Quotes about pair
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“You can talk film theory till you're blue in the face, but in the end, the thing that may haunt you most about a movie is a pair of eyes.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Seduced and Abandoned, Salon.com, 1997-05-09, 2006-08-25, http://web.archive.org/web/19990828005105/http://www.salon.com/may97/vep970509.html, 1999-08-28 http://www.salon.com/may97/vep970509.html,

“Language, intelligence, and humor, along with art, generosity, and musical ability, are often described as human equivalents of the peacock’s tail. However, peacocks afford a poor analogy for the role of courtship displays in humans. Other animal models offer a better fit. In a number of nonhuman species — species as diverse as sea dragons and grebes — males and females engage in a mutual courtship “dance,” in which the two partners mirror one another’s movements. In Clark’s grebes and Western grebes, for instance, the pair bond ritual culminates in the famous courtship rush: The male and female swim side by side along the top of the water, with their wings back and their heads and necks in a stereotyped posture. If we want a nonhuman analogue for the role of creative intelligence or humor in human courtship, we should think not of ornamented peacocks displaying while drab females evaluate them. We should think instead of grebes engaged in their mating rush or sea dragons engaged in their synchronized mirror dance. Once we have one of these alternative images fixed in our minds, we can then add the proviso that there is a slight skew such that, in the early stages of courtship, men tend to display more vigorously and women tend to be choosier. However, this should be seen as a qualification to the primary message that intelligence, humor, and other forms of sexual display are part of the mutual courtship process in our species.”

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 160

Charles Perrault photo

“She then gave her a pair of slippers made of glass, the prettiest in the world.”

Charles Perrault (1628–1703) French author

Tales of Mother Goose, 1727, "Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper"

Kazimir Malevich photo
Mickey Spillane photo
Michael Chabon photo
John Adams photo

“There was a physical quality in us resembling the power of electricity or of the magnet, by which when a pair approached within a striking distance they flew together like the needle to the pole or like two objects in electric experiments.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

As quoted in Complete Book of U.S. Presidents (1984), by William A. DeGregorio, pp. 19–20

James A. Garfield photo
Heidi Klum photo

“A pair of black Louboutin's… and that's it!”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Answering the question, "What would you wear on a desert island if your husband came to visit?" in Lucky Magazine, March 2011

Samuel Butler photo
Pausanias photo

“Belistiche, a woman from the coast of Macedonia, won with the pair of foals … at the hundred and twenty-ninth Olympics.”

Pausanias (110–180) Ancient Greek geographer

Description of Greece, Eleia VIII, 11 [Loeb].

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) photo
Luther H. Gulick photo
Maria Bamford photo
Akiba ben Joseph photo

“(To his 24,000 pairs of students) My (Torah knowledge) and yours are hers”

Akiba ben Joseph (50–136) Tanna

his wife
Talmud Bavli,Nedarim https://www.sefaria.org.il/Nedarim.50a.5?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en|

“Frege's pair of concepts (nominatum and sense) is compared with our pair (extension and intension). The two pairs coincide in ordinary (extensional) contexts, but not in oblique (nonextensional) contexts.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: Meaning And Necessity (1947), p. 124 as cited in: E. Cornell Way (1991) Knowledge Representation and Metaphor. p. 183

Larry Wall photo
Roger Shepard photo
Nikolai Gogol photo
Hans Arp photo
Stanislaw Ulam photo

“With sixty professors there are roughly eighteen hundred pairs of professors. Out of that many pairs it was not surprising that there were some whose members did not like one another.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 5, Harvard Years, p. 91

Simon Armitage photo

“Mother, any distance greater than a single span
requires a second pair of hands.”

Simon Armitage (1963) Poet, playwright, novelist

'*', from Book Of Matches.

Sydney Smith photo

“Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Lady Holland's Memoir (1855) Vol. I, ch. 11, p. 415
Variant: Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

Philip Warren Anderson photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Charles Darwin photo
Vitruvius photo
Kent Hovind photo
Joseph Beuys photo
Tom Clancy photo
Dennis Skinner photo

“Our society, it turns out, can use modern art. A restaurant, today, will order a mural by Míro in as easy and matter-of-fact a spirit as, twenty-five years ago, it would have ordered one by Maxfield Parrish. The president of a paint factory goes home, sits down by his fireplace—it looks like a chromium aquarium set into the wall by a wall-safe company that has branched out into interior decorating, but there is a log burning in it, he calls it a firelace, let’s call it a fireplace too—the president sits down, folds his hands on his stomach, and stares at two paintings by Jackson Pollock that he has hung on the wall opposite him. He feels at home with them; in fact, as he looks at them he not only feels at home, he feels as if he were back at the paint factory. And his children—if he has any—his children cry for Calder. He uses thoroughly advanced, wholly non-representational artists to design murals, posters, institutional advertisements: if we have the patience (or are given the opportuity) to wait until the West has declined a little longer, we shall all see the advertisements of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith illustrated by Jean Dubuffet.
This president’s minor executives may not be willing to hang a Kandinsky in the house, but they will wear one, if you make it into a sport shirt or a pair of swimming-trunks; and if you make it into a sofa, they will lie on it. They and their wives and children will sit on a porcupine, if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won’t buy and sit in if you tell him it is a chair: the great new art form of our age, the one that will take anything we put in it, is the chair. If Hieronymus Bosch, if Christian Morgenstern, if the Marquis de Sade were living at this hour, what chairs they would be designing!”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Taste of the Age”, pp. 19–20
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

