Element Quotes

As I see the world, there's one element that's even more corrosive than missionaries: tourists. It's not that I feel above them in any way, but that the very places they patronize are destroyed by their affection. ~ Tahir Shah

We know from Philo there was already a Jewish tradition of a preexistent being named Jesus who was the Form of God (Element 40). It cannot be claimed Philo came up with this notion on his own, since that would entail a wildly improbable coincidence. So we surely are looking at a derivation from an earlier Divine Logos doctrine. Then we're told this Jesus did not try to seize power from God in heaven (as by some accounts Satan had once done, resulting in his fall to the lower realms), but instead divested himself of all his power and higher being, enslaving himself (either to God's plan or the world of flesh) by 'being made' [genomenos] in the 'likeness' of men (not literally becoming a man, but assuming a human body, and thus wearing human 'flesh'). ~ Richard C. Carrier

It is in no way, shape or form your cosmic duty or responsibility to take away the pain of other people. This is because by absorbing the pain of others, you are depriving them of a vital element of their spiritual evolution and karmic responsibility. ~ Mateo Sol

If you're speaking of love, you really must include the element of uncertainty - and perhaps it's best approached as the art of constant maintenance. ~ Twyla Tharp

There are only a few things investors can do to counteract risk: diversify adequately, hedge when appropriate, and invest with a margin of safety. It is a precisely because we do not and cannot know all the risks of an investment that we strive to invest at a discount. The bargain element helps to provide a cushion for when things go wrong. ~ Seth Klarman

Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since. ~ Edith Sitwell

My most earnest wish is to see the republican element of popular control pushed to the maximum of its practicable exercise. I shall then believe that our government may be pure and perpetual. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Love is an element which though physically unseen is as real as air or water. It is an acting, living, moving force ... it moves in waves and currents like those of the ocean. ~ Prentice Mulford

Towers' is the name of the dormitory that I lived in in college; it's made up of these two towers – North and South – my girlfriend lived in one and I lived in the other. It's about falling in love, but also about what happens when you've long fallen out of love and those reminders are still there. You drive by them, these two buildings, and you look, and you realise that we really built that up. That we really built that love into these things, and for a long time afterward looking at them really made me feel sad; to see these empty buildings that I don't go in to anymore. But then, as time goes on, they start to become kind of joyous in their own way: you can look at them and think 'that love was great and these buildings still stand tall'. But there's also an element of the fact that they're just buildings – they're gonna fall down one day, and they're not that important because there's new love in your life and you've got to break things down that get built up. ~ Justin Vernon

When we started there was this element of these experiments we were doing where we weren't really sure how the music would play out because the music was all on different players. ~ Wayne Coyne

A life spent in the routine of science need not destroy the attractive human element of a woman's nature. ~ Annie Jump Cannon

The act of underlining always contains an element of self-recognition. ~ Eric Weiner

To be joining 'The Hunger Games' family is such a thrill. It deserves the hype because it's well written, handles really big subject matter, but doesn't talk down to its audience. And then there's the romance element. ~ Natalie Dormer

Similarly deadly to small wriggling cells, if a bit more quackish, is vanadium, element twenty-three, which also has a curious side effect in males: vanadium is the best spermicide ever devised. Most spermicides dissolve the fatty membrane that surrounds sperm cells, spilling their guts all over. Unfortunately, all cells have fatty membranes, so spermicides often irritate the lining of the vagina and make women susceptible to yeast infections. Not fun. Vanadium eschews any messy dissolving and simply cracks the crankshaft on the sperm's tails. The tails then snap off, leaving ~ Sam Kean

Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the latter's conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could 'participate' substantively in imperial politics; hence it is not surprising that the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates. No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire. ~ Chalmers Johnson

That's the hardest thing about doing sequels - you've lost the element of surprise. ~ Sylvester Stallone

She holds within her the memory of this journey, drawn out for her like a constellation in the darkness, each element of the landscape connecting her along a line that is her past. Carter may want to come here now, but she's the one who belongs, on this road, under this piece of sky. ~ Kirsty Gunn

