Cubing Function Quotes

Bellgrove, eminently lovable, because of his individual weakness, his incompetence, his failure as a man, a scholar, a leader or even as a companion, was neverless utterly alone. For the weak, above all, have their friends. Yet his gentleness, his pretence at authority, his palpable humanity were unable, for some reason or other, to function. He was demonstrably the type of venerable and absent-minded professor about whom all the sharp-beaked boys of the world should swarm. ~ Mervyn Peake

Twenty million more have Chronic Kidney Disease, where patients experience a gradual deterioration of kidney function, the end result of which is kidney failure. ~ Xavier Becerra

I was a young black man, light-skinned enough so that four out of five people who met me, of whatever race, assumed I was white ... I was a homosexual who now knew he could function heterosexually.
And I was a young writer whose early attempts had already gotten him a handful of prizes ...
So, I thought, you are neither black nor white.
You are neither male nor female.
And you are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer.
There was something at once very satisfying and very sad, placing myself at this pivotal suspension. It seemed, in the park at dawn, a kind of revelation
a kind of center, formed of a play of ambiguities, from which I might move in any direction. ~ Samuel R. Delany

The function of ritual and myth is to make possible, and then to facilitate, the jump - by analogy. Forms and conceptions that the mind and its senses can comprehend are presented and arranged in such a way as to suggest a truth or openness beyond. And then, the conditions for meditation having been provided, the individual is left alone. Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness - that void, or being, beyond the categories - into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved. Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means - themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves. ~ Joseph Campbell

To honour his bills of exchange, Badoer had at least four accounts with local bankers in Constantinople, where banking was organised along the same lines as on the Rialto: a bank's primary function was not to lend money, but to transfer the funds of its depositors, who personally presented themselves to authorise the transfer of money to creditor accounts in different cities. ~ Jane Gleeson-White

The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression. ~ Tariq Ali

[T]he power of willful activity to shape the brain remains the working principle not only of early brain development, but also of brain function as an ongoing, living process. ~ Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Clicking on "send" has its limitations as a system of subtle communication. Which is why, of course, people use so many dashes and italics and capitals ("I AM joking!") to compensate. That's why they came up with the emoticon, too - the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne.

You will know all about emoticons. Emoticons are the proper name for smileys. And a smiley is, famously, this:

: - )

Forget the idea of selecting the right words in the right order and channelling the reader's attention by means of artful pointing. Just add the right emoticon to your email and everyone will know what self-expressive effect you thought you kind-of had in mind. Anyone interested in punctuation has a dual reason to feel aggrieved about smileys, because not only are they a paltry substitute for expressing oneself properly; they are also designed by people who evidently thought the punctuation marks on the standard keyboard cried out for an ornamental function. What's this dot-on-top-of-a-dot thing for? What earthly good is it? Well, if you look at it sideways, it could be a pair of eyes. What's this curvy thing for? It's a mouth, look! Hey, I think we're on to something.

: - (

Now it's sad!

; - )

It looks like it's winking!

: - r

It looks like it's sticking its tongue out! The perm ~ Lynne Truss

'Reasoning doesn't have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions,' said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. 'It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.' Truth and accuracy were beside the point. ~ Ezra Klein

I never view aesthetic ideas as having an existence purely of their own but as a function they have in connection with political or moral values. ~ Antoni Tapies

The longer I am a writer
so long now that my writing finger is periodically numb
the better I understand what writing is; what its function is; what it is supposed to do. I learn that the writer's pen is a microphone held up to the mouths of ancestors and even stones of long ago. That once given permission by the writer
a fool, and so why should one fear?
horses, dogs, rivers, and, yes, chickens can step forward and expound on their lives. The magic of this is not so much in the power of the microphone as in the ability of the nonhuman object or animal to BE and the human animal to PERCEIVE ITS BEING. ~ Alice Walker

The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide. ~ Walter Lippmann

Practicing yoga is like tuning up your car: it allows the bode to function in accordance with what it was designed to do. ~ Alan Finger

No matter how much talent you have in your mind and spirit, if your body is not able to function, you are not able to fulfill your destiny. ~ T.D. Jakes

With function, flow, and form as basis, design is evaluated as a process culminating in an entity which intensifies comprehension. ~ Ladislav Sutnar

As soon as the genome had been cmpletely decoded (which would be in a matter of months) humanity would have complete control of its evolution; when that happened sexuality would be seen for what it really was: a useless, dangerous, and regressive function. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Claiming that the destructive practice of mountaintop removal mining, blowing the tops off mountains to get at the coal beneath, performs the "necessary" function of creating flat land for development To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe. ~ Joseph Conrad

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. [ ... ] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself. ~ Paul Auster

My function is, as objectively and accurately as I can, to present reality to people out there, and doing that as quickly as we do is quite difficult enough, thank you. ~ Ted Koppel

It would be a marvelous thing if in the process of your listening - unemotionally, not sentimentally - to what is being said … you could really understand sorrow and be totally free of it; because then there would be no self-deception, no illusions, no anxieties, no fear, and the brain could function clearly, sharply, logically. And then, perhaps, one would know what love is. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Leadership is not a title, a position or an Office but a function ~ Kayode Fayemi

In these lands we are not experiencing the primitive infancy of capitalism but its vicious senility. Underdevelopment isn't a stage of development, but its consequence. Latin America's underdevelopment arises from external development, and continues to feed it. A system made impotent by its function of international servitude, and moribund since birth, has feet of clay. It pretends to be destiny and would like to be thought eternal. All memory is subversive, because it is different, and likewise any program for the future. The zombie is made to eat without salt: salt is dangerous, it could awaken him. The system has its paradigm in the immutable society of ants. For that reason it accords ill with the history of humankind, because that is always changing. And because in the history of humankind every act of destruction meets its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation. ~ Eduardo Galeano

I get invited to an awful lot of Jewish functions. ~ Tim Roth

In Hull's view, all learning involves the reduction of basic drives (like hunger, thirst, sex, or pain), and current behavior is therefore a product of drive reduction in the past. That is, what we do today in a certain situation is a function of what we did in the past that was successful in reducing drives in similar situations. This is essentially a psychological version of the philosophical position known as hedonism, the idea that we live our lives in such a way as to seek pleasure and avoid pain. ~ Joseph E. Ledoux

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done. ~ Peter F. Drucker

A patient's passivity must not be unilaterally interpreted as lack of motivation, resistance, lack of confidence, or the like. Many times, passivity is a function of inadequate knowledge and/or skills. ~ Marsha M. Linehan

Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don't know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but can walk and talk "Don't you want me?" Again, I don't know how to care for the child. But I am dedicated to protecting and nurturing him at any cost! It is the function of the Guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy. ~ William S. Burroughs

The railway hit Harrow on the Hill in 1880 and it's been downhill ever since, culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built. As a result, your average shopper has only to spend ten minutes inside to be reduced to a state of quiet desperation. Primark has the right idea, being right by the entrance so that fleeing punters would grab the closest approximation to whatever it was they wanted before running screaming into the night. I'm ~ Ben Aaronovitch

I don't trust my mind for everyday thinking, but I am convinced that it has one very great function, which is to eventually make me aware of astounding things. ~ Jim Woodring

Expression is a function of intention and intention emanates from your thought faculty. ~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

I realized the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby
not even money, certainly not my soul. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

To receive God's gifts, to live exalted and joy filled, isn't a function of straining higher, harder, doing more, carrying long the burdens of the super-Pharisees or ultra-saints. Receiving God's gifts is a gentle, simple movement of stooping lower. ~ Ann Voskamp