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Rarity Quotes

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Rarity Quotes

“No man can see over his own height. Let me explain what I mean. You cannot see in another man any more than you have in yourself. Your own level strictly determines the extent to which he comes within your understanding. If your intelligence is unawakened, mental qualities in another, even though they be of the highest kind, will have no effect on you at all… his higher mental qualities will no more exist for you than colors exist for those who cannot see.”

SelfIgnoranceIntelligenceHeightRaritySchopenhauer
Author:Arthur Schopenhauer
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“Della sank down beside the creek, waiting for the flash of white fur that would herald Tidda's arrival. The first time she'd come across Tidda she'd been no more than a joey hardly big enough to be out of her mother's pouch. Perhaps because she was different, with her strange lack of color and red eyes, the mob had rejected her. Charity reckoned it was the sign of the devil, a punishment or a curse from the Darkinjung ancestral spirits. That was nothing but a load of rubbish. Tidda was more beautiful than most because of the strange trick natures had played upon her.”

RarityKangarooAlbino
Book:The Woman in the Green Dress
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“Pay to go inside Neruda's home A body lies there with no dome. But right there in the front hall Lean a fairy against the icy wall. Oh Endless enigmas had the bard! Nice and large and calm backyard Ends In the middle of a rare room Rare portrait of revelishing gloom. Up climbing at the weird snail stair Does make you grasp for some air. And there's a room with bric-a-brac: Old and precious books all in a pack. Dare saying what I liked most of all? Enjoyed seeing visitors having a ball!”

PeopleLoveArtPoetryHouseWomenPoetPoemAncientOddGuestsVisitingOldTourismLyricsVisitorsPrecious ThingsPreciousWallsRarityRareMuseumVisitRhymesOdeTourBardPablo NerudaNerudaArt CollectionArt CollectorOld PieceRhymedAcrostiLa ChasconaPablo Neruda OdePablo Neruda Poetry PopulismPreciosity
Book:ACross Tic
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“Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects - inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity - perhaps rarity most of all - combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury - one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way - as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick - to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.”

ArtSoulSpiritPoetryHistoryObjectsPaintingAppearanceArtistsTombsMasksRarityMaterialContextLocomotivesCemeteriesIntegralGwynnNuminous PhenomenaAsheningBeth ConstanzinDemiurgesQuelling
Book:The Etched City
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“The sun, still shy and submissive to winter, peeped in now and then between days of mean wind and bitter rain. Then one afternoon, just like that, spring elbowed her way in for good. The day warmed, and the sky shone as if polished. Kya spoke quietly, as she and Tate walked along the grassy bank of a deep creek, overhung with tall sweetgum trees. Suddenly he grabbed her hand, shushing her. Her eyes followed his to the water's edge, where a bullfrog, six inches wide, hunkered under foliage. A common enough sight, except this frog was completely and brilliantly white.”

WhiteRarityPrecious MomentBullfrog
Book:Where the Crawdads Sing
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“Thick, pale golden juice burst like a tiny rain cloud, tart as a lime and sweet as a peach on my tongue. Full-bodied. A trickle dripped down my index finger, caught just in time, too prized to go to waste. I let Darwin lick it. The real thing, its brilliant sweetness, eaten miles from human habitation, acted as an intoxicating potion. Immediately, its taste unlocked the gates to other northern lands and, as the last of the sweet-sour flavor fizzed out on my tongue, overlaying images sped joyfully through my mind: birch forests, mountains, glittering lakes, snowy trains, windswept taiga. I lingered over that single cloudberry, cherishing it, more than caviar, more than whisky or truffles, more than anything else I had ever eaten, smoked or drunk before. Once it had gone, I felt only a little grief, convincing myself that the cloudberry-- surely the ultimate 'taste of place'-- was somehow a gift; I felt I had consumed its very northernness. It brought back the similar sensations of eating a pear in an orchard, a melon in a melon field, an apple in a grove, though nothing could really compare.”

