Elements Quotes

For every role, I brought certain elements of the character. Even on White Collar over six years, I tried to keep the set fun and breezy and Howard Hawks-y and very of the tone of the show. ~ Matt Bomer

Our breathing has been a friend that has accompanied us through every moment of life; it has never deserted us no matter how terrible we have felt. Friendship in itself connotes a quality of feelings that has elements of warmth, trust, and welcome. Our hearts always relax when we greet a friend.
Mandala of Being, Richard Moss MD ~ Richard Moss

On the edge of dreaming when the brain lets go, when it stops its scheming, our blood runs slow... Then the heart speaks clearly of the things it knows, things it brought so dearly at the evening's glow... And a misty sunset fills the west with yellow, gold and scarlet red. The bowl of space a dawn sheds light upon our silky bed. For you I send refreshing rain to wash the past away. A quiet breeze drifts warmly across your tired face. It brings the scents from flower climbs, and leaves without a trace. With vines and newborn stars in our hair...undressed, bronzed platinum we are as summer in your golden church... Like whispers lost at sea...we soar beyond the sky of fire...in harmony within the clash of elements... Together lost and free to claim our each desire. Like leaves we float to earth, once more...forbidden passion, romantic eyes, and heated lips...two burning amber hearts released and drinking slowly mysterious champagne of heaven sweetest rest... ~ Oksana Rus

To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart; -
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around -
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air -
Comes a still voice -
Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.
Yet not to thine etern ~ William Cullen Bryant

And it is because a series of elements in Spanish life which operate today the same way as they did in the times of Blanco White made obvious my relationship with him, based on a similarity in Spain's condition. ~ Juan Goytisolo

If you have received a letter inviting you to speak at the dedication of a new cat hospital, and you hate cats, your reply, declining the invitation, does not necessarily have to cover the full range of your emotions. You must make it clear that you will not attend, but you do not have to let fly at the cats. The writer of the letter asked a civil question; attack cats, then, only if you can do so with good humor, good taste, and in such a way that your answer will be courteous as well as responsive. Since you are out of sympathy with cats, you may quite properly give this as a reason for not appearing at the dedicatory ceremonies of a cat hospital. But bear in mind that your opinion of cats was not sought, only your services as a speaker. Try to keep things straight. ~ William Strunk Jr.

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

I prayed to what all things hold in common. I prayed to what makes life. I thought about the elements of the universe, the rocks, the stars, the air, other living things. I tried to get the perspective of what's behind all that. I prayed to the force that brings things into existence. I thought this force encompassed all it created. My God was transcendent, and my God was also immanent. God ran in my veins. God lived and died and lived again in every atom of the universe. ~ Margaret D. McGee

Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there. ~ Laurence Fishburne

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

By seeking what was needful for Eppie, by sharing the effect that everything produced on her, he had himself come to appropriate the forms of custom and belief which were the mould of Raveloe life; and as, with reawakening sensibilities, memory also reawakened, he had begun to ponder over the elements of his old faith, and blend them with his new impressions, till he recovered a consciousness of unity between his past and present. ~ George Eliot

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

We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view. ~ Edward Abbey

To me a great sci-fi movie has elements of horror and suspense. ~ Moon Bloodgood

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

An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

At this point in history when all things which concern man and the structure and elements of history itself are suddenly revealed to us in a new light, it behooves us in our scientific thinking to become masters of the situation, for it is not inconceivable that sooner than we suspect, as has often been the case before in history, this vision may disappear, the opportunity may be lost, and the world will once again present a static, uniform, and inflexible countenance. ~ Karl Mannheim

What if there were no longer only two sides? Not just capital versus labor, but a third team, one that straddled elements of both? I think there's a huge opportunity for a third kind of participant, a linchpin, and now there is an opportunity to change all the rules that we've lived with all our lives. There is a shortage of this third kind of worker, and that shortage means that the market needs you desperately. The con game is ending, at least for people passionate enough to do something about it. ~ Seth Godin

A film must have two elements - it must deal with the real world and show how it could be made better. ~ Rouben Mamoulian

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 wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow was the Final Dawn, the last sunrise before the Earth and Sun are reshaped into computing elements. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

