Charles James
Fashion Designer
"There are not many original shapes or silhouettes -- only a million variations."
Variation quotes
Variation
141 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Novelist, Playwright
"It was certainly not this mummified and outrageously painted old woman he was seeing before him, but the entire "female species," as it was his custom to call women. The individual disappeared, the features were obliterated, whether young or senile, beautiful or ugly - those were mere unimportant variations. Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite."
Charles Darwin
Naturalist, Geologist
"Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relationship to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring."
Byron Katie
Author, Speaker
"Every (stressful thought) is a variation on a single theme: This shouldn't be happening. I shouldn't be having this experience. God is unjust. Life isn't fair."
Charles Darwin
Naturalist, Geologist
"Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps."
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Variation quotes (page 1 of 8)
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"Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft."
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"The variations I've composed on the graceful Neapolitan ditty, 'Oh Mamma, Mama Cara,' outshine everything. I can't describe it"
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"There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme."
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"It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life."
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"Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations."
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"Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his."
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"The interaction of the variation in our genes is what's responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor."
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"It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed."
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"Every rock song is some variation of 'Pull down your pants'"
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"Films have gotten leaner and leaner, cutting out all variations from the story line."
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"...the characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone."
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"All music is rehash. There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme. Try to tell the kids in the Seventies who were screaming to the Bee Gees that their music was just The Beatles redone. There is nothing wrong with the Bee Gees."
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"You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous."
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"His knowledge is not like ours, which has three tenses; present, past, and future. God's knowledge has no change or variation."
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"His brothers were the type; he was the variation."
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"There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious."
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"The thoughts which the word "God" suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves."
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"My works have always been unjoined. People were always making variations of my works, and I just said, "I don't want to know." You can't put limits on those pieces. You can't be there all of the time when they're installed."
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"The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of form are unimportant."
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"Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself."
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