TasteFlavorSensationalRaritySweet And SourCloudberries
Book:Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels
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“Kate still was not used to all the attention, but she was told from those in the know, that from the first whispered rumors of their secret marriage, she had charmed the ton. The Society pages praised the excellent taste of her enormous wardrobe; the hostesses of the aristocracy were pleased with her French noble blood; and at the ball the Rotherstones had given in her and Rohan's honor a few weeks ago, the ton's haughtiest dandies, the cruelest arbiters of taste, had pronounced her the rarest of finds: a great beauty with a sharp mind, a spirited wit, and a bold sense of style. In short, she had been proclaimed "all the kick.”

RarityDuchessKate MadsenEnglish Society
Book:My Dangerous Duke
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“Without doubt, it was a single cloudberry--- wrapped, like a gift, in a gauzy spider's web. Golden-red, the color of cognac, and shaped like its cousin the raspberry, but with fatter, yet fewer, juice-filled druplets, its solitariness hinted that its life had begun as a seed dropped by a bird; a fugitive out on its own, not part of a patch. Typically found in remote and scattered locations, cloudberries elude even the best and most hyper-local of foragers. So few in number are they, that they seem unreal--- the fruits of mountain fairies or goblins. Cloudberries are a distinct rarity in Britain, often more rumor than reality. I had never seen them in the wild in Scotland (though other walkers have), nor in the moorlands of northern England, where they are also reported to grow, each stem boasting just a single fruit. Notoriously hard to cultivate commercially--- needing snow in the winter, followed by the right succession of damp, sun, rain and even fog--- they grow mainly in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, where wild fruit is scant and the summer sun never fully sets.”

RarityCloudberries
Book:Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels
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“RJ is standing there, and in his arms is a wriggling French bulldog puppy of the most inexplicable color, almost pale honeyed yellow tinged with a sort of peachy pink. "Oh my goodness! Who are you?" RJ hands me the pup, who immediately starts licking all over my face and biting my ponytail. Dumpling tries to stand on his one leg to see what is going on, and falls over at my feet. RJ scoops him up and puts him face-to-face with the puppy. "Dumpling, there is someone we want you to meet. We thought you might want a little sister." Dumpling looks at the puppy, who leans forward and licks his face. Dumpling licks back. The puppy sniffs his ear and then with one move, snatches the eye patch right off his head and starts to chew it. Dumpling looks at me with his one good eye, head cocked as if to say, "We're going to have our hands full with this one," and then turns and licks RJ under his chin. "I can't believe you did this! You are so sneaky." "Well, we did talk about wanting to do it, and a guy at work breeds them for showing, but this one is off the allowable color charts." "She does have a certain, um... Well, she's kind of, um..." "Pink? Yeah. Some weird anomaly, and apparently, not good for the show circuit." "But good for us." "That's what I thought." "What should we call her?" RJ smiles. "I was thinking Pamplemousse." "Of course. What else could she be?”

YellowPuppyDog LoveRarityPinkDumplingFrench Bulldog
Book:Off the Menu
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“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”

FormSecretRecordsTreeEvolutionEvidenceTradeExtremesDataBranchesReasonablePersistFossilsTextbooksInferenceRarityPaleontologyCreation ScienceCreation And Evolution
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“A true evangelist is almost as great a rarity as a true pastor. Alas! Alas! How rare are both! The two are closely connected. The evangelist gathers the sheep; the pastor feeds and cares for them. The work of each lies very near the heart of Christ- [Who Is] The Divine Evangelist and Pastor.”

HeartTwoCareChristianPastLyingChristDivineConnectedSheepPastorAlasEvangelistsRarity
Book:The Mackintosh Treasury - Miscellaneous Writings - Volume V: The Church – The Body of Christ
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“The First thing that strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of the universally ambitious stir of society. No Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise, but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude or to pursue very lofty aims. All are constantly seeking to acquire property, power, and reputation.”

FirstsStatesDesireUnitedUnited StatesConditionsAmbitionOriginalsAimPropertySeekingStrikesPursueReputationAcquireMidstYearningAmbitiousMultitudesTravelerLoftyMagnitudeRarity
Author:Alexis de Tocqueville
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“Few and precious are the words which the lips of Wisdom utter: To what shall their rarity be likened? What prices shall count their worth? Perfect, and much to be desired, and giving joy with riches, No lovely thing on earth can picture their fair beauty. They be chance pearls, flung among the rocks by the sullen waters of Oblivion.”

