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Chimera Quotes

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Chimera Quotes

“[Charles] Nodier’s later view was that fantasy reconciles men to their fate. Fantasy and the taste for chimeras, he wrote, are symptoms of a time of political decay and transition, when the unpleasant realities of political life are too hard to bear. They serve a useful purpose in that they give men hope when scepticism and disillusion would otherwise drive them to despair.”

FantasyDespairIllusionScepticismChimera
Book:Murdered Magicians
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“In the oddest, surreal moment, I look out and see one lone face. It’s Cain, the chimera by curse and not birth. He’s been welcomed into Demon-kind as one of them. Almost a treasured being for all his uniqueness. In all reality, he is the most divine among us. The product of an angel and a Neanderthal. A very son of the first Eve. It is he alone who is not prostrate before me. Our eyes lock and my vision goes wonky. I can see details and colors and etched outlines like I never imagined. I see Cain’s magnificent aura as it embraces him like a full-body halo. He is watching the spectacle that is me with detached interest. It’s as if he has truly seen everything there is too see and this is nothing more than a repeat of some long forgotten original episode. He is unafraid. I can feel how calm he is. Before he drops his eyes, surrendering to the dominance of my dragon, he gives me a slightly amused expression and a small nod of encouragement.”

Paranormal RomanceDragonsDemonsErotica RomanceChimera
Book:Fire Clothed in Skin
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“Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.”

LoveLifeDreamRealityPainPastDeathSufferingHateBeliefFearImaginationNaturalLossBrainPovertyCourageFantasyPsychologyFailureFutureHorrorSolitudeAnxietyBraveryAdversityTerrorScaryRationalFakeTortureNightmareFearfulFrighteningPresentIrrationalSupernaturalSuperstitionDaydreamingCognitionMake BelieveFacadeForeshadowingChimeraLife EventsIrrational BeliefRational Belief
Book:Healology
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“Equality is deemed by many a mere speculative chimera, which can never be reduced to practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we ought not to try at least to mitigate it? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of the legislature must always tend to maintain it.”

IfsTryingDoeForcePracticeOughtAbuseMereEqualityInevitableLegislatureChimera
Book:An Inquiry into the Nature of the Social Contract; or principles of political right. Translated from the French
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“Venice is ever the fragile labyrinth at the edge of the sea and it reminds us how brief and perilous the journeys of our lives are; perhaps that is why we love it so. City of plagues and brief liaisons, city of lingering deaths and incendiary loves, city of chimeras, nightmares, pigeons, bells. You are the only city in the world whose dialect has a word for the shimmer of canal water reflected on the ceiling of a room.”

WorldWaterRoomsCitiesOur LivesJourneySeaEdgesNightmareFragileBellsPlagueCeilingsVeniceLabyrinthPigeonsLingeringDialectCanalsCities In The WorldShimmerChimeraLiaison
Author:Erica Jong
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“In whatever system where the weight attached to the wheel should be the cause of motion of the wheel, without any doubt the center of the gravity of the weight will stop beneath the center of its axle. No instrument devised by human ingenuity, which turns with its wheel, can remedy this effect. Oh, speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest. Go and take you place with the seekers after gold.”

ShouldHumansTurnsCausesDoubtEffectsGoldWeightInstrumentsVainWheelsGravityQuestsPerpetualRemedySeekersIngenuitySpeculatorsChimeraPerpetual Motion
Author:Leonardo da Vinci
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“If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated local populations, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is a chimera. A new species does not evolve in the area of its ancestors; it does not arise from the slow transformation of all its forbears. co-author with Niles Eldridge”

IfsDoeExpectationsAreasTransformationSpeciesPopulationAriseLocalsEvolveAncestorIsolatedFossilsSequenceGreat ExpectationsChimera
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.”

TryingDoeArtStillsStatesPoliticalArtistTurnsSocialModernIdealsConstitutionReformDescriptionWorks Of ArtDreamerIdealismDefectsGreat WorkPosterityShamefulTriumphantProdigiesChimera
Book:Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860: Volume Nine, Scholarly Edition
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“Affirmative action was designed originally for "women and other minorities" but the phrase has become just another tortured euphemism. Female conscientiousness and eagerness to please have always made women good students and natural test takers. Jews have gloried in scholarship throughout the ages, and Asians of both sexes score so high on SATs and IQ tests that they regard affirmative action as an impediment. Affirmative action really means favoritism for blacks for the sake of racial peace, but the favor is pure chimera, and so, increasingly, is the peace.”