John Fante photo
Rab Butler photo
Amy Poehler photo
G. E. M. Anscombe photo
Conor Oberst photo
Mickey Spillane photo

“To treat a poor wretch with a bottle of Burgundy, and fill his snuff-box, is like giving a pair of laced ruffles to a man that has never a shirt on his back.”

Thomas Brown (1662–1704) English translator and writer of satire

Laconics, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Like sending them ruffles, when wanting a shirt", Sorbienne (1610–1670); also used in Oliver Goldsmith, The Haunch of Venison.
Source: Brown, Thomas, 1663-1704. Laconics, Or, New Maxims of State And Conversation: Relating to the Affairs And Manners of the Present Times : In Three Parts. London: Printed for Thomas Hodgson ..., 1701. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015013771368?urlappend=%3Bseq=117

Jacques Monod photo

“One day, almost exactly 25 years ago - it was at the beginning of the bleak winter of 1940 - I entered André Lwoff’s office at the Pasteur Institute. I wanted to discuss with him some of the rather surprising observations I had recently made.
I was working then at the old Sorbonne, in an ancient laboratory that opened on a gallery full of stuffed monkeys. Demobilized in August in the Free Zone after the disaster of 1940, I had succeeded in locating my family living in the Northern Zone and had resumed my work with desperate eagerness. I interrupted work from time to time only to help circulate the first clandestine tracts. I wanted to complete as quickly as possible my doctoral dissertation, which, under the strongly biometric influence of Georges Teissier, I had devoted to the study of the kinetics of bacterial growth. Having determined the constants of growth in the presence of different carbohydrates, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to determine the same constants in paired mixtures of carbohydrates From the first experiment on, I noticed that, whereas the growth was kinetically normal in the presence of certain mixtures (that is, it exhibited a single exponential phase), two complete growth cycles could be observed in other carbohydrate mixtures, these cycles consisting of two exponential phases separated by a-complete cessation of growth.”

Jacques Monod (1910–1976) French biologist

Introduction
From enzymatic adaptation to allosteric transitions (1965)

Thomas Kyd photo

“My son – and what's a son? A thing begot
Within a pair of minutes, thereabout:
A lump bred up in darkness.”

Thomas Kyd (1558–1594) English dramatist

Act III, sc. xia
Misattributed

Harry Turtledove photo

“"Let's dicker, Lord Lyons," Lincoln said; the British minister needed a moment to understand he meant bargain. Lincoln gave him that moment, reaching into a desk drawer and drawing out a folded sheet of paper that he set on top of the desk. "I have here, sir, a proclamation declaring all Negroes held in bondage in those areas now in rebellion against the lawful government of the United States to be freed as of next January first. I had been saving this proclamation against a Union victory, but circumstances being as they are-" Lord Lyons spread his hands with genuine regret. "Had you won such a victory, Mr. President, I should not be visiting you today with the melancholy message I bear from my government. You know, sir, that I personally despise the institution of chattel slavery and everything associated with it." He waited for Lincoln to nod before continuing. "That said, however, I must tell you that an emancipation proclamation issued after the series of defeats Federal forces have suffered would be perceived as a cri de coeur, a call for servile insurrection to aid your flagging cause, and as such would not be favorably received in either London or Paris, to say nothing of its probable effect in Richmond. I am sorry, Mr. President, but this is not the way out of your dilemma." Lincoln unfolded the paper on which he'd written the decree abolishing slavery in the seceding states, put on a pair of spectacles to read it, sighed, folded it again, and returned it to its drawer without offering to show it to Lord Lyons. "If that doesn't help us, sir, I don't know what will," he said. His long, narrow face twisted, as if he were in physical pain. "Of course, what you're telling me is that nothing helps us, nothing at all."”

