinosaurs with a sheep in between them in their mouths. Here is a hippo tusk from the twelve century B. C., showing an animal with a long neck, and a long tail. Here's a cylinder seal, showing what appears quite obviously to be a long neck dinosaur. The Bible talks about a fiery flying serpent, in Isaiah 14.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

People , Dogs , Way , Guy

“The social product grows from year to year. Who is now the true creator of this surplus value which grows wildly and beyond any measure? Who can afford to figure out the profit yielded causally adequate by this immense wealth and the series of economic miracles? In concrete terms: who is the legitimate distributor of the social product and who actually assesses the shares in practical life? As long as the issue is about value, all such questions must above all be formulated as economic questions.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

"The Tyranny of Values" (1967)

Life , Question , Wealth

“Also, light a candle for me at the Russian or Greek Orthodox Church in Stroudsburg from time to time. It doesn't need to be during a liturgy, just whenever they are open. I am sure you can figure it out…”

Eric Frein (1983) American fugitive

Letter to parents (December 2013)

Light , Time

“One of the issues with animals that I'm really concerned about is people who get animals as pets and maybe aren't prepared to take care of them and haven't really thought it through. I've seen a lot of people I know who get dogs and they can't handle them two days later … [Fur] is a really easy thing to avoid, you don't need fur and if you want the look of fur, I mean, there’s faux fur. There's just no reason for it. I just make a point of telling people that I don't buy products that are fur … I have a fragrance line and one of the things I really love about is the manufacturer assured me that nothing's tested on animals … I mean, how many years have we been selling cosmetics in this country? We should be able to figure out what we can use on humans safely and what no.”

Holly Madison (1979) American author, model, showgirl, and television personality

“Holly Madison Naked Video,” video interview with PETA (8 February 2008) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDBAPh_28O4.

Love , People , Dogs , Animals

“We must agree right now that the Bill of Rights takes precedence over everything else and may not be suppressed by a pall of political correctness on campuses, in the media, in corporate life, or anywhere else. There is no right not to be offended by the free expression of others. Those of us who can afford it should sue those who try to deprive us of our freedom of speech. Mine is worth at least ten figures.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Revenge of the Cookie Monster" http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle555-20100131-04.html 31 January 2010.

Life , Freedom

“Hi, new people — there's a lot of new people. Welcome to the family. We're a little weird here, but we're all very nice — so you'll fit in here. We're kind of intense — but you'll figure it out.”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"This Just In!" (30 January 2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSKgFqisXRo

People , Family

“The answer Hollywood figured out for this question was what doomed it. It figured out that writers were not to be in charge of creating stories. Instead, a curious tribe of inarticulate Pooh-Bahs called Supervisors and, later, Producers were summoned out of literary nowhere and given a thousand scepters. It was like switching the roles of teacher and pupil in the fifth grade. The result is now history. An industry based on writing had to collapse when the writer was given an errand-boy status.”

Ben Hecht (1894–1964) American screenwriter

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

History , Boy , Question , Teachers

“In the Great War ledger, the page on which the Russian losses were written has been torn out. No one knows the figure. Five or eight Million?”

Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) Prussian-German field marshal, statesman, and president of Germany

As quoted in With Snow on Their Boots : The Tragic Odyssey of the Russian Expeditionary Force in France During World War I (1999) by Jamie H. Cockfield, p. 28
Undated

War , Loss

“But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.”

Honoré de Balzac book A Woman of Thirty

Mais la raison est toujours mesquine auprès du sentiment; l'une est naturellement bornée, comme tout ce qui est positif, et l'autre est infini.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. III: At Thirty Years.