The woman's mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its activities. ~ Margaret Thatcher

In the contest between talent and hard work as to which is the more important element of success, there's no comparison. A mediocre talent with lots of hard work will go further than a stellar talent who coasts. ~ David Joyner

Is there a relative value of beauty? Is evanescence - fleetingness - a necessary element of the thing that most moves us? A shooting star dazzles more than the sun. A child captivates like an elf, but grows into grossness, an ogre, a harpy. A flower splays itself into color - the lilies of the field! - more treasured than any painting of a flower. But of all these things, women's grace, shooting stars, flowers, and paintings, only a painting endures. ~ Gregory Maguire

From the depths of the well I had discovered a light above, and yearned to go up and see what all it shone upon. At last
ah, with what years of toil!
I stood in the perfect day, and beheld the principle of life, the element of religion, the link between the soul and God
Love! ~ Lew Wallace

There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea
that idea which the church has never ceased to embody
I AM! ~ Henry Adams

I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless. ~ Leonard Baskin

In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

After Marx died, Engels denied that Marx had said that 'the economic element is the only determining one'. He and Marx, he conceded, were partly to blame for this misinterpretation, for they had emphasized the economic side in opposition to those who rejected it altogether. ~ Anonymous

Before success comes patience ... when we add to our accomplishments the element of hard work over a long period of time, we'll place a far greater value on the outcome. When we are patient, we'll have a greater appreciation of our success. ~ John Wooden

Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to ~ David Graeber

The most important element of democracy, I believe, is the protection of minorities. ~ Shahin Najafi

The work of God which is conversion is truly saving in the most personal sense. There is not – as some folk vainly preach – an element of self-denial or restriction in conversion. The converted man does not denounce or give up what he was before as a person, but what he was before as a person is, in conversion, restored to him in maturity and fulfillment. It was so with Paul – who was a great zealot. Before his conversion, Paul was the most zealous persecutor of Christ. After his conversion, Paul becomes the most zealous evangelist and apologist. Both before and after, Paul is still Paul the zealot. Paul is still the person he is in every sense, save that now that which he is, is freed from tribute to death and fulfilled – made new – brought to mature humanity – in Christ. ~ William Stringfellow

Most people can swim a narrow river. Water is an alien element, but with labor we can force ourselves through it. A good swimmer can cross a wide river, a lake, even the English Channel; no one, as far as we know, has ever swum the Atlantic Ocean, or is likely to do so. Even a champion swimmer, if he had business which required to spend alternate weeks in Paris and London, would not make the trip regularly by swimming the English Channel. Although we can force ourselves through water by skill and main strength, for all practical purposes our ability to traverse water is only as good as our ships or our airplanes. And so with the activities of our brains. Thinking is probably as foreign to human nature as is water; it is an unnatural element into which we throw ourselves with hesitation, and in which we flounder once we are there. We have learned, during the millenniums, to do rather well with thinking, but only if we buoy ourselves up with words. Some thinking of a simple sort we can do without words, but difficult and sustained thinking, presumably, is completely impossible without their aid, as traversing the Atlantic Ocean is presumably impossible without instruments or submarine transportation. ~ Charlton Grant Laird

The Tree of Life was an ancient symbol of interconnection, fertility, and eternal life - precisely because of this legendary tree's fruit. Fruit is part of our essence, a basic element of who we are. We cannot survive without fruit on this planet. It outweighs the nutrition of any other food. Yet the current "health" movement toward low-carb diets has put fruit on the endangered species list, with the goal of making it extinct. Is this denial? Ignorance? Foolishness? We're not talking about uneducated people who are driving the trend. We're talking about smart, highly intelligent professionals with advanced degrees in medicine and nutrition. If they're advising patients to shun fruit, it must be because of their training, the misinformation out there, or their own selective interests. Have you heard of book burning? If the anti-sugar war keeps up its momentum, fruit trees will be next to go up in flames. ~ Anthony William

Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown.
Structure provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. That is why, for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized. The absolute demands imposed on a parent by an infant, the responsibility to care for an invalid, the tight discipline demanded by membership in a church or, in some countries, a political party - all these may also impose a simple structure on life. ~ Alvin Toffler

We're the blue line, sir, and that will resonate on-screen. But Peabody is the face, the very human element. And she would symbolize who we are, contrast sharply against what Renee Oberman is."
He rubbed his chin, and his lips curved a little above his fingers. "You can carve out an angle like that, an excellent angle, and believe the idea of your ass in the chair someday down the road is terrifying?" He waved off her response before she could make it. "I should have thought of it myself, should have thought it through exactly that way. I'll contact Furst."
Something inside her unknotted. "Thank you, sir."
"Don't thank me. I'm wondering why I haven't assigned you to Media and PR."
"Because, sir, I hope I've done nothing to deserve that kind of punishment. ~ J.D. Robb

I, like almost all chemists I know, was also attracted by the smells and bangs that endowed chemistry with that slight but charismatic element of danger which is now banned from the classroom. I agree with those of us who feel that the wimpish chemistry training that schools are now forced to adopt is one possible reason that chemistry is no longer attracting as many talented and adventurous youngsters as it once did. If the decline in hands-on science education is not redressed, I doubt that we shall survive the 21st century. ~ Harry Kroto

But the more I reflect on events recent and past, the more I am struck by the element of the absurd in everything humans do. ~ Tacitus

Every single element, even the most hair-raising, can be improved. ~ Dmitry Bilozerchev

Putin learned from reading the William King and David Cleland textbook in the 1980s and 1990s, planning for uncertainty is the most important element of strategy. ~ Clifford G. Gaddy

There is a hint of despair in the cry of 'I told you so,' an element of disappointment in the apparent satisfaction when idols turn out to have clay feet. The human race, when it thinks it has proved that no one is superior, is partly gratified and partly depressed. ~ Alice Thomas Ellis

Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing. ~ Erik Larson

Desire is what lends power to thought, it is that element that separates a wish or a day dream into reality, if properly directed. ~ Stephen Richards

It is a well-worn saying but one nonetheless true and nonetheless worthy of repetition, inasmuch as it expresses peculiarly the situation now widely prevalent, that "where there is no vision the people perish. " Mankind as a whole, or more particularly the Western element, has lost in some incomprehensible way its spiritual vision. An heretical barrier has been erected separating itself from that current of life and vitality which even now, despite willful impediment and obstacle, pulses and vibrates passionately in the blood, pervading the whole of universal form and structure. The anomalies presented today are due to this rank absurdity. Mankind is slowly accomplishing its own suicide. A self-strangulation is being effected through a suppression of all individuality, in the spiritual sense, and all that made it human. It continues to withhold the spiritual atmosphere from its lungs, so to speak. And having severed itself from the eternal and never-ceasing sources of light and life and inspiration, it has deliberately blinded itself to the fact - than which no other could compare in importance - that there is a dynamic principle both within and without from which it has accomplished a divorce. The result is inner lethargy, chaos, and the disintegration of all that formerly was held to be ideal and sacred. ~ Israel Regardie

I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the "gift" of not belonging. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

Foreign correspondence has a natural element of romanticism - and this could be seen as soon as that class of professional reporter emerged in the last half of the 19th century. ~ John Maxwell Hamilton

The IMAX was dark when Shay awoke. She knew Ryan was beside her - even after only a day of being together, she could sense his body as a discrete element in the universe. ~ Dayna Lorentz

One reason that challenge brings happiness is that it allows you to expand your self - definition. You become larger. Suddenly you can do yoga or make homemade beer or speak a decent amount of Spanish. Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened. ~ Gretchen Rubin

John Updike once said that he was confused by the very concept of "antiwar," which he felt, and I'm paraphrasing him here, was like being "anti-food" or "anti-sex," since war was such an essential element of human experience. ~ Mark Bowden

Paul Theroux on Blogging, Travel Writing, and Three Cups of Tea

Speaking of books that contain an element of travel, Greg Mortenson's bestseller about Central Asia was in the news recently. Were you surprised by the allegations that Three Cups of Tea contained fabrications?

