B Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with B. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“But technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also include the making of things. Actually a root word of technology, techne, originally meant "art." The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them.”
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.”
Source: True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival
“But teleological considerations can lead no further than to a belief and a hope. They do not give certainty.”
“But television affords you, what you just described, to - over the course of 18 hours, now that we're doing a third season - tell the story of this man. You're not under any obligation, really, to do massive expositional stuff at the beginning. You're at liberty to say, "Come with us on this journey," and, gradually, you become aware of what his motivations are, what drives him, what his weaknesses are, what his strengths are. That's what I think's sucking people into these worlds, because it is kind of like a novel, you just go really, really deep.”
“But television, when I was doing it, was all about scoring. You had to make these jokes bang, do whatever you could to make the material really pop. And if it didn't, there was something wrong with the material, or with you.”
“But tell me, this physician of whom you were just speaking, is he a moneymaker, an earner of fees, or a healer of the sick?”
“But tell me: how did gold get to be the highest value? Because it is uncommon and useless and gleaming and gentle in its brilliance; it always gives itself. Only as an image of the highest virtue did gold get to be the highest value. The giver's glance gleams like gold. A golden brilliance concludes peace between the moon and the sun. Uncommon is the highest virtue and useless, it is gleaming and gentle in its brilliance: a gift-giving virtue is the highest virtue.”
“But tell you true, I honestly didn’t think nothing about the Green Man beefing that posse. Was just men and the world’s full of them.”
Source: Calamity: Being an Account of Calamity Jane and Her Gunslinging Green Man
“But Tertullian insists that making choices is evil, since choice destroys group unity. To stamp out heresy, Tertullian says, church leaders must not allow people to ask questions, for it is “questions that make people heretics” — above all, questions like these: Whence comes evil? Why is it permitted? And what is the origin of human beings? Tertullian wants to stop such questions and impose upon all believers the same regula fidei, “rule of faith,” or creed. Tertullian knows that the “heretics” undoubtedly will object, saying that Jesus himself encouraged questioning, saying, “Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you” (Matt. 7:7). But Tertullian has no patience with such people: “Where will the end of seeking be? The point of seeking is to find; the purpose in finding, to believe.” Now that the church can provide a direct and simple answer to all questions in its rule of faith, Tertullian says, the only excuse for continuing to seek is sheer obstinacy:
Away with the one who is always seeking, for he never finds anything; for he is seeking where nothing can be found. Away with the one who is always knocking, for he knocks where there is no one to open; away with the one who is always asking, for he asks of one who does not hear.
The true Christian, Tertullian declares, simply determines to “know nothing ... at variance with the truth of faith.” But when people “insist on our asking about the issues that concern them,” Tertullian says, “we have a moral obligation to refute them. . . . They say that we must ask questions in order to discuss,” Tertullian continues, “but what is there to discuss?” When the “heretics” object that Christians must discuss what the Scriptures really mean, Tertullian declares that believers must dismiss all argument over scriptural interpretation; such controversy only “has the effect of upsetting the stomach or the brain.”
Source: The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics
“But thankfully, my first album, Wide Screen, was sort of a critics darling - everyone raved about it, but no one bought it. They only manufactured 10,000 copies; I wasnt even in the running for failure!”
“But thanks to the efforts, the initiative of the United States and of the several countries from the world, from Europe, including Turkey, it ended within a few weeks.”
“But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.”
“But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.”
Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
“But that cold soup stayed with me. It resonated, waking me up, making me aware of my tongue, and in some way, preparing me for future events.”
Source: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
“But that constant adjustment and adaptation to your new environment, all the variables are the same. There's always a promoter, there's always a rider, there's always a shower, and there's always a stage.”
“But that day I was anxious. I was nervous and worried, uneasy and distracted. I paced around and never felt settled. I didn't care for the sensation, yet I realized it was possibly a natural progression of my evolving soul, and therefore I tried my best to embrace it.”
Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain
“But that did not stop her heart from shattering into countless pieces or her soul from shredding into slivers.”
“But...that doesn't make any sense...!'
'It does if you're a goat.”
Source: Castle Waiting, Vol. 2
“But that Franklin trip changed me profoundly. As I believe wilderness experience changes everyone. Because it puts us in our place. The human place, which our species inhabited for most of its evolutionary life. That place that shaped our psyches and made us who we are. The place where nature is big and we are small.”
Source: Boyer Lectures 2011: The Idea of Home
“But that from us aught should ascend to Heav'n So prevalent as to concern the mind Of God, high-bless'd, or to incline His will, Hard to belief may seem; yet this will prayer.”
Source: The Poetical Works of John Milton ...
