Minor Quotes
More Minor Quotes
The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or Minor influences.
pierre bourdieu— Bourdieu (2001), "The Intellectual Class Struggle," New York Times, Jan. 6, 2001
The hallmark of the Minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.
robert hughes— "Alex Katz" (1986)
Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the Minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.
George Steiner— Ch. 3 (p. 170)
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of Minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
Alain de Botton— The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009, pg. 127)
Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the very first time.
margot fonteyn— p. 9 (Margot Fonteyn : Autobiography? (1975))
Whenever a massacre of Armenians is reported from Asia Minor, every one assumes that it has been carried out "under orders" from somewhere or another; no one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbours now and then.
saki— "Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped"
Minor in parvis Fortuna furit, Leviusque ferit leviora deus.
— Fortune is gentle to the lowly, and heaven strikes the humble with a light hand.
— Seneca, Hippolytus, Act IV. 1,124.
Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and Minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable.
béla bartók— "The Folk Songs of Hungary" in Pro Musica VII (October 1928)
As our faces and bodies drew nearer, gravity was not helping us at all. It took Minor struggle to come together, and we had to hold on in an effort to keep our lips aligned.
vanna bonta— p. 29 (Zero Gravity interview (2006))
In almost every single way, George and I share the same values. And if we differ on some issues, it's very, very Minor.
Laura Bush— CBS News (June 24, 2004)
Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but and absolutely marvellous Minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.
a. e. housman— John Berryman, The Paris Review, Winter 1972
We're not playing some Minor game in Scientology. It isn't cute or something to do for lack of something better. The whole agonized future of this planet, every Man, Woman and Child on it, and your own destiny for the next endless trillions of years depend on what you do here and now with and in Scientology.
l. ron hubbard— "Keeping Scientology Working" (7 February 1965)
The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a local, perverted, nationalistic cult, by which a few major artists and many Minor ones were honored for their Germanness, not their talent.
christopher isherwood— Christopher and His Kind (1976) ISBN 0-8166-3863-2, p. 65
Among Minor alterations, I may mention the substitution for the name political economy of the single convenient term economics. I cannot help thinking that it would be well to discard, as quickly as possible, the old troublesome double-worded name of our science.
william stanley jevons— Preface To The Second Edition, p. 8
"Ilsa" has been such a Minor part of my career, that I find it amusing that some persons only know me for that association.
dyanne thorne— Fabian Paffendorf (November, 2003). Dyanne Thorne Interview. wicked-vision.com. Retrieved on 2007-09-30.
— (also available in German)
People are too apt to treat God as if he were a Minor royalty.
herbert beerbohm tree— "The Importance of Humour in Tragedy: Presidential Address Delivered at the Birmingham Midland Institute, 1915", Nothing Matters, and Other Stories (1917) p. 207.
Warlimont became renowned, with Keitel and Jodl, as one of the German officers most loyal to Hitler and was accordingly sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment in 1949 as a Minor war criminal...
walter warlimont— Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War
When I wrote about Hank Williams 'A hundred floors above me in the tower of song', it's not some kind of inverse modesty. I know where Hank Williams stands in the history of popular song. Your Cheatin' Heart, songs like that, are sublime, in his own tradition, and I feel myself a very Minor writer.
hank williams— Leonard Cohen, Who held a gun to Leonard Cohen's head? The Guardian (2006-06-20)
Economy is the first and great article (economy such as I understand it) in my financial creed. The controversy between direct and indirect taxation holds a Minor, though important place.
william ewart gladstone— Letter to his brother Robertson of the Financial Reform Association at Liverpool (1859), as quoted in Gladstone as Financier and Economist (1931) by F. W. Hirst, p. 241
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a Minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
stephen hawking— Der Spiegel (17 October 1988)
In this state, dig it, you get twenty years for sale of dope to a Minor. You only get five to ten for manslaughter. So like, the thing is, if you're selling to a kid and cops come, shoot the kid real quick!
abbie hoffman— "Chicago", on the spoken word album Wake Up America! (1970)
Whether we take these characters then, or such Minor ones as those which are derivable from the proportional length of the spines in the cervical vertebrae, and the like, there is no doubt whatsoever as to the marked difference between Man and the Gorilla; but there is as little, that equally marked differences, of the very same order, obtain between the Gorilla and the lower apes.
thomas henry huxley— Ch.2, p.92
For a country to have a great writer ... is like having another government. That’s why no régime has ever loved great writers, only Minor ones.
aleksandr solzhenitsyn— Innokenty, in Ch. 57Variant translation: For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees, in a higher or lower grade, of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a very Minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.
— Section I: “The Old Order Changeth”, p. 5.
Cui non conveniet sua res, ut calceus olim, Si pede major erit subvertet; si Minor, uret.
— If a man's fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.
— Horace, Epistles, I. 10. 42.
The nursery of brooding Pelicans, The dormitory of their dead, had vanish'd, And all the Minor spots of rock and verdure, The abodes of happy millions, were no more.
james montgomery— James Montgomery, The Pelican Island (1827), Canto VI, line 74.
It's my observation that gardeners and gardening for a very long time have had to take a back seat. Architects are very famous; they've got huge projects. What goes on in and around them has been relegated to a very Minor role.
— Robert Irwin, in The California Garden :At the Getty, roots hold fast, Los Angeles Times, 24 July 2008|
Patience, n. A Minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce— Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary.
There are certain figures in the arts who, although Minor in accomplishment and equivocal in their aesthetic influence, are so completely representative of the spirit of their age....
— Hilton Kramer, in Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1987-2005, p.168