No, I wasn't. One of the things The Tao of Travel shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. For example, everyone loved John Steinbeck's book Travels With Charley. Turns out he didn't travel alone, his wife kept meeting him, yet she was never mentioned in the book. Steinbeck didn't go to all the places he mentioned, nor did he meet all the people he said he met. In other words, Travels With Charley is fiction, or at least half-fiction. As for Three Cups of Tea, I think that philanthropists and humanitarians are even less forthcoming about what they do. I guess this guy did build a couple of schools in Afghanistan, but a self-promoting humanitarian is not someone I have a great deal of trust or belief in. I lived for six years in Africa and I've been to Africa numerous times since then. People build schools for their own reasons - not to improve a country.

The people I've known who've done great things of that type - you know, building hospitals, running schools - are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. Mi ~ Paul Theroux

In what circumstances does the human element remain indispensable, and why? ~ Matthew B. Crawford

You can talk about a caption underneath a photograph being true or false, because there is a linguistic element. You can claim that a photograph is a picture of a horse or a cow, but it is the sentence that expresses the claim, which is true or false, not the photograph. ~ Errol Morris

The element of surprise wasn't allowed near the Periodic Table. ~ Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers. However, of the three, action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought. The ~ Hannah Arendt

I fall in love with characters when they're out of their element or are uncomfortable and you really feel for them in a knee-jerk sympathetic way. ~ Anna Kendrick

It is the element I miss in electronic music - no performance, no loving immersion. Maybe that is why I was never particularly drawn to electronic music. ~ Lukas Foss

His biases played a large role here, but for Komatsu bias was an important element of truth. ~ Haruki Murakami

All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming they've "never seen anything like this before" and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven. ~ Siegfried Sassoon

The quest for human knowledge is quintessential element of being human, it's a part of our nature. We are all scientists and it's up to each and everyone of us to embark on our own self journey to inquiry. ~ Frank Huguenard

I'm not jumping into anything fast. I'm an actor that likes to choose my work and there's an element of good taste to my work. ~ Luke Ford

The desire to create holds an element of hope. Success proves that Hope is not a by-product of living; it is a Building Block of life."
Francesca Quarto ~ Francesca Quarto

Every element of our own self-reliance must be put to death by the power of God. The moment we recognize our complete weakness and our dependence upon Him will be the very moment that the Spirit of God will exhibit His power. ~ Oswald Chambers

Time was such an element, she now believed. The stretch of existence between events, consisting of countless other events, all strung together in complex patterns of cause and effect, all laid out like images sewn onto a tapestry, creating a sequence of scenes that, once one stood back, was revealed to be co-existing. Present all at once. ~ Steven Erikson

Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,-there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,-that no honest seeking goes unrewarded. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If something produces an undue amount of pleasure or undue amount of displeasure, it's going to be judged differently and it's going to be introduced in your narrative with a different size, with a different development. So that is the next element to superimpose on the sequencing element. And in fact, that element is so powerful that very often it can trump the sequencing event, that the sequencing aspect. ~ Antonio Damasio

You look so out of your element. (Savitar)
I am out of my element. Much like you in a Seattle Goth club. (Acheron)
I'm never out of my element, Atlantean. And it must be dire indeed to get you in shorties, and on a board. One day I'm actually going to get you to say 'Rad four-mill steamer, dude! (Savitar) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

As tradition, the female element clings to the old art and opposes anything new - precisely because each new art moves further away from the natural appearance of things. ~ Piet Mondrian

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. ~ Edward Hopper

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still 'un-analysed' and crying aloud for treatment.
The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which 'verified' the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasized by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation--which revealed the class bias of the paper--and especially of course in what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantl ~ Karl Popper

I don't like the idea of "understanding" a film. I don't believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn't. If you are moved by it, you don't need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it. ~ Federico Fellini