“But that guitar is the perfect companion to the human voice. You rest it against your gut, against your heart, and when you strum it the vibrations go outwards for all to hear, but the vibration also hits you on your body.”
“But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”
Source: ANNA KARENINA
“But that hair? That is comedy entrapment. People are not attacking your hair, they are defending themselves from something that appears like it's about to attack them.”
“But that I know love is begun by time,
And that I see, in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it,
And nothing is at a like goodness still;
For goodness, growing to a pleurisy,
Dies in his own too-much. That we would do
We should do when we would. For this 'would' changes,
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.
And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing.”
Source: Hamlet
“But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be.”
Source: You Shall Know Our Velocity
“But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.”
“But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.”
“But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.”
“But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.”
Source: Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
“But that is a valid, continuing service that that music - which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old - is rendering. And proving its own timelessness.”
“But that is another story and shall be told another time.”
“But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason.”
Source: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.”
Source: D.H. Lawrence: Selected Works
“But that is impossible," said Peter.
"Magic is always impossible," said the magician. "It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it is magic.”
Source: The Magician's Elephant
“But that is not because these principles are traditional; it is because they are biblical. There is certainly an arrogant, hide-bound type of traditionalism, unthinking and uncritical, which is carnal and devilish. But there is also a respectful willingness to take help from the Church's past in order to understand the Bible in the present; and such traditionalism is spiritual and Christian.”
Source: Fundamentalism
“But that is precisely what life is, wouldn’t you agree? Everything is a matter of choice, and when we choose are we not gambling on the unknown and its being a wise choice? And isn’t it free choice that makes individuals of us? We are eternally free to choose ourselves and our futures. I believe myself that life is quite comparable to a map like this, a constant choice of direction and route.”
Source: The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax
“But that is the danger of metaphors: they can be overstretched, innocently or intentionally, as an attempt at polemic or rhetorical advantage.”
Source: Metaphor: an exploration of the metaphorical dimensions and potential of architecture
“But that is the difference between us, I always want more than what the world has to give me. There is a crow outside calling out a lonesome call. Maybe one day I will sprout wings and fly above the land, only to wish that I was a salmon swimming upriver to the sea.”
Source: SLAB
“But that is the nature of true grace and spiritual light, that it opens to a person's view the infinite reason there is that he should be holy in a high degree. And the more grace he has, and the more this is opened to view, the greater sense he has of the infinite excellency and glory of the divine Being, and of the infinite dignity of the person of Christ, and the boundless length and breadth and depth and height of the love of Christ to sinners. And as grace increases, the field opens more and more to a distant view, until the soul is swallowed up with the vastness of the object, and the person is astonished to think how much it becomes him to love this God and this glorious Redeemer that has so loved man, and how little he does love. And so the more he apprehends, the more the smallness of his grace and love appears strange and wonderful: and therefore he is more ready to think that others are beyond him.”
Source: The Religious Affections
“But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: The Merry Men and Other Stories
“But that is the only thing that slows me down is the system. No one, two or three was big enough to slow me down, only the system. It was the system that slowed me down to make my numbers fall. Not because I am older.”
“But that is the thing about miracles: it is perception that determines them as such, not facts.”
Source: Sweetness in the Belly
“But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some heroic, some villainous, some true, some false, some funny, some tragic, and all of them combining to form the mystical, undefinable entity we call the school. Not exactly the building, not exactly the faculty or the students or the alumni - more than all those things but also less, a paradox, an order, a mystery, a monster, an utter joy.”
“But that is the way of the world, is it not? Every day a child steps away from the parent by the littlest distance, perhaps just the width of a mouse-whisker, but every day it happens and the days go by, one after another after another”
Source: Far Far Away
“But that is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.”
Source: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
“But that is what islands are for; they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time.”
Source: Bitter Lemons of Cyprus
“But that is what life is all about, he said. "It is about dreaming and making those dreams come true with effort and determination - and love.”
Source: Simply Perfect
“But that is what these people do - the Steves of this world - they all try and make something out of nothing. and they all do it for themselves.”
Source: The Shock of the Fall
“But that isn't my life. I have said many times I don't want to be considered one who once flew fighters. That's not who I am. I devoted the subsequent 50 years - more - to writing.”
“But that isn't right. The King of Beasts shouldn't be a coward,'" said the Scarecrow. 'I know it,' returned the Lion, wiping a tear from his eye with the tip of his tail. 'It is my great sorrow, and makes my life very unhappy. But whenever there is danger, my heart begins to beat fast.' 'Perhaps you have heart disease,' said the Tin Woodman. 'It may be,' said the Lion.”
Source: Oz, the Complete Collection, Volume 1: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; The Marvelous Land of Oz; Ozma of Oz