Source: The Great War: American Front (1998), p. 7

Chuck Palahniuk photo

“Blest pair! if aught my verse avail,
No day shall make your memory fail
From off the heart of time.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book IX, p. 324

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“2649. I will not touch her with a Pair of Tongs.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Tom Rath photo

“Hector had always been known as a great shoemaker. In fact, customers from such far-off places as France claimed that Hector made the best shoes in the world. Yet for years, he had been frustrated with his small shoemaking business. Although Hector knew he was capable of making hundreds of shoes per week, he was averaging just 30 pairs. When a friend asked him why, Hector explained that while he was great at producing shoes, he was a poor salesman -- and terrible when it came to collecting payments. Yet he spent most of his time working in these areas of weakness.
So, Hector's friend introduced him to Sergio, a natural salesman and marketer. Just as Hector was known for his craftsmanship, Sergio could close deals and sell. Given the way their strengths complemented one another, Hector and Sergio decided to work together. A year later, this strengths-based duo was producing, selling, and collecting payment for more than 100 pairs of shoes per week -- a more than threefold increase.
While this story may seem simplistic, in many cases, aligning yourself with the right task can be this easy. When we're able to put most of our energy into developing our natural talents, extraordinary room for growth exists. So, a revision to the "You-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be" maxim might be more accurate.”

Tom Rath (1975) American author

StrengthsFinder 2.0, 2007
Source: Tom Rath, "The Fallacy Behind the American Dream," Business Journal, Feb. 8, 2007 (Excerpted from StrengthsFinder 2.0)

Russell Brand photo
Ben Croshaw photo
Giovannino Guareschi photo
Holly Johnson photo
Russell Brand photo
Agatha Christie photo
T.S. Eliot photo
Jack Vance photo
Orson Welles photo

“A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Quoted by Peter Bogdanovich, from the DVD audio commentary on The Lady from Shanghai (1947).

Sam Kinison photo
Preity Zinta photo
Dan Abnett photo

“Their gaze met for a few seconds. The exchange was as warm and friendly as a pair of automated range finders getting a mutual target lock.”

Dan Abnett (1965) British comic book writer, novelist

[Dan Abnett, First & Only, Games Workshop, 2000, ISBN 0671783750]

Charles Sanders Peirce photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Cory Booker photo
Bob Dylan photo
Stephen King photo
Ann Coulter photo

“At this, even Hillary Clinton was thinking, "Come on, guys — let's grow a pair."”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"No Wonder They're Afraid of Brit Hume" (3 May 2007) http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2007/05/03/no_wonder_theyre_afraid_of_brit_hume/page/full/.
2007
Context: The not-visibly-insane Democrats all claim they'll get rough with the terrorists, but they can't even face Brit Hume.
In case you missed this profile in Democrat machismo, the Democratic presidential candidates are refusing to participate in a debate hosted by Fox News Channel because the hosts are "biased." But they'll face down Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!
At this, even Hillary Clinton was thinking, "Come on, guys — let's grow a pair."

Martin Fowler photo
José Martí photo

“A nation that neglects either of these forces perishes. They must be steered together, like a pair of carriage horses.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)
Context: Fortunately, there is a sane equilibrium in the character of nations, as there is in that of men. The force of passion is balanced by the force of interest. An insatiable appetite for glory leads to sacrifice and death, but innate instinct leads to self-preservation and life. A nation that neglects either of these forces perishes. They must be steered together, like a pair of carriage horses.

P. J. O'Rourke photo
Gianni Sarcone photo

“Are the eyes an open door to the world, as poets say? Well, honestly, not really. The fact is, we see the world through a pair of tiny peepholes, the pupils of our eyes.”

Gianni Sarcone (1962) Italian author, artist, designer, and researcher in visual perception and cognitive psychology

Our brain functions as a highly creative ‘camera obscura’ – the forerunner of the modern photographic camera, named from the Latin for dark room.
Amazing Visual Illusions: Trick Your Mind and Feast Your Eyes (2011).

Rutherford B. Hayes photo

“General Crook gave me a very agreeable present this afternoon — a pair of his old brigadier-general straps.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (9 December 1864)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)
Context: General Crook gave me a very agreeable present this afternoon — a pair of his old brigadier-general straps. The stars are somewhat dimmed by hard service, but will correspond pretty well with my rusty old blouse. Of course I am very much gratified by the promotion. I know perfectly well that the rank has been conferred on all sorts of small people and so cheapened shamefully, but I can’t help feeling that getting it at the close of a most bloody campaign on the recommendation of fighting generals like Crook and Sheridan is a different thing.

Simone Weil photo

“The needs of the soul can for the most part be listed in pairs of opposites which balance and complete one another.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943), Statement Of Obligations
Context: The needs of the soul can for the most part be listed in pairs of opposites which balance and complete one another.
The human soul has need of equality and of hierarchy.
Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings. Hierarchy is the scale of responsibilities. Since attention is inclined to direct itself upwards and remain fixed, special provisions are necessary to ensure the effective compatibility of equality and hierarchy.