The most important element of breaking into a house is a flashlight, a flashlight will keep ya' on target. You don't wanna be stummblin' around, and it will make it alot crista-crystal-cleaner and crystal like surranwrap you S.O What?, and I'll never tell you a lie 'cause we're gonna get you through this successfully and you wanna have all the stuff were givin' ya now. ~ Brandon DiCamillo

You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know. ~ Janet Fitch

It is doubtless true that the masses have always been led in one way or another, and it could be said that their part in history consists primarily in allowing themselves to be led, since they represent a predominantly passive element, a materia in the Aristotelian sense of the word; but in order to lead them today it is sufficient to possess oneself of purely material means, taking the word matter this time in its ordinary sense, and this clearly shows to what depths the present age has sunk; and at the same time these same masses are made to believe that they are not being led, but that they are acting spontaneously and governing themselves, and the fact that they believe this to be true gives an idea of the extent of their unintelligence. ~ Rene Guenon

I guess there is also an element of deliberate change involved. Each of my books has been, at least from my point of view, radically different from the last. ~ George Murray

Beyond the element of giving, the active characteristic of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsability, respect and knowledge ~ Erich Fromm

As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element. ~ Ernst Haeckel

There's an analogy I came up with once for an interviewer who asked me how much of my material was autobiographical," Octavia says. "I said that the life experience of a fiction writer is like butter in cookie dough: it's a crucial part of flavor and texture - you certainly couldn't leave it out - but if you've done it right, it can't be discerned as a separate element. There shouldn't be a place that anyone can point to and say, There--she's talking about her miscarriage, or Look--he wrote that because his wife had an affair ~ Carolyn Parkhurst

The periodic table was incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could never adequately analyze what I meant here by beauty – simplicity? coherence? rhythm? inevitability? Or perhaps it was the symmetry, the comprehensiveness of every element firmly locked into its place, with no gaps, no exceptions, everything implying everything else. ~ Oliver Sacks

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people. ~ Andre Dubus

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that ~ Virginia Woolf

I'm not really comfortable with who I am to be honest. I feel more free to step into the shoes of somebody else. There's always an element of me in there but, you know, if you give me a script and some clothes I can do anything. But, as Ryan, I'm a bit of a recluse. ~ Ryan Kwanten

She never indulged in reveries or tried to be clever in her conversation; she seemed to have drawn a line in her mind beyond which she never went. It was quite obvious that feelings, every kind of relationship, including love, entered into her life on equal terms with everything else, while in the case of other women love quite manifestly takes part, if not in deeds, then in words, in all the problems of life, and everything else is allowed in only in so far as love leaves room for it. The thing this woman esteemed most was the art of living, of being able to control oneself, of keeping a balance between thought and intention, intention and realization. You could never take her unawares, by surprise, but she was like a watchful enemy whose expectant gaze would always be fixed on you, however hard you tried to lie in wait for him. High society was her element, and therefore tact and caution prompted her every thought, word, and movement. ~ Ivan Goncharov

The Silmarils are Eorclanstánas (also treated as an Old English noun with plural Silmarillas). There are several different forms of this Old English word: eorclan-, eorcnan-, and eorcan- from which is derived the 'Arkenstone' of the Lonely Mountain. The first element may be related to Gothic airkns, 'holy'. With middangeard line 37 cf. my father's note in Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings, in A Tolkien Compass, p. 189: 'The sense is 'the inhabited lands of (Elves and) Men', envisaged as lying between the Western Sea and that of the Far East (only known in the West by rumour). Middle-Earth is a modern alteration of medieval middel-erde from Old English middan-geard'. ~ Christopher Tolkien

So for me having that element of being able to be competitive wasn't a problem. I'm very competitive. I thought if I could skate first, acting would come second. I could say my lines and then go do what I was saying. You don't have to fake it, you're not really acting. ~ John Robinson

Probably the most important element in intricacy is centering. Good small parks typically have a place somewhere within them commonly understood to be the center - at the very least a main crossroads and pausing point, a climax. ~ Jane Jacobs