“Jumped in the river, what did I see?
Black-eyed angels swam with me
A moonful of stars and astral cars
And all the figures I used to see
All my lovers were there with me
All my past and futures
And we all went to heaven in a little row boat
There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

"Pyramid Song"
Lyrics, Amnesiac (2001)

Fear , Angels , Cars , Star

“As I wanted to suggest a luxuriant and untamed type of nature, a tropical sun that sets aglow everything around it, I was obliged to give my figures a suitable setting.It is indeed the outdoor life — yet intimate at the same time, in the thickets and the shady streams, these women whispering in an immense palace decorated by nature itself, with all the riches that Tahiti has to offer. This is the reason behind all these fabulous colors, this subdued and silent glow."But none of this exists!""Oh yes it does, as an equivalent of the grandeur, the depth, the mystery of Tahiti, when you have to express it on a canvas measuring only one square meter."Very subtle, very knowing in her naïveté is the Tahitian Eve. The riddle hiding in the depth of her childlike eyes is still incommunicable to me.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 137: Diverse Choses, his notebook (1896 - 1898)

Life , Women , Color , Nature

“In the case of Jesus Christ, where virtually every detail of the story fits the mythic hero archetype, with nothing left over, no "secular," biographical data, so to speak, it becomes arbitrary to assert that there must have been a historical figure lying back of the myth.”

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Christ a Fiction, https://infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/fiction.html, 27 November 2016, 1997]

Lying , Christ

“Thank you, Judge Keith, for your kind, warm words. As always, I deeply appreciate the manner in which you have made yourself available over the years for counsel and advice. And I appreciate your courteous and dignified example over the past 15 years. And I might add parenthetically here, I met Judge Keith in the early '80s when I was trying to figure out a way to distribute in excess of 10 million dollars to minorities for scholarships, and was being opposed by individuals who should have been supporting us. And it was his advice and counsel that bolstered us in that effort. We who are just commencing our tenures as judges can only hope to emulate your positive spirit and the strength of character that you've always demonstrated.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Hope , Way , Support , Effort

“In the eye of the law no doubt, man and wife are for many purposes one: but that is a strong figurative expression, and cannot be so dealt with as that all the consequences must follow which would result from its being literally true.”

William Henry Maule (1788–1858) British politician

Wenman v. Ash (1853), C. B. 844.

Law , Strong

“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.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. VI: Pathos

Art , Thinking , Parting

“All those angry, uneducated Trump supporters seemed to understand what his policies were. They figured it out by listening to him. It was only fair. No one listened to Trump, except the voters; and no one listened to the voters, except Trump.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2016, In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! (2016)

Understanding , Support

“Without knowing what it was, I had an instinctive feeling that the time had come to drop industrials (paintings). Now I feel more strongly than ever that the figures stand on their own two feet.”

L. S. Lowry (1887–1976) British visual artist

Tape interview with Monty Bloom L. S. Lowry - A Biography by Shelley Rhode Lowry Press 1999 ISBN 9781902970011.
Other

Feeling , Time , Painting

“Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.”

William Carlos Williams book Sour Grapes

"The Great Figure"
Sour Grapes (1921)

Light

“(When asked to reflect on his career) Music is the emotion of the experience. Regarding whether someone knows composers by name, it comes down to how much the music had touched someone that they then care enough to find out who composed it. Myself as an example, I get a dozen or so fan emails every single day, from all over the globe. Most of the time it's new people that are just now figuring out who I am after all their years of playing games I've done, and that I composed some of their favorite game music or just their favorite game in particular. And it never gets old even though I've been reading them and answering them ever since I launched my website www. frankklepacki. com about seven years ago. You can't beat knowing you've had that kind of impact on people on a regular basis. I am always very grateful for it. Some of my fans cared enough to spread the word about my career that they made a full feature article on Wikipedia. That blew me away!”

Frank Klepacki (1974) American musician, video game music composer and sound director

Gameplay magazine

People , Music , Game , Time

“In the same way that the figure of the peasant tends to disappear, so too does the figure of the industrial worker, the service industry worker and all other separate categories.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

125
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Way

“Some day, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music…or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed property owners so brain dead and stupid they won't even see that if you're too goddamn greedy to pay taxes for schools and services, they're not going to be any good any more! And that uneducated time bombs are a very poor investment as a future work force. And if you go on teaching people that life is cheap, and leave them to rot in ghettos and jails, they may one day feel justified in coming back to rob and kill you. Duh!”

