Acute Quotes

#1. We're highly social animals - I'm told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

Alan Alda

#2. I have an acute sense of delicacy. Naturally I am prejudiced in favour of virtue.
("The Accursed Cordonnier")

Bernard Capes

#3. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

Mark Slouka

#4. All the arts are based on the senses. What they do for the person who practices them, and also the persons interested in them, is make that particular sense more active and more acute.

Henry Moore

#5. Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga - stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

Edward Hoagland

#6. Suddenly, I developed an acute case of Tourette's syndrome, Fuck! That fucking-shit-son-of-an-ass-monkey-dick-weasel!

Christine Zolendz

#7. My father's drinking was sometimes a problem. And a great deal went unspoken. He was not particularly acute or articulate about the emotions. But he was very affectionate towards me.

Ian McEwan

#8. When we are suddenly released from an acute absorbing bodily pain, our heart and senses leap out in new freedom; we think even the noise of streets harmonious, and are ready to hug the tradesman who is wrapping up our change.

George Eliot

#9. The battles your enemy wages against you - especially the most acute, consistent ones - possess a personality to them, an intimate knowledge of who you are and the precise pressure points where you can most easily be taken down.

Priscilla Shirer

#10. Strictly speaking, there is but one real evil: I mean acute pain. All other complaints are so considerably diminished by time that it is plain the grief is owing to our passion, since the sensation of it vanishes when that is over.

Mary Wortley Montagu

#11. All of this caused Kiyoaki constant pain. In comparison with Satoko's public humiliation, however, he did not even have a slighting remark to contend with. And however acute his private agony, it was, after all, the torment of a coward.

Yukio Mishima

#12. To win the Champions League with Porto, you have to be tactically acute

Paul Merson

#13. She knew exactly how he was feeling, because experience had taught her that the kind of excitement she was feeling at that moment was never, ever one-sided. On the contrary, she knew that it was born of acute and mutual anticipation, and she knew, too, that it would not be denied.

Jack Whyte

#14. I've either got an acute case of hypochondria or I'm falling apart at the age of twenty-three.

Chris Martin

#15. The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#16. The fear of vomiting, which for me is one of the most original and most acute of my fears, is actually fairly common. Emetophobia, it's called, and by some estimates, it's the fifth most common specific phobia.

Scott Stossel

#17. The weird thing about this business - and I'm sure this operates in many other things, but it's very present and acute in this business - is that a lot of people don't realize that they have power. Particularly actors.

Lili Taylor

#18. The acute attention that ravens pay to our subtle signals underscores the degree to which they can draw conclusions from our body language. They perceive our intentions even though we may not be consciously aware of them.

John M. Marzluff

#19. All I do know is that in six hours I could be suffering from acute existence failure.

Alastair Reynolds

#20. We have an opportunity to create a future where we are actually encouraging providers to keep people away from acute care, whenever possible.

Kathleen Sebelius

#21. The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

Alfred North Whitehead

#22. None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much.

Lydia M. Child

#23. From time to time he would feel that acute surge go over him, like his blood was too hot all of a sudden, dying away into that warm unhappy feeling that fiddle music gave him.

William Faulkner

#24. Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.

N. Scott Momaday

#25. Occasionally I am smitten with an acute case of Smug. It can happen to anyone, but it happens most often to people who think they've been especially clever.

Kevin Hearne

#26. Unhappiness isn't at its most acute point until a realistic chance of happiness, sufficiently close, has been envisioned.

Michel Houellebecq

#27. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic.

Donna J. Haraway

#28. The mad fucker just laughed that insane laugh and pulled his sword out of his ass. Zeus, now afflicted with acute pietism, gasped and asked him to do that again. Jupiter slapped him to to the ground, and yelled for him to get his priorities in order.

Kevin Hearne

#29. Why prove to a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not let him save his face? He didn't ask for your opinion. He didn't want it. Why argue with him? Always avoid the acute angle.

Dale Carnegie

#30. A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: "There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon." I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon.

Mary Norris

#31. Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#32. You are quite acute for a mental stillborn

Dan Simmons

#33. I could not excuse a man's having more music than love - more ear than eye - a more acute sensibility to fine sounds than to my feelings.

Jane Austen

#34. Suffering is none the less acute and much more lasting when it is put into words.

Evelyn Waugh

#35. I think we all suffer from acute blindness at times. Life is a constant journey of trying to open your eyes. I'm just beginning my journey, and my eyes aren't fully open yet.

Olivia Thirlby

#36. No information could be got from the lady herself, who was temporarily insane from an acute attack of brain fever.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#37. In Hitler the rare union has taken place between the most acute logical thinker and truly profound philosopher, and the iron man of action ... I follow no leadership but that of Adolf Hitler and of God.

Hermann Goring

#38. Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

Andrew Solomon

#39. The most important innovators often don't need any technologies - just imagination and acute sensitivity to people's needs.

