Best 451 quotes in «description quotes» category

One single glance will conquer all descriptions.

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists - talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

Physics is the belief that a simple and consistent description of nature is possible.

Recipes are just descriptions of one person’s take on one moment in time. They’re not rules.

Ronnie had it right calling it Torture. That is a much more accurate description the way I see it.

Sainthood emerges when you can listen to someone's tale of woe and not respond with a description of your own.

Seedy wasn't a fair description for the place, because seeds imply eventual regrowth and renewal.

Selfish hedonism is not a pejorative. It is a description - an exactly accurate description of what is involved in homosexual relations.

Sisters ruin everything. It's in their job description.

The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

Terminus sniffed. “I guard borders. I don’t kill giants. It’s not in my job description.

That still feels like the most accurate description - I felt homesick, but I was home.

The limitations that we can see of the sexual description of reality are very apparent. Very few men attain enlightenment, even fewer women.

The description is not the described.

The job description for a queen changes with the times.

The description and explanation is the best part of music reviewing. There is such a thing, and you know it too, as a gift for judgment. If you have it, you can say anything you like. If you haven't got it, you don't know you haven't got it.

The fundamental principle in the analysis of propositions containing descriptions is this: Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.

The observer cannot be left out of the description of the observation.

The most lively fancy aided by the strongest description cannot equal the reality of the opera.

The observer and the universe are part of the same universe. It's what science discovered at the beginning of this century, when they say you can't tell where an atomic particle is. You know where they are, but not their speed; or you know their speed but not their place, because it depends on you. The one who describes is part of the description.

The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.

There was a time when "sound as a dollar" was a description, not a joke.

The world doesn't yield to us directly, the description of the world stands in between. So, properly speaking, we are always one step removed and our experiences of the world is always a recollection of the experience. We are perennially recollecting the instant that has just happened, just passed. Re recollect, recollect, recollect.

Trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of any goods to the public, does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principal, comes within the jurisdiction of society.

They presented a description of the world to all of us which was very limited and narrow.

To me, self-description is a calamity.

Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.

Unfortunately, unless the job description included a translation of the prologue of The Canterbury Tales, I was dreadfully under-qualified.

We live in a description of reality.

What girls do to each other is beyond description. No chinese torture comes close.

What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.

What is your one-sentence job description?

What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.

Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two.

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.

A fighter, muses Rachel, is a fighter through and through, consistently irregular, a fighting man on every scale. Fractal, fractious, with a rough complexity! Nothing she can do. A fractal, Papa once told her, is a way of seeing infinity. In Zachariah, she sees infinity. Mandelbrot famously wrote a paper called 'How Long Is the Coast of Britain?,' the answer to which, of course, is that it depends how you look at it. The closer one looks, the larger it is. And more and more intricate, on an infinite scale. There is a template for all things.

What we need now is the description of the "describer" or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer.

You are a genius beyond description, so start telling yourself that and become aware of who you really are.

Above the front door the fanlight glowed blue, delicate as wing-bones.

a constant repetition and a boundless incongruity of useless but indestructible objects.

A draught made the flames of the candles dance and the air grew thick with the smell of hot wax. Marianne's eyes had grown more and more accustomed to the candlelight and she made out knobs and swags of craving in the ceiling, flowers, cherubs, jacks-in-the-green, death's heads, hourglasses and memento mori, all covered with dust. Trunks, chests and cases were littered everywhere, covered with dusty utensils and more books even than in her father's study. He must have a special cart to himself to transport them all. Yellow weeds blossomed in the walls and somewhere moisture dripped.

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan Mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees- willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter's flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them.Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of 'coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.

All description is obscene. If it's real, if it exists, why do you need the words?

A good story or a book is all about it's power to hold it's readers still till the very last word of it's climax - complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!

Alfred is taken past this broom, and enters this room; which can only be described as 'piecemeal'. It is full of pieces of fish-market paraphernalia, pieces of military-regalia; and pieces of rusted-steel. It is full of these spiky-hooks, fishmongery-books; and saline-scalers. These bayonet-blades, grenades; and dusty loud-halers.

Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him handsome, although all the women did. Really he was almost ugly, but in a stirring, thrilling way that made her shift in her seat as she thought about him.

All kinds of weird stuff going down, whisperings in corners, significant matches struck and blown out. The whores, unoccupied, were drinking heavily. The police, occupied were drinking even more heavily. The grass in the corner wanted to drink most heavily, but lacked the poke.