Peculiar quotes
298 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there."
"In abstract mathematics, of course operations alter those particular relations which are involved in the considerations of number and space, and the results of operations are those peculiar results which correspond to the nature of the subjects of operation."
"We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)"
"Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?"
"People have a peculiar pleasure in making converts, that is, in causing others to enjoy what they enjoy, thus finding their own likeness represented and reflected back to them."
"One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all."
"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."
"My sister is a very peculiar lady. When we were young, I wasn't allowed to talk to her friends. Now I'm not allowed to talk to her children, nor are they permitted to see me. This is the nature of the lady. Doesn't bother me at all."
"It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time."
"In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language."
"The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government."
"Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind."
"Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times - almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I've seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it."
"Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge."
"The peculiar doctrine of Christianity is that of a universal sacrifice and perpetual propitiation."
"Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason."
"Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing."
"Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one."
"The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience."
"The people of western Missouri are, in some respects, very peculiar. We will take Jackson county where I was born for instance. In that section the people seemed to be born fighters, the instinct being inherited from a long line of ancestors."