Jello Biafra (1958) singer and activist

"Rob Now, Pay Later", Home Alive: The Art of Self Defense (1996)

Life , People , Stupidity , School

“I mean, after a certain age you figure out just because a button works doesn't mean you have to push it.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks Sex in Space (Interview - Femail magazine)

Age

“We have to construct the figure of a new David, the multitude as champion of asymmetrical combat, immaterial workers who became a new kind of combatants, cosmopolitan bricoleurs of resistance and cooperation.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

50
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“I was a Yorkshire miner's son, the youngest of seven, and my mother was no longer so very young. She suffered from bad rheumatism in the back and would often say to me in winter, when I came home from school: 'Henry, boy, come and rub my back.' Then I would massage her back with liniment. When I came to model this figure [for his sculpture 'Seated Woman', 1957] which represents a fully mature woman, I found that I was unconsciously giving to its back the long-forgotten shape of the one that I had so often rubbed as a boy. Not just her shoulder but her whole back down from the shoulder blades with the skin close to the bone, to the fleshy lower parts. I had a strong sense of contrast between bone and flesh. I was seven or eight at the time [c. 1906].”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Moore, 1978; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, pp. 32-33
1970 and later

School , Home , Boy , Sense

“Despite the vociferous claims of the Platonists and Neoplatonists, Plato was not a mathematician. To Plato and his followers mathematics was largely a means to an end… they viewed the technical aspects of mathematics as a mere device for sharpening one's wits, or at most a course of training peparatory to handling the larger issues of philosophy. This is reflected in the very name "mathematics,"… a course of studies or… a curriculum. …in the Dialogues… such topics as harmony, triangular numbers, figurate numbers… which we view today as more or less irrelevant, if not trivial, were taken up at length. …the guiding motive behind the… Pythagoreans and Platonists was… metaphysical …which for the nonprofessional have all the earmarks of the occult.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

...We also discover in the Pythagorean speculations more than a mere germ of... the scientific attitude.
The Bequest of the Greeks (1955)

Mathematics , Motivation , Study , Training

“This is not only his birthday, but the anniversary of the farewell reception extended to him at the White House by President Adams during his last visit to our country. This day not only recalls his youth and his dashing figure in our Revolution, but it reminds us of the venerable man, half a century later, held in love and admiration by two countries for the sacrifices he had made in the service of liberty.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

Love , Youth , Birthday , Housing

“Of women he [Voltaire] has no very high opinion. To judge from his treatment of them, their minds are exclusively occupied by the prospect of making love to handsome young men with good figures, though, being both venal and timid, they are prepared to hire their bodies to old inquisitors or soldiers if, by so doing, they can save their own lives or amass riches. They are inconstant, and will gladly cut off the nose of a husband fondly mourned in order to cure a new lover.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Love , Women , Men , Making love

“I am lonely without measure; that is to say, I am alone with my doubles, phantasms in whom I realize specific dreams, ideas, inclinations, and so on. I rip three other people out of my inner life, give them names, and believe in them myself. Gradually three clearly defined types have emerged: *1: Grosz. *2: Count Ehrenfried, the nonchalant aristocrat with the well-manicured fingernails, concerned only with cultivating himself; in a word, the detached, aristocratic individualist. *3: The physician. Dr. William King Thomas, the more American, practical counterweight to Grosz the mother figure.”

George Grosz (1893–1959) German artist

Letter, September 1915, to Robert Bell; in Grosz, Briefe, p. 30 ff; as cited in 'Portfolios', Alexander Dückers; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 112 - note 61

Life , People , Dreams , Idea

“The trend toward narcissistic flair has been responsible in large part for smiting rock with the superstar virus, which revolves around the substituting of attitudes and flamboyant trappings, into which the audience can project their fantasies, for the simple desire to make music, get loose, knock the folks out or get 'em up dancin.' It's not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is figure a way of getting yourself associated in the audience's mind with their pieties and their sense of "community," i. e., ram it home that you're one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth.”

Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist

"James Taylor Marked for Death" (1971), p. 67
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988)

Music , Way , Home , Communication

“The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

On Poesy or Art (1818)

“Writing wasn't easy for her. It wasn't like arithmetic, not like a column of numbers to be added or subtracted from the top of the blackboard to the bottom, neat and organized; or science, figuring out the why of things.”

Patricia Reilly Giff (1935) American children's writer

Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 11-20, p. 65

Science

“In this Summer time of ours with Scheveningen on the shore the bathing time and the hot weather I did very few things.... was only busy calculating my studies [for later paintings] and to see what I should do.... an interior with some figures an outside Schevening shore scene a scene with sentiment of feeling or a picture quite after nature so natural as if it was the old dutch school [17th century].... I hope the next days will bring me a safe outcome from the turbulations in my head, all is so fine and beautiful to do..”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

original text by Israëls
In a letter from The Hague, 26 August 1872, to his friend and colleague George Reid in Edinburgh; as cited in Jozef Israëls, 1824 – 1911, ed. Dieuwertje Dekkers; Waanders, Zwolle 1999, p. 363
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1871 - 1900

School , Beauty , Hope , Feeling

“I was in a cab in New York. The cab had a sign, "Please do not smoke, Christ is our unseen guest." This guy was reaching. I figure, if he could overcome being nailed to a cross, I don't think a Marlboro Light's gonna faze him that much.”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Dark Poet (1991)

Guy , Thinking , Light , Christ

“For me, Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr. That is how I understood him in 1908 when I used this figure for the first time... It was under the influence of the pogroms. Then I painted and drew him in pictures about ghettos, surrounded by Jewish troubles, by Jewish mothers, running terrified with little children in their arms.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

quote from: From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew B. Hoffman; Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 218
Chagall started in 1912 (in Paris) to paint his 'Golgotha' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marc_Chagall,_1912,_Calvary_(Golgotha)_Christus_gewidmet,_oil_on_canvas,_174.6_x_192.4_cm,_Museum_of_Modern_Art,_New_York.jpg and later more Crucifixions. In this (later! quote) Chagall looks back on this question.
1910's

Children , Time , Christ , Painting

“Yes, Wordsworth often personified objects in nature and gave them the human aspect, and personally I have done rather the reverse process in sculpture. I’ve often found that by taking formal ideas from landscape, and putting them into my sculpture I have, as it were, related a human figure to a mountain, and so got the same effect as a metaphor in painting.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote in 'The Listener', 13 November 1941, pp. 657-9; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, pp. 126-27
1940 - 1955

Mountain , Idea , Nature , Painting

“"You don't understand," he said, "who I am or what I am. I'll show you. By Heaven! I'll show you." Then he put his open palm over his face and withdrew it. The centre of his face became a black cavity. "Here," he said. He stepped forward and handed Mrs. Hall something which she, staring at his metamorphosed face, accepted automatically. Then, when she saw what it was, she screamed loudly, dropped it, and staggered back. The nose—it was the stranger's nose! pink and shining—rolled on the floor.Then he removed his spectacles, and everyone in the bar gasped. He took off his hat, and with a violent gesture tore at his whiskers and bandages. For a moment they resisted him. A flash of horrible anticipation passed through the bar. "Oh, my Gard!" said some one. Then off they came.It was worse than anything. Mrs. Hall, standing open-mouthed and horror-struck, shrieked at what she saw, and made for the door of the house. Everyone began to move. They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors, but nothing! The bandages and false hair flew across the passage into the bar, making a hobbledehoy jump to avoid them. Everyone tumbled on everyone else down the steps. For the man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation, was a solid gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and then—nothingness, no visible thing at all!”

H. G. Wells book The Invisible Man

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 7: The Unveiling of the Stranger

Understanding , Housing , Falseness

“When I was going blind, I didn't turn to God. It didn't seem to me then — and it doesn't seem to me now — that those items were His concern. Early on, I figured I better begin to learn how to count on myself, instead of counting on supernatural forces.”

Ray Charles (1930–2004) American musician

First years at School, p. 25
Brother Ray : Ray Charles' Own Story (1978)

God , Learning

Quotes about figure page 7

Quotes about figure
page 7