GivingWisdomEarthJoyWaterChancePerfectRocksFairsLipsRichesLovelyPearlsOblivionSullenRarityLovely Things
Book:Proverbial philosophy: a book of thoughts and arguments, originally treated
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“If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?”

IfsCertainUniverseAsksViewsCommonConditionsExpressionMaterialsUltimateUniversalConstitutionIndependentFundamentalsStructurePropertyRaisedGradesPhenomenonFossilsVaryHomo SapiensRarityMartiansOddballs
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Before seeing Truffaut 's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity a poetic comedy that's really funny.”

TryingChildrenEnoughFilmTurnsNaturalSimpleComedySeeingChildhoodSeriesResilienceThemePoeticGood EnoughNot Good EnoughRaritySmall Changes
Book:When the lights go down
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“Thank God it has rained all day. I say thank God, though rain is no rarity, because it is the duty of every man to be thankful for whatever happens by the will of the Omnipotent Creator; yet it was not so agreeable to any of my party as a fine day would have been.”

MenHas BeensHappensPartyDutyFineRainCreatorEvery ManThank GodBeing ThankfulWhatever HappensOmnipotentRarityFine Day
Book:Life and Adventures of Audubon the Naturalist
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“Short of climbing aboard a time capsule and peeling back eight and one-half decades, James Cameron's magnificent Titanic is the closest any of us will get to walking the decks of the doomed ocean liner. Meticulous in detail, yet vast in scope and intent, Titanic is the kind of epic motion picture event that has become a rarity. You don't just watch Titanic , you experience it from the launch to the sinking, then on a journey two and one-half miles below the surface, into the cold, watery grave where Cameron has shot never-before seen documentary footage specifically for this movie.”

KindTwoHalfWatchesJourneyEventsColdWalkingOceanShotsDetailsEightSurfaceDecadesMilesGravesClimbingClosestMagnificentDoomedEpicDocumentariesScopeSinkingDeckMotion PicturesOne HalfCameronRarityPeelingMeticulousBelow The SurfaceTime Capsules
Author:James Berardinelli
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“One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.”

BookStatesHumanityLostWaterImaginationInterestingSeaLandDangerousPlanetsCivilizationLessonsNormalOppositesDifficultyIncreaseErrorsBoundsSpreadSurfaceSaltBarbarismHistory BooksSavageryRaritySalt Water
Book:Image and Imagination
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“Men ruled the roost and women played a subservient role [in the 1960s]. Working wives were a rarity, because their place was in the home, bringing up the kids. The women who did work were treated as second-class citizens because it was a male-dominated society. That was a fact of life then. But it wouldn't be tolerated today, and that's quite right in my book... people look back on those days through a thick veil of nostalgia, but life was hard if you were anything other than a rich, powerful, white male.”

PeopleIfsMenLooksBookHardFactsHomeKidsTodayWhitePowerfulClassRolesRichWifeCitizensMalesNostalgiaTreatedThickVeils1960sFacts Of LifeSubservientRaritySecond Class CitizensRoost
Author:Jon Hamm
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“However dangerous might be the shock of a comet, it might be so slight, that it would only do damage at the part of the Earth where it actually struck; perhaps even we might cry quits if while one kingdom were devastated, the rest of the Earth were to enjoy the rarities which a body which came from so far might bring it. Perhaps we should be very surprised to find that the debris of these masses that we despised were formed of gold and diamonds; but who would be the most astonished, we, or the comet-dwellers, who would be cast on our Earth? What strange being each would find the other!”

IfsShouldBodyMightWould BeEarthEnjoyDangerousCryStrangeMassGoldCastsQuittingKingdomsAliensDamageShockDiamondDespisedDevastatedCometsDebrisRarityDwellersGold And Diamonds
Author:Pierre Louis Maupertuis
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“I don't believe in having to show anybody anything. I just do my work. You know, making a living as an actor is such a rarity on earth. It's like making a living as a painter. So I look at different opportunities in the same way as Jack Nicholson, who said once, "Keep popping up in different holes. That's what you want to do: Just keep popping up in different holes." That made a lot of sense to me.”

KnowsWayWantBelieveLooksMadeSaidDifferentShowsEarthActorsOpportunityDon't BelieveWhat You WantHolesPainterMaking A LivingPoppingRarityNicholson
Author:Steve Guttenberg
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