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A Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All A Quotes

“Arising there, a china cabinet, its gifts enclosed in a hug. Atop a pedestal table, hand-sanded and love-stained, Mom's Christmas cactus trails and cascades in forest greens awaiting pink-winged petals alighting in season, a crescendo of bloom framed an autumn-light meandering through remembrance like a dream.”

“Aristocracy means ‘rule of the best’, and I can’t think of any company in which Chingford would be counted as best, including the average gaol. Yet the hereditary principle demands we grant power, authority, and vast swathes of land to a man who couldn’t run a whelk stall if you gave him a copy of How To Run A Whelk Stall with corners turned down to mark the good bits.”

“Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and, for this two-fold reason, they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal.”

“Aristophanes, in Plato's "Symposium", is purported to suggest that human form was not always as it is today: Originally, humans were spherical, with four arms, four legs, and two faces on either side of a single head. (In evolutionary terms, it's hard to see the advantage of this construction.) Such was their hubris that they dared to challenge the gods themselves. Zeus, in his wisdom, split the upstarts in two, each half becoming a distinct entity. Since then, men and women have been running around in a panic, searching for their lost counterparts, in a desire to be whole again. (Plato makes clear what he thinks of this theory by having Socrates casually dismiss it. We should at least give some credit to Aristophanes for originality.)”

“Aristotle declared that, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Does the intrinsic tension between opposing ideas create a lamplight of stereoscopic vision? Does the mental friction generated by antinomy, a contradiction between two apparently equally valid principles or between inferences correctly drawn from such principles, lead to war within the mind or does the natural rasping of abrasive thoughts spur the mind to create soothing metaphorical thoughts in order to attain conceptual peace?”