The traveler must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements. ~ Henry David Thoreau

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

Then, one by one, they went away, for night was falling on the storm, wrapping in shadows the raging ocean and all the battling elements. ~ Guy De Maupassant

Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography. ~ Herbert Read

When people are unable to integrate their traumatic memories, they seem to lose their capacity to assimilate new experiences as well. It is as if their personality stops at a certain points and cannot enlarge any more by the addition or assimilation of new elements. Unless they become aware of the split off elements and integrate them into a story that had happened in the past but was now over, they would experience a slow decline in their personal and professional functioning. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

We begin to fight. The wind and I. Horns locked. Battling each other with elements. ~ Laura Dockrill

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam or Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being. ~ Rumi

To build character of purpose and integrity is our high mark, and that cannot be done in a world where there are no adverse elements. ~ Vance Havner

In Euclid's Elements we meet the concept which later plays a significant role in the development of science. The concept is called the "division of a line in extreme and mean ratio" (DEMR). ...the concept occurs in two forms. The first is formulated in Proposition 11 of Book II. ...why did Euclid introduce different forms... which we can find in Books II, VI and XIII? ...Only three types of regular polygons can be faces of the Platonic solids: the equilateral triangle... the square... and the regular pentagon. In order to construct the Platonic solids... we must build the two-dimensional faces... It is for this purpose that Euclid introduced the golden ratio... (Proposition II.11)... By using the "golden" isosceles triangle...we can construct the regular pentagon... Then only one step remains to construct the dodecahedron... which for Plato is one of the most important regular polyhedra symbolizing the universal harmony in his cosmology. ~ Alexey Stakhov

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive. ~ Susan Sontag

There but for the... good choices I've made, genetics, psychological conditioning, and 10K random elements, go I. ~ Daniel Ionson

The idea of the universe as an interconnected whole is not new; for millennia it's been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. What is new is that Western science is slowly beginning to realize that some elements of that ancient lore might be correct. ~ Dean Radin

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

I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. ~ Dmitri Mendeleev

Just as food is a craft, great service is, too. It can take years to perfect the technical aspects of clearing a plate, carving tableside, or pouring wine, and a lifetime to master the emotional elements of service. ~ Daniel Humm

The digital capability is modular, dynamic, and nonlinear, having many visible and invisible business elements, for improving organizational competency, and enabling business strategy. ~ Pearl Zhu

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

Nevertheless, to commit burglary you must cross some imaginary border, or invisible plane, and enter another clearly defined architectural space - a volume of air, an enclosure - with the intention of committing a crime there. Without walls and thresholds - without doorways, floors, and window frames, or even roofs, awnings, and screened-in porches - burglary would not be legally possible. It is a spatial crime, one whose parameters are baked into the very elements of the built environment. ~ Geoff Manaugh

Chickens were packed into wire crates stacked ten high, without room to stand or protection from the elements. They had likely traveled hundreds of miles to get here, without access to food or water. ~ Rachel Lacey

Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life. ~ Justine Musk

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

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

When each of these three elements of vision-concern for excellence, for people and for the wider environment-are present, business is transformed from a tool for making profits into a creative, humane experiment for improving life. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The sense of a spiritual dimension in life is absolutely important, and the religious communities are also important. The question of believing in a set of creedal statements is a lot less important, because I realize the Christian movement thrived then and can now on other elements of the tradition. ~ Elaine Pagels

As a dedicated, successful writer, Lydia Sigourney violated essential elements of the very gender roles she celebrated. In the process, she offered young, aspiring women writers around the country an example of the possibilities of achieving both fame and economic reward. ~ Lydia Sigourney

The normal seething mass of emotion that never seemed to be directed at me was still there. But the elements that were directed towards me contained humor, disbelief, fondness, resignation, possessiveness and a weird jumbled mass that I couldn't identify - but it wasn't negative. ~ Anne Zoelle

