Clumsy Quotes
More Clumsy Quotes
For the eye is always in search of beauty, and if we do not gratify its desire for pleasure by a proportionate enlargement in these measures, and thus make compensation for ocular deception, a clumsy and awkward appearance will be presented to the beholder.
— Chapter III, Sec. 13 (Book III)
The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
— Appendix, Scepticism of the Instrument
A clumsy wolf will frighten the sheep away, a clumsy thief will be caught.
— As quoted in Will Graves, Wolves in Russia: Anxiety throughout the Ages, (2007)
My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.
— 1928 Letter to Aldous and Maria Huxley,15 Aug.
I believe that all novels?deal with character, and that it is to express characternot to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.
(Adeline) Virginia ne e Stephen Woolf— 1924 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown'.
What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. However, and this is the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector.
— Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Richard Kostelanetz and Joseph Darby (Wadsworth, 1996, ISBN 0-028-64581-2)
I foresee great refinements in the field of short-pulse microwave signaling, whereby several simultaneous programs may occupy the same channel, in sequence, with incredibly swift electronic communication; vastly important developments in microwave technique, whereby present clumsy connecting leads between wall or floor sockets and electric devices like toasters and vacuum sweepers may become unnecessary; gigantic magnetrons and klystrons, or their successors, will generate megawatts in microwaves; living rooms and their occupants will be heated by high-frequency waves from walls or ceilings; short waves will be generally used in the kitchen for roasting and baking, almost instantaneously
Lee De Forest— "Dawn of the Electronic Age", Popular Mechanics, January 1952
For the first time he looked into his heart and wrote, and thus for the first time he touched the hearts of others; the cold style took fire, and beneath the clumsy periods welled tears.
evelyn beatrice hall— Ch. 1 : D'Alembert: The Thinker, p.29
Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.
william mckinley— Speech delivered at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York (September 5, 1901)
My Saviour! fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my clumsy hand has drawn of a Divine life, with the fullness of Thy perfect picture. I feel the beauty I cannot realize; robe me in Thine unutterable purity.
frederick william robertson— P. 77. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
You may hear people say that submarines have done away with the battleship, and that aircraft have annulled the mastery of the sea. That is what our pessimists say. But do you imagine that the clumsy submarine or the fragile aeroplane is really the last word of science?
john buchan— Ch. 3 "Tells of a Midsummer Night"
Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century's "hidden hand" than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism. In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.
john james cowperthwaite— March 30, 1962, page 133.
We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end.
camille paglia— p. ix (Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992))
Ignorance, which is contented and clumsy, will produce what is imperfect, but not offensive. But ignorance dis contented and dexterous, learning what it cannot understand, and imitating what it cannot enjoy, produces the most loathsome forms of manufacture that can disgrace or mislead humanity.
john ruskin— Lecture V, section 88.
Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man’s existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.
Arthur Schopenhauer— Vol. 2, Ch. 13, § 160
A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
wallace stevens— Journal entry (26 July 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 3
For the eye is always in search of beauty, and if we do not gratify its desire for pleasure by a proportionate enlargement in these measures, and thus make compensation for ocular deception, a clumsy and awkward appearance will be presented to the beholder.
vitruvius— Chapter III, Sec. 13
We accepted a definition of ourselves which confined the self to the source and to the limitations of conscious attention. This definition is miserably insufficient, for in fact we know how to grow brains and eyes, ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know how to walk and breathe, talk and think only we can't put it into words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details.
alan watts— (page 112) (The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966))
Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.
— William McKinley Speech delivered at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York (September 5, 1901)
Quiet, Robin, quiet! You lovers are such clumsy summer-flies, Forever buzzing at your lady's face.
— Alfred Tennyson, The Foresters, Act IV, scene 1.
FORTRAN the "infantile disorder" , by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?". 1975-06-18. Retrieved on 2008-08-20.
The Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes that women need more initiating, more time for maturing of sexual feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blunderer.
Margaret Mead— p.91 (Coming of age in Samoa, 1928)
Is earnest enough, may earnest attract or lead to light; Is light enough, if hands in clumsy frenzy, flimsy whimsically, enlist; Is light enough when this bewilderment crying against the dark shuts down the shades? Dilute confusion. Find and explode our mist.
gwendolyn brooks— "garbageman: the man with the orderly mind"
To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical. "To illustrate a principle ," says Bagehot , "you must exaggerate much and you must omit much." As to the quantity of absolute truth in a thought : it seems to me the more comprehensive and unobjectionable a thought becomes, the more clumsy and unexciting it gets. I like half-truths of a certain kind they are interesting and they stimulate.
Eric Hoffer— Entry (1950)
