Convention Quotes - 2
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"The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry."
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More Convention Quotes
To the Lords of convention 'twas Claver'se who spoke, 'Ere the King's crown shall fall there are crowns to be broke; So let each Cavalier who loves honour and me, Come follow the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.'
— 1830 The Doom of Devorgoil, act 2, sc.2,'Bonny Dundee', stanza1.
A convention has to be something that more than one person is moved to take hold of. It's a convention to call your sweetheart "dumplin" or "honeybun." It would also be a convention to call her "gulag," if she would stand for it, which she won't, and why would you want to be around someone who would?
roy blount— Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 66
To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated.
sri aurobindo— 4 December 1893
In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?
eugène delacroix— 13 January 1857 (p. 334)
Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, colour by convention; atoms and Void [alone] exist in reality.
Democritus— Freeman (1948) , p. 142Variant: By convention [nomos] sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.Durant (1939) , Ch. XVI, §II, p. 353; citing C. Bakewell, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy, New York, 1909, "Fragment O" (Diels), p. 60
... les traités de mécanique ne distinguent pas bien nettement ce qui est expérience, ce qui est raisonnement mathématique, ce qui est convention, ce qui est hypothèse.
henri poincaré— ... treatises on mechanics do not clearly distinguish between what is experiment, what is mathematical reasoning, what is convention, and what is hypothesis.Ch. VI: The Classical Mechanics? as translated by George Bruce Halsted (1913)
Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.
Rainer Maria Rilke— Letter Four (16 July 1903)
After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquillity of a political convention.
adlai stevenson— As quoted in The New York Times (14 August 1964).
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
tom stoppard— Ruth, Act I (Night and Day (1978))
By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.
thomas szasz— p. 167 (The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997))
" Elohim ," the name for the creative power in Genesis , is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as " God ," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH , mispronounced Jehovah , later still.
— Robert Anton Wilson, in Everything Is Under Control (1998) "Genesis", p. 197
Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, colour by convention; atoms and Void [alone] exist in reality.
— Durant (1939) , Ch. XVI, §II, p. 353; citing C. Bakewell, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy, New York, 1909, "Fragment O" (Diels), p. 60
Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. ~ Abraham Lincoln
— used 15 February 2008, proposed by Jeff Q
A wise man once said, "convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through."
learned hand— "The Preservation of Personality" commencement address at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania (2 June 1927); also in The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses (1952), p. 32.
It's hard for me to see how members of al Qaeda could be considered prisoners of war. I think they clearly do not fit within the prescriptions of the Geneva convention.
eric holder— January 28, 2002. CNN transcript
When trade is at stake, it is your last entrenchment; you must defend it, or perish...Sir, Spain knows the consequence of a war in America; whoever gains, it must prove fatal to her...is this any longer a nation? Is this any longer an English Parliament, if with more ships in your harbours than in all the navies of Europe; with above two millions of people in your American colonies, you will bear to hear of the expediency of receiving from Spain an insecure, unsatisfactory, dishonourable convention?
— Denouncing the Spanish Convention of Prado in the House of Commons (6 March, 1739).William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. 6-7.
“At the 1992 Republican National convention, Pat Buchanan called Democrats political cross-dressers for attempting portray themselves… as something they weren’t… Until recently, I had assumed he meant this as a criticism.”
david a. ridenour— David A. Ridenour, "Say it Ain't So, Pat," Tampa Tribune, November 21, 1995Referring to Pat Buchanan's characterization of a 40% increase in Medicare spending over seven years as a "cut."
In pulp fiction it is a rigid convention that the hero’s shoulders and the heroine’s balcon constantly threaten to burst their bonds, a possibility which keeps the audience in a state of tense expectancy. Unfortunately for the fans, however, recent tests reveal that the wisp of chiffon which stands between the publisher and the postal laws has the tensile strength of drop-forged steel.
s. j. perelman— "Captain Future, Block That Kick!", The Most of S. J. Perelman (1992) p. 72
" Elohim ," the name for the creative power in Genesis , is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as " God ," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean " goddesses ." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH , mispronounced Jehovah , later still.
robert anton wilson— Genesis, p. 197
