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Elements Quotes

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Elements Quotes

“Perhaps the heroic element in our natures is exhibited to the best advantage, not in going from success to success, and so on through a series of triumphs, but in gathering, on the very field of defeat itself, the materials for renewed efforts, and in proceeding, with no abatement of heart or energy, to form fresh designs upon the very ruins and ashes of blasted hopes. Yes, it is this indomitable persistence in a purpose, continued alike through defeat and success, that makes, more than aught else, the hero.”

“When speaking of a "body of knowledge" or of "the results of research," e.g., we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to inherited knowledge and to independently acquired knowledge. To counteract this tendency a special effort is required to transform inherited knowledge into genuine knowledge by revitalizing its original discovery, and to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious elements of what claims to be inherited knowledge.”

“Such is the nature of the marriage relation that a breach once made cannot be healed, and it is the height of folly to waste one's life in vain efforts to make a binary compound of two diverse elements. What would we think of the chemist who should sit twenty years trying to mix oil and water, and insist upon it that his happiness depended upon the result of the experiment?”

“By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.”

“The nation as such is not a large subject that has needs, that works, practices economy, and consumes. . . . Thus the phenomena of “national economy” . . . are, rather, the results of all the innumerable individual economic efforts in the nation and . . . must also be theoretically interpreted in this light. . . .Whoever wants to understand theoretically the phenomena of “national economy” . . . must for this reason attempt to go back to their true elements, to the singular economies in the nation, and to investigate the laws by which the former are built up from the latter.”

“In a novella, a whole lot of crap can happen, and you can build momentum and suspense and leave room for a surprise or three. Stories are cut down to the most essential elements, and novels (this might be an unfair generalization on my part) are big fat clumsy efforts where the reader can snooze for a couple chapters and miss nothing of consequence. Hence my love for the middle way.”

“When I was a film critic, the reason I kind of found it disenchanting was because the things that I wanted to talk about were the ideas in the movie, the theme of it, and contextual elements that weren't necessarily central to the story. But the only thing people really wanted was a plot description and how many stars I'd give it. It didn't matter how much effort you put into writing a piece, they looked at it solely as a consumer's guide toward going or not going to films.”

“The bulk of our efforts [in The Khaled Hosseini Foundation] has focused on helping build permanent shelters for returning refugees who are homeless, living out in the open or in makeshift homes. This is an area of urgent need as Afghanistan's natural elements are quite harsh, with very hot summers, and freezing winters.”

“He'd only been gone two seconds, but the room got brighter when they were together, as if they were two elements that became brilliant in proximity. At Sam's clumsy efforts to carry the vacuum, Grace smiled a new smile that I thought only he ever got, and he shot her a withering look full of the sort of subtext you could only get from a lot of conversations whispered after dark. It made me think of Isabel, back at her house. We didn't have what Sam and Grace had. We weren't even close to having it. I didn't think what we had could get to this, even if you gave it a thousand years.”