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 more perfect something is, the less it can be loved -- like a face, a body, voice, tone, color, or music itself. In playing a piece, don't strive for perfection: it will kill the piece in that it will prevent it from entering the emotions. That's the kind of advice you can't do anything with except perhaps later, when you don't even know you're doing it. It's part of the freeze of counterpoint.'
'I've never heard that expression,' she said.
'Stasis may be a better word -- the liberation of the space between two contradictions. Let me explain if I can. If two waves of equal but opposite amplitude meet in water, what do you get'
'Flat water.'
'In sound?'
'Silence.'
'Right. From agitation, peace, a perfection that you might have thought unobtainable from the clash of contradictory elements.'
'I think you've explained the magic of counterpoint very well.'
'Not really. It's inexplicable. I've noted it, that's all. Half of humanity's troubles arise from the inability to see that contradictory propositions can be valid simultaneously. ~ Mark Helprin

I love red and I think it's more than just a color: It evokes an emotion. When you wear red, it makes you feel empowered and sexy. For me, sin is all about temptation and the power of seduction. Red Sin is a combination of those elements to make women feel irresistible. ~ Christina Aguilera

Religion is merely the law which binds man to his Creator: in purity it has but these elements
God, the Soul, and their Mutual Recognition; out of which, when put in practise, spring Worship, Love, and Reward. ~ Lew Wallace

The phrase 'nature and nurture' is a convenient jingle of words, for it separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality is composed. Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence without that affects him after his birth. ~ Francis Galton

The yearning for the common good comes from the refusal to accept that perhaps Americans have very little in common apart from the elements of a sometimes successful civil religion based around a sentimental, indeed sometimes teary-eyed, attachment to the constitution and a belief in the quasi-divine wisdom of the founding fathers. ~ Simon Critchley

In a struggle against a revolutionary idea it is only possible to use ideological elements which are a thousand times more radical, or adopt principles which represent a total reaction against them. ~ Francis Stuart Campbell

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Four elements make up the climate of war: danger, exertion, uncertainty and chance. ~ Carl Von Clausewitz

Men change less than is imagined; their after life is only a kaleidescope combination of the elements of their character at the period of adolescence. ~ Geraldine Jewsbury

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

I show elements of the set in my pictures because it's not real. When I see movies, I often love the 'making of' more than the movie itself. It's not so final. When you have a woman just standing there, it doesn't mean much. ~ Peter Lindbergh

In other words each of those calm and melancholy days on which I did not see her, coming one after the other without interruption, continuing too without prescription (unless some busy-body were to meddle in my affairs), was a day not lost but gained. Gained to no purpose, it might be, for presently they would be able to pronounce that I was healed. Resignation, modulating our habits, allows certain elements of our strength to be indefinitely increased. Those - so wretchedly inadequate - that I had had to support my grief, on the first evening of my rupture with Gilberte, had since multiplied to an incalculable power. ~ Marcel Proust

For Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it's better, it's simpler, and it's at the forefront of technology. That's where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores. ~ Walter Isaacson

We've done it in intelligence sharing and certain elements of security. There were parts of the department, in fact, that worked very well in Katrina, like the Coast Guard and TSA. ~ Michael Chertoff

Women are the most spectacular instance of this. After a period of independence that came with the spread of Christianity, they were relegated to a lower order. This is all the more interesting because the gospel and the first church were never hostile to women nor treated them as minors, and the situation of women in the Roman empire (particularly in the East) was relatively favourable. In spite of this, when Christianity became a power or authority, this worked against women. A strange perversion, yet fully understandable when we allow that women represent precisely the most innovative elements in Christianity: grace, love, charity, a concern for living creatures, nonviolence, an interest in little things, the hope of new beginnings - the very elements that Christianity was setting aside in favor of glory and success. ~ Jacques Ellul

I'm so used to being behind the scenes. I didn't really want to be front and center. One of the elements of my relationships with the artists I work with is that I'm not front and center, and they are. ~ Arthur Fogel

The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former ... [T]he historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. ~ Karl Marx

Summer in Karachi is brutal. The heat alone is ugly and unforgiving. Add unrelenting humidity, and the elements become merciless. The city sits on the sea but is surrounded by desert land that has been known to reach some of the hottest temperatures anywhere. When the heat reaches its peak, you feel baked in an oven and the thick, humid air gives everything an extra, hot skin. It's an effort to even lift your finger. You could get by with air-conditioning, but in this teeming, overpopulated Third World megapolis, it is a luxury few can afford. ~ Saad Shafqat