Ernest Flagg photo

“The ridge-dormers are placed in pairs, at the very apex of the roof. They are opened and closed only once a year”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)
Context: The ridge-dormers are placed in pairs, at the very apex of the roof. They are opened and closed only once a year—in the spring and fall respectively; and are so arranged that no rain can enter.... if the air in the room is warmer than the outer air, it must rise and escape through the ridge-dormers.... If, during a heated spell, the lower windows and and doors are carefully kept shut, the air inside may be maintained several degrees cooler than the outer air.... the coolest air of the twenty-four hours will find its way through them, taking the place of the warmer air which escapes.... cooler air can be trapped in the house and held there during the day.... hot air, being lighter, does not descend into cool air.<!--Ch. III

Nikos Kazantzakis photo

“In a violent flash of lightning I discern on the highest peak of power the final, the most fearful pair embracing:
Terror and Silence. And between them, a Flame.”

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: Joy! Joy! I did not know that all this world is so much part of me, that we are all one army, that windflowers and stars struggle to right and left of me and do not know me; but I turn to them and hail them.
The Universe is warm, beloved, familiar, and it smells like my own body. It is Love and War both, a raging restlessness, persistence and uncertainty.
Uncertainty and terror. In a violent flash of lightning I discern on the highest peak of power the final, the most fearful pair embracing:
Terror and Silence. And between them, a Flame.

Eugene Field photo
Aeschylus photo

“For where might and justice are yoke-fellows—
What pair is stronger than this?”

Aeschylus (-525–-456 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Fragment 209 https://archive.org/stream/aeschyluswitheng02aescuoft#page/496/mode/2up

Mary Midgley photo

“In a species as emotionally interdependent as man this view of marriage is nonsense. Pair-formation could never have entered anybody's head as a device deliberately designated to promote utility.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).
Context: Speaking of an institution such as marriage as natural is, of course, paying it a compliment, the compliment of saying that it meets a fairly central human need. The fact that it is found in some form in every human society is in a way enough to show. But it might be thought that marriage became thus widespread only because it was, like adequate sanitation, a means to an end. This is pretty certainly what Hume thought, as evidenced by his very confused contrast of natural with artificial virtues. He regarded human sagacity simply as the power to calculate consequences, and counted chastity and fidelity, with justice, as artificial virtues, devices designed merely to produce safety and promote utility. In a species as emotionally interdependent as man this view of marriage is nonsense. Pair-formation could never have entered anybody's head as a device deliberately designated to promote utility.

Umberto Eco photo

“Semiosis is, according to Peirce, "an action, or influence, which is, or involves, an operation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into an action between pairs".”

[O] : Introduction, O.I.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Context: The sign is usually considered as a correlation between a signifier and a signified (or between expression and content) and therefore as an action between pairs. Semiosis is, according to Peirce, "an action, or influence, which is, or involves, an operation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into an action between pairs".

Karl Pearson photo

“Heredity. Given any organ in a parent and the same or any other organ in its offspring, the mathematical measure of heredity is the correlation of these organs for pairs of parent and offspring... The word organ here must be taken to include any characteristic which can be quantitatively measured.”

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) English mathematician and biometrician

"Mathematical Contributions to the Theory of Evolution III: Regression, Heredity and Panmixia", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series A, Vol. 187 (1896) p. 259.

Robert Sheckley photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words! My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption. Is it that every man believes every other to be an incurable partialist, and himself a universalist? I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers; I endeavored to show my good men that I love everything by turns and nothing long; that I loved the centre, but doated on the superficies; that I loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats; that I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan world stood its ground and died hard; that I was glad of men of every gift and nobility, but would not live in their arms. Could they but once understand that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them God-speed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, — it would be a great satisfaction.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Jonathan Haidt photo
Sebastian Vettel photo
Russell Brand photo
Rani Mukerji photo
Emmanuel Levinas photo

“I myself can wear joggers, a good pair of sneakers, then maybe a sweatshirt, and on top of it all, a blazer. That's what makes a difference in luxury terms.”

Brunello Cucinelli (1953) Italian entrepreneur and philanthropist

Source: THE VALUE OF HUMAN DIGNITY: Brunello Cucinelli’s Vision for a Better World https://gearpatrol.com/2018/12/20/brunello-cucinelli-interview/ John Zientek, Gear Patrol, December 20, 2018

Keira Knightley photo

“I don't like my legs. … A good pair of legs on someone else always makes me jealous. I don't have any tits so I can't show cleavage. The only part I really like is my stomach.”

Keira Knightley (1985) British actress

Variant: I hate my body. I like so many other people's bodies. I like legs — a good pair of legs on someone else always makes me jealous.
Source: "Is Kate turning into Keira?" by Clemmie Moodie The Standard (1 December 2005) https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/is-kate-turning-into-keira-7250578.html
Source: Celebrity W.T.F’s Volume 107(16 December 2005) https://lindagallacher.blogspot.com/2005/12/celebrity-wtfs-volume-107.html

Benjamin Creme photo