MeanMadeAgeActionSexNaturalRaceStudentsPleasePureFemaleTestsRegardSakeJewFavorsPhrasesSatScoreMinoritiesReally MeanScholarshipAffirmative ActionAffirmativeImpedimentsEagernessEuphemismGood StudentsChimeraFavoritismConscientiousness
Author:Florence King
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“Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will....The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.”

WayDoeIdeasWishCausesLibertyWillingExpressionIndifferenceFree WillFacultyVoidWish YouUnworthyChimeraScholastics
Author:Voltaire
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“Truth and fact are old-fashioned and out-of-date, my friends, fit only for the dull and vulgar to live by. Appearance, not reality, is what the clever dog grasps at in these clever days. We spurn the dull-brown solid earth; we build our lives and homes in the fair-seeming rainbow-land of shadow and chimera.”

FactsHomeRealityEarthOur LivesLandDogFitMy FriendsShadowFairsAppearanceCleverDullBrownLive ByRainbowOld FashionedVulgarSeemingChimera
Book:Clocks
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“The Void is not being, but not being cannot be, ergo the Void cannot be. The reasoning was sound, because it denied the Void while granting that it could be conceived. In fact, we can quite easily conceive things that do not exist. Can a chimera, buzzing in the Void, devour second intentions? No, because chimeras do not exist, in the Void no buzzing can be heard, and intentions are mental things - an intended pear does not nourish us. And yet I can think of a chimera even if it is chimerical, namely, if it is not. And the same with the Void.”

IfsThinkingDoeI CanFactsSoundHeardIntentionReasoningDeniedVoidPearsChimera
Author:Umberto Eco
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“When we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up. Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.”

IfsWayHumansHandsBigsPowerfulWonderProduceShotsToolsEarsIllBoxesVariousDebateCodeWhat IfDnaTrue NatureCrackedBiologistPandoraChimeraPandora's Box
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.”

LittlesDifferentRealityInterestViewsVisionChangedMastersSceneLimitsAmbitionImmortalityGrandeurBoundlessAnnihilationChimeraInquirers
Book:Frankenstein: Easyread Edition
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“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”

WorldSaidShowsDreamFieldsBirthUltimateMedicineTricksHatsDestinationUnspeakablePrecedentAnything Is PossibleStrangenessReckoningTranceCarnivalsChimeraAnalogue
Author:Cormac McCarthy
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“When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar—-who hands him the paper every morning.”

MenHandsKnownMorningFocusEffectsPaperFindingsPursuitFamiliarEvery MorningFleetingPornographyFinding PeaceFashion IndustryChimera
Book:The Beauty Myth
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“I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.”

WorldHeartPersonsRealEndsFeelingsPassionImaginationMy OwnPleasureCreativeSeeingLandObjectsMy HeartIdealsWorthyImpossibilityExaltedReal PersonCreative ImaginationIdeal WorldChimera
Author:Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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“There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured As April's green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow's wings.”

HomeSpiritDesireHeavenSpringBirdGreenWingsSouthEndureGravesGoldenEveningHillsProphecyRemembrancePalmsJuneAprilAwakenedVisionariesLike HerCloudyIsleChimera
Book:The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
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“Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.”

HumansIdeasHumanityGoalImaginationLinesRaceCareersProgressMovementCivilizationChaosRegionsHuman HistoryPlungeIllustrationBarbarismCometsChimeraAnalogueParabola
Book:Looking Backward 2000-1887
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“That I had never heard of such a bird did not surprise me.... But others more experienced also did not know of the Carolina Parakeet. The more I spoke of the bird, the more it seemed that, somehow, its existence had been a chimera. Admittedly, my survey was small and unscientific, but intelligent people who could reel off the names of various dinosaurs and identify sparrows at epic distances could not name the forgotten parakeet. I realized, forcefully, what I suppose I knew abstractly: Histories, like species, can go extinct.”

PeopleKnowsNamesExistenceEnvironmentHeardBirdIntelligentDistanceSurpriseSpeciesForgottenVariousI RealizedSpokesEpicDinosaursSurveysCarolinaSurprise MeSparrowsChimeraParakeets
Book:Hope Is the Thing With Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds
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“The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its own shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience.”

PeopleHumansStatesIndividualHuman BeingsResponsibilityTakenDivineWeaknessConscienceWeightShouldersImmortalSovietJustifiedLiberatedInsignificanceChimera
Author:Vasily Grossman
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