Best 170 quotes in «peculiar quotes» category

The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.

The total amount paid out in dividends is roughly equal to the amount lost in trading and investment advice, so net dividends to shareholders are zero. This is a very peculiar way to run a republic.

The soul is subject to health and disease, just as is the body. The health and disease of both . . . undoubtedly depend upon beliefs and customs, which are peculiar to mankind.

The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels.

The United States are under peculiar obligations to become a holy people unto the Lord our God.

The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

Very great personages are not likely to form very just estimates either of others or of themselves; their knowledge of themselves is obscured by the flattery of others; their knowledge of others is equally clouded by circumstances peculiar to themselves. For in the presence of the great, the modest are sure to suffer from too much diffidence, and the confident from too much display.

Vegetables, which are the lowest in the scale of living things, are fed by roots, which, implanted in the native soil, select by the action of a peculiar mechanism, different subjects, which serve to increase and to nourish them.

Virtue is only a conflict by which we get the mastery of our failings; that, by which every man proves his peculiar power of understanding the will and spirit of God, is only a silent working of the inner man.

We are sure living in a peculiar time. You get morefor not working than you will for working, and morefor not raising a hog than for raising it.

We live in a society which is heading in one direction, so it's good to have at least a few friends who share the same values and can encourage us and help us to remember that we're not alone or peculiar, but that what we're doing is a very valid way of life. This will encourage us to put the Dharma at the centre of our life and not the periphery, to use our daily life as our Dharma practice.

We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.

We may all be a peculiar lot...often broke, often dissatisfied because we're not doing more and better work...but we know how to have a ball that makes the rest of the world seem square.

Were not the eye made to receive the rays of the sun, it could not behold the sun; if the peculiar power of God lay not in us, how could the godlike charm us?

We should never invoke the spirit of antiquity as our authority. Spirits are peculiar things; they cannot be grasped with the hands and be held up before others. Spirits reveal themselves only to spirits. The most direct and concise method would be, in this case as well, to prove the possession of the only redeeming faith by good works.

To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.

We must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life.

What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought'.

What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.

We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.

What's his offense? Groping for trout in a peculiar river.

Which I wish to remark-- And my language is plain,-- That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.

When she had gone upstairs, he walked to a window and stood looking up at the sky. His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one's head.

When thus the heart is in a vein Of tender thought, the simplest strain Can touch it with peculiar power.

You see, astrology is like fortune-telling. If you can't get it right, you say, "Well, if Venus was doing something peculiar in the background, that would alter your prognostication--because, of course, astrology is rubbish.

You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.

You're peculiar, you're aggravating, yet you're easy to forgive. You say you're seventeen?..How odd. How strange. And my wife thirty and yet you seem so much older at times. I can't get over it.

Develop your own skills and styles. In music, designing, electronics, etc., you may have a peculiar way of exposing your dreams in an uncommon way

Early in life we recognize certain talents in ourselves, and we focus on those to the exclusion of others. It's not that nothing else is possible, but that nothing else was nurtured.

God created you not as an ordinary personality, but eminent, peculiar, and with a special assignment

Have a peculiar passion, audacity and boldness that see farther and further into the outer space.

I'm insane. I'll admit that. I have that awful condition: cleithrophobia. Father knew all of this, of course, but nowadays he never asks direct questions. I was determined to show him the world outside should be invited in--celebrated. I had every intention of doing the same thing tomorrow, and all nights thereafter, until he conceded, or, I made my escape to gay Paree.

Normality is much less captivating than the extraordinary.

By stepping outside your comfort zone to do something peculiar, you confirm that you can do more than you've done. Move out!

It's forbidden to bite a woman's arse. In the absence of a legal precedent, the Imams decided to apply human law to the guilty monkey, whoever it turned out to be. They narrowed it down to Bosco or Shin Bone. The victim was unable to distinguish one monkey from the other.

My face is shaped like a face, and my body like a body, but my thoughts are very unusual. Piano from the third floor. Daisies on a roof.

One or two steps alone do not guarantee the evidence of your success unless you have your own peculiar definition for success. And I assure you; that definition is wrong! Do it again and again!

Peculiar I say, how so often the smallest, most seemingly insignificant details later unveil their faces as vital means for progression.

The comfort was peculiarly chilling.

I'll never understand ninety-nine percent of humanity. - Enoch

What would Golan Do? That way I can ask myself before I do anything. Before I take a dump. How would Dr. Golan want me to take this dump? Should I bank it off the side or go straight down the middle? What would be the most psychologically beneficial dump I could take?

There´s always use in fighting,” said Emma. “Especially when it makes terrible people cry.

To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was “system,” and indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy was “industry”, indecision when right was “caution”, and blind stubbornness when wrong, “determination.

When you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there was no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union - each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that can buffet an air-liner for no reason at all. An attitude or belief which you had never suspected, one so peculiar (at least to you) that it seemed nearly psychotic. And then you tread lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to really know another.

When you are convinced that what you offer is yours, whether it be mediocre or of standard quality, your originality will make people love you in a way you did not expect.

When you make weirdness into a puzzle to be solved, you make LOST