Speaking of people I had to exclude: Hank Williams. which is to say, songs are part of lyric poetry in my book, my thinking. In fact they are the urgent element of poetry in our time, they carry the most emotion for the most people in our culture. everyone LOVES poetry, because we all love (one form or another) of rock and roll (be it folk to emo to rap). It's all rock and roll and all lyric poetry. ~ Gregory Orr

I have never doubted the importance of melody. I like melody very much, and I consider it the most important element in music, and I labour many years on the improvement of its quality in my compositions. ~ Sergei Prokofiev

We must first realize that dancing is an absolutely independent art, not merely a secondary accompanying one. I believe that it is one of the great arts ... The important thing in ballet is the movement itself. A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle ... is the essential element. The choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach the audience through the eye. It's the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician. ~ George Balanchine

In particular, if consciousness is an ontological fundamental-that is, a primary element of reality-then it may have the power to achieve what is both the best-documented and at the same time the spookiest effect of the m ind on the material world: the ability of consciousness to transform the infinite possibilities for, say, the position of a subatomic particle as described by quantum mechanics into the single reality for that position as detected by an observer. If that sounds both mysterious and spooky, it is a spookiness that has been a part of science since almost the beginning of the twentieth century. It was physics that first felt the breath of this ghost, with the discoveries of quantum mechanics, and it is in the field of neuroscience and the problem of mind and matter that its ethereal presence is felt most markedly today. ~ Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Any Arthurian enthusiast who has watched 'Merlin' has probably concluded that it's not accurate whatsoever - but, it's not meant to be. It's not meant to be a true telling. It's in a fantasy setting, it's really concentrating on the fantasy element. ~ Colin Morgan

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. ~ Friedrich Engels

The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

She was in her element walking the concrete sidewalks, listening to the buzz of traffic and the hum of city life. One reason was because as a child she lived in the old downtown of the small town, where the movie theater, the bank, several restaurants and most of city's government structure was located. As a child she'd seen empty wine bottles and empty snuff boxes littering the streets on Sunday morning. ~ Richard E. Riegel

It feels great and it's very beautiful when you can bring someone of your own nationality into a story, where even the historic element of it is important. I loved that I could use my own accent for the character. ~ Penelope Cruz

When one is still and listens, one begins to be in touch with a mysterious element that is within each of us, which can transform and shape us and can help to transform the world. ~ William Segal

Even as a raft, of course, it could have been made from gold, or any element with a molecular number lower than mercury. Lead would still sink in mercury, but gold shouldn't. It was one number down the Periodic Table and so ought to float. Veppers looked over the side of the vessel at where his ingot of gold had entered the liquid metal, but it showed no sign of surfacing yet. ~ Iain M. Banks

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive. ~ Chuck Klosterman

To me, the scariest movie ever made to this day is 'The Exorcist.' It still scares the living hell out of me, and it's because of the fantasy element. It's the exorcism. It's the Devil. It's not a guy breaking into your house trying to torture you or cut your whatever off. Those kinds of movies don't do it for me, and I don't call them horror. ~ Cassandra Peterson

A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless. ~ Charles De Gaulle

Before and after the funeral I never ceased to cry and be miserable, but it makes me ashamed when I think back on that sadness of mine, seeing that always in it was an element of self-love - now a desire to show that I prayed more than any one else, now concern about the impression I was producing on others, now an aimless curiosity which caused me to observe Mimi's cap or the faces of those around me. I despised myself for not experiencing sorrow to the exclusion of everything else, and I tried to conceal all other feelings: this made my grief insincere and unnatural. Moreover, I felt a kind of enjoyment in knowing that I was unhappy and I tried to stimulate my sense of unhappiness, and this interest in myself did more than anything else to stifle real sorrow in me. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The greatest force is derived from the power of thought. The finer the element, the more powerful it is. The silent power of thought influences people even at a distance, because mind is one as well as many. The universe is a cobweb; minds are spiders. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigour and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes time. The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here. ~ John O'Donohue

Mature striving is linked to long-range goals. Thus, the process of becoming is largely a matter of organizing transitory impulses into a pattern of striving and interest in which the element of self-awareness plays a large part. ~ Gordon W. Allport