Surroundings Quotes
More Surroundings Quotes
For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but its surroundings bring it to life – the air and the light, which vary continually.
Claude Monet— Claude Monet, (ca. 1891); Quoted in: Discovering Art, – The life time and work of the World’s greatest Artists - 'MONET', K.E. Sullivan, Brockhamptonpress, London 2004, p. 56
If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand. Again and again, when I have been at a loss how to proceed, I have just had to wait until I have felt the mathematics led me by the hand. It has led me along an unexpected path, a path where new vistas open up, a path leading to new territory, where one can set up a base of operations, from which one can survey the surroundings and plan future progress.
paul dirac— As quoted in The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (2009) by Graham Farmelo, p. 435
For the most part, these are not new lessons, but lessons learned in different circumstances and surroundings. The fact that they are not new is of course a lesson in itself — we must continually strive to benefit from past experiences and structure our management so that past related experience can be brought to bear on current problems.
john h. disher— "Skylab Lessons Learned" (22 September 1975) at NASA Office of Logic Design
I am so used to plunging into the unknown that any other surroundings and form of existence strike me as exotic and unsuitable for human beings.
werner herzog— 31 May 1981 diary entry (pg. 248 of Herzog's book Conquest of the Useless)
One musn’t be misled by the amiable, bumbling persona. He is a toughly intelligent man moving confidently in any kind of surroundings from Windsor Castle to Birdland.
humphrey lyttelton— Philip Larkin [1]
To see is one thing; to picture or visualise is another. A person can see things, only when his eyes are open, and when his surroundings are illuminated; but he can have pictures in his mind’s eye, when his eyes are shut and when the world is dark.
Gilbert Ryle— Ch. VIII: Imagination, (2) Picturing and Seeing
A person influenced by circumstances can become viciously envious or affectionately kind. Our company and our surroundings have a crucial effect on our consciousness. How important it is to be an instrument to bring out the inherent good of each other rather than the worst.
radhanath swami— (?)
I didn't like the King's Cross world: it was grimy and dirty. I always envisioned myself in much more romantic and grand surroundings. I never really thought that I belonged to the working-class area at all.
kenneth williams— Quoted in Daily Mail, 31st October 2008.
If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.
ludwig wittgenstein— p. 50e (Culture and Value (1980))
To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.
gilbert keith chesterton— Chapter XIV "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family"
.. art and life are no longer separate domains.. ..The word ‘art’ no longer has anything to say to us. In place of that, we (= De Stijl) insist upon the construction of our surroundings according to creative laws, deriving from a fixed principle. (on integration of art in life, 1918)
theo van doesburg— "Abstract Art", Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson 1990, p. 85
It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory or rationality, rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, "objectivity", "truth", it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.
paul karl feyerabend— Pg. 27 & 28, italics are Feyerabend's
His light blue eyes behind his spectacles were like those of a baby who remembers his previous incarnation and is more amused than dismayed to find himself reborn in new surroundings. He had a baby's vulnerability, which is also the invulnerability of a creature whom one dare not harm.
e. m. forster— Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (1976) ISBN 0374520364 , ch. 6 (p. 106)
In my present insistence on high standards you will see that there is less self-indulgence than resolve and application. I do not let the Christian monopolize the ideal of perfection. I have my own virtue, which I am constantly cultivating and refining by teaching myself not to tolerate in me or my surroundings anything but the exquisite.
andré gide— Maurice in “Characters,” p. 298
The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world . The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process.
carl jung— The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913)
The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind .
john maynard keynes— Chapter I, pg.3
Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe ; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
thomas mann— Ch. 1 (The Magic Mountain (1924))
When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it's light, and sometimes it gets very dark.
The Weeknd— Canadian singer, songwriter and record producer.
Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state.
thomas mann— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Ch. 1 (1924)
People are very flexible and learn to adjust to strange surroundings they can become accustomed to read Lisp and Fortran programs, for example.
— Leon Sterling and Ehud Shapiro, Art of PROLOG, MIT Press
Nevertheless even under these [misfortunes] the force of nobility shines out, when a man bears calmly many great disasters, not from insensibility, but because he is generous and of a great soul. Setting happiness then, as we do, not in the outward surroundings of man, but in his inward state, we may fairly say that no one who has attained to the bliss of virtue will ever justly become an object of pity or contempt.
— St. George William Joseph Stock, Lectures in the Lyceum or Aristotle's ethics for English readers (1897), p. 47
It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form.
ernst ludwig kirchner— Letter to K.E. Osthaus, 23 December 1917; as quoted in "Kirchner and the berlin street", ed. Deborah Wye, Moma, New York, 2008, p. 36
Do the identifications with fictions, the inner, tidal motions of pathos and libido which the novel, the film, the painting, the symphony unleash within us somehow immunize us against the humbler, less formed, but actual claims of suffering and of need in our surroundings? Does the cry in the tragic play muffle, even blot out, the cry in the street?
George Steiner— Ch. 1 (p. 144)