The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the 'external' elements of linguistics from the 'internal' elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

Without a doubt it was Dr. Urbino's most contagious initiative, for opera fever infected the most surprising elements in the city and gave rise to a whole generation of Isoldes and Otellos and Aidas and Siegfrieds. But it never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians confronting each other with sticks and canes during the intermissions. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The renowned astronomer Carl Sagan once said, "We are made of star stuff." And it is true. The same elements that make up the stars are also inside us. We are a part of a huge, amazing universe, a tiny speck of magick amidst a world full of marvels. So every once in a while, take the time to look at the stars and remember that you have star stuff (and goddess stuff and god stuff) inside you. ~ Deborah Blake

My biggest objection to Fox News, I say, is not the scaremongering, it's the way it's reshaped the Republican party. It will misrepresent social and economic issues, and promote the more extreme elements of the party, politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, in a way that is hugely detrimental to American politics. (For the record, Rupert Murdoch disagrees, and last year claimed that Fox News "absolutely saved" the Republican party.) "Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing," says Stewart. "I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don't get turd lung disease. ~ Anonymous

SECOND AMENDMENT
A "well-regulated militia" means regulated by the government. We need prudent regulation for guns. Let's all accept that. We don't need anyone to have machine guns. We can wait a little while on a background check (but if you're white with a bowl cut, then you have to go to the back of the line, Preston). Support prudent legislation designed to keep other guns away from the mentally ill and criminal elements. If you're paranoid that all these laws are designed to take away your gun, then we're going to assume you're mentally ill or criminal. But now let's be clear: guns rock. Hunting is awesome. Keep your guns. But, like, we gotta regulate 'em, y'all. We have to. ~ Trae Crowder

Nothing is forgotten, all is permitted. In a stinking cave, muttering babies scream and scratch, furs undulate in copulation. In one corner, bright-eyed first marks are daubed on a wall. They are marks to function, marks of place, of time. They are marks to draw results and persist beyond one human lifetime. Instinct has arisen, snake-like, coiling itself into intuition and suggesting the very power of suggestion. No one noted down from a book this process, it grew from watching the elements, closeness to life-sources, death-forces that modern persons are divorced from. On this damp stone there is a curve, it is land, horizon, ejaculation, movement. ~ Genesis P-Orridge

The leaves of the trees will stroke your cheeks, The wind will blow through your chest and cleanse your soul, The magical sounds of the earth, animals and the elements will hug your ears, The positive vibrations of the earth will fall asleep next to your heart and the breathtaking beauty of the earth will ease your mind. If you allow it, the earth, in itself, will heal you. ~ Julia McCann

Whoever thinks algebra is a trick in obtaining unknowns has thought it in vain. No attention should be paid to the fact that algebra and geometry are different in appearance. Algebras (jabbre and maqabeleh) are geometric facts which are proved by propositions five and six of Book two of Elements. ~ Omar Khayyam

There's a kind of edge to what you're doing, the kind of leading edge of what you're doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. "I've pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can't I'm just fed up with that. Let's do something else."And you always think "Oh my God I've never done anything at all like that before." But, of course, in retrospect, and to an outsider, they'll say, "Oh, yeah that's typical Eno." ~ Brian Eno

Truman charged that Republicans were "Wall Street reactionaries," "gluttons of privilege," "bloodsuckers," and "plunderers." GOP legislators in the 80th Congress, he said, were "tools of the most reactionary elements" who would "skim the cream from our natural resources to satisfy their own greed." Dismissing Dewey, "whose name rhymes with hooey," Truman said, "If you send another Republican Congress to Washington, you're a bigger bunch of suckers than I think you are." "Give 'em hell, Harry!" the people shouted back. "Pour it on!"59 ~ James T. Patterson

The task is not primarily to have a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure the essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative. ~ Deborah Eisenberg

While, naturally, he has to gauge risk, to read the elements, he still often bemoans the hardships of the past. He constantly puzzles over the role of remote influences, like the after-life. He wants to know why events happen as they do, how control is exercised from beyond understanding. ~ Peter Gray

I don't think that what I'm doing [political cartooning] is necessarily left versus right. What I'm addressing is top versus bottom. If I'm not spending a lot of time making fun of the more extreme elements of the Green Party, it's because what I do is to critique power. ~ Tom Tomorrow

No one can obtain felicity by pursuit. This explains why one of the elements of being happy is the feeling that a debt of gratitude is owed, a debt impossible to pay. Now, we do not owe gratitude to ourselves. To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift. ~ Josef Pieper

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

Capitalist agricultural production prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer. ~ Karl Marx

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements. ~ Douglas Coupland

I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified system. But I didn't picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network. ~ Dave Eggers

Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends
the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!
Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever. ~ H. Rider Haggard

Sometimes I think that the long-term work of reading is to discover one by one, the books that hold the scattered elements of our nature, after which the true consummation can begin. We undertake the gradual focused exploration, nuance by nuance, of their meanings, their implications; we follow out the strands that mysteriously connect the words of another with the unformulated stuff of the self. ~ Sven Birkerts

Interest in alchemy seems to be nowadays on the rise. Whereas the educated public at large remains no doubt skeptical and indeed disdainful of the ancient discipline, there is today a deepening awareness among the better informed that what stands behind many an "exploded superstition" may be in fact a long-forgotten wisdom. Although Carl Jung was obviously exaggerating when ! he suggested that four centuries after being expelled from our universities,- alchemy stands "knocking at the door," a number of factors have conspired; to render the prospect of re-admission less remote, at least, than it had been ; during the heyday of materialism. In any case, no truly solid grounds for rejecting the ancient doctrine have yet been proposed. Take the case of the so-called four elements: earth, water, air and fire. One can be reasonably certain that these terms were not employed alchemically in their ordinary sense, but were used to designate elements, precisely, out of which substances, as we know them, are constituted. Somewhat like the quarks of modern physics, these elements are not found empirically in isolation, but occur in their multiple combinations, that is to say, as the perceptible substances that constitute what I term the corporeal domain. Now, as I have argued at length in The Quantum Enigma (Peru, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1995), corporeal objects are not in fact mere aggregates of quantum particles; and this clearly suggests that there may indeed be elements of the afo ~ Wolfgang Smith

Of the four elements water is the second in weight and the second in respect of mobility. It is never at rest until it unites with the sea ... ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Reagan survived the Iran-Contra scandal because the elements of it that were illegal (aiding anti-communist Nicaraguans) were popular and the things that were unpopular (arming the Iranians) were quite legal. ~ David Frum

How easily we accept the fact that this is a varied world, with many races, cultures, and mores. In America we rejoice in this diversity, this pluralism, which makes up the rich pattern of our national being. We should learn to accept this pluralism in ourselves, to rejoice in the truth that we human being consist of a variety of moods, impulses, traits, and emotions ... If we become pluralistic in thinking about ourselves, we shall learn to take the depressed mood or the cruel mood or the uncooperative mood for what is, one of many, fleeting, not permanent. As pluralists we take ourselves for worse as well as for better, cease demanding a brittle perfection which can lead only to inner despair. There are facets of failure in every person's makeup and there are elements of success. Both must be accepted while we try to emphasize the latter through self-knowledge. ~ Joshua Loth Liebman

When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker's mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. […] In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication. ~ Harry G. Frankfurt

When I was filming 'Ouija,' there were some elements in that that really creeped me out. ~ Olivia Cooke

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

Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and geologists, he seemed to taunt, and you'll find them. ~ Sam Kean

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. ~ D.T. Max

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

Krister Stendhal, a Lutheran minister and Harvard University Dean gave these rules of Religious understanding for reporters to use when they are reporting on a religion.

Stendahl's Three Rules of Religious Understanding

(1) When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.

(2) Don't compare your best to their worst.

(3) Leave room for "holy envy." (By this Stendahl meant that you should be willing to recognize elements in the other religious tradition or faith that you admire and wish could, in some way, be reflected in your own religious tradition or faith.) ~ Kristner Stendhal