Geoff Mulgan

#40. It is said in Java that the tiger's hearing is so acute that hunters must keep their nose hairs cut lest the tiger hear the breath whistle through their nostrils.

Peter Matthiessen

#41. A schlemihl is a schlemihl. What can you "make" out of one? What can one make out of himself? You reach a point, and Profane knew he had reached it, where you know how much you can and cannot do. But every now and again he got attacks of acute optimism.

Thomas Pynchon

#42. Little closer, as if I hadn't quite heard him. I leaned at an angle five degrees less acute than the waitress had. - What's that? - I was wondering if there's a melody in there. - It just went out for a smoke. It'll be back in a minute. But I take it that you don't

Amor Towles

#43. I once cured an amateur skydiver of acute acrophobia. Now you could say he was all right because he was able to jump, but you could also say he was not all right because he was so stoned he neglected to open his parachute.

Robert Preston

#44. The need to encourage entrepreneurship and ensure that young people have the opportunity to start new businesses is acute.

Edmund Phelps

#45. Someone who was experiencing a break-up was the same as that of someone undergoing acute physical pain.

Preeti Shenoy

#46. Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring

Adam Phillips

#47. ...I had an acute sense that the walls were closing in on "real" Christians... For the first time in my life, I felt like a persecuted minority.

J.D. Vance

#48. The impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle is actually as overwhelming in effect as the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo.

Wassily Kandinsky

#49. For a man as keen as he on getting into bed with women, keeping hidden the full enormity of his fatness was a chronic problem. Its most acute form naturally came up when someone new had to be hustled or cajoled past the point of no return. That point tended to get later and later as his belly waxed.

Kingsley Amis

#50. A small insect, clearly suffering from acute depression, decided that my open mouth was the ideal route for a suicide mission. With kamikaze-like determination, it rocketed down my throat and splattered against my tonsils. - Calma Harrison

Barry Jonsberg

#51. You reach a point where the pain gets so acute you do not feel it anymore, but to reach that point, you experience so much pain that you're unable to forget the suffering that led you there.

Christopher Rees

#52. What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#53. A sensitive boy's humiliations may be very good fun for ordinary thick-skinned grown-ups; but to the boy himself theyareso acute, so ignominious, that he cannot confess themcannot but deny them passionately.

George Bernard Shaw

#54. During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump.

Madeleine L'Engle

#55. The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now

George Orwell

#56. The wren-box problem is becoming more acute each year, for wrens now demand better housing conditions and labor-saving devices.

Will Cuppy

#57. I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music; but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all those born to understand it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#58. Half of the receipts in our cookbooks are mere murder to such constitutions and stomachs as we grow here ... in America, owing to our brighter skies and more fervid climate, we have developed an acute, nervous delicacy of temperament far more akin to that of France than of England.

Catharine Beecher

#59. We must pass through acute loneliness to learn that we are not alone.

Sandra Lee Dennis

#60. Being a reactionary is not about believing in certain solutions, but about having an acute sense of the complexity of the problems.

Nicolas Gomez Davila

#61. The pettiest and slightest nuisances are the most acute; and as small letters hurt and tire the eyes most, so do trifling matters sting us most.

Michel De Montaigne

#62. The temperature in that hangar would sometimes get down to 40 degrees, and very often I had to put on long underwear, which was so restrictive I suffered from an acute vascular disorder for days afterward.

Larry David

#63. Constructions of a-rhythmical forms, the clash between concrete and abstract forms ... The acute angle is passionate and dynamic, expressing will and a penetrating force.

Carlo Carra

#64. When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only - What a crib from Rochefoucauld!

Ouida

#65. We "activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies," Sapolsky writes, "but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.

Paul Tough

#66. He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine.

Baruch Spinoza

#67. I think you learn how to fall well when you're figure skating. Your reflexes are very acute.

Jud Tylor

#68. For how is it possible, says that acute man, that when a concept is given me, I can go beyond it and connect with it another which is not contained in it, in such a manner as if that latter necessarily belonged to the former?

Immanuel Kant

#69. And for Narnie, hours without them went by, and then days, and then weeks. And in between those seconds and minutes and hours and day and weeks was the most acute sense of loneliness she'd ever experienced

Melina Marchetta

#70. Here have been many times in my life when I have felt helpless. It is perhaps the most acute pain a person can know, founded in frustration and ventless rage.

R.A. Salvatore

#71. I love it when he cocks an eyebrow whenever I say something he finds clever or amusing.
I love listening to his boots clomp across my bedroom ceiling.
I love that the accent over his first name is called an acute accent, and that he has a cute accent.

Stephanie Perkins

#72. Before now poetry has taken notice
Of wars, and what are wars but politics
Transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?

Robert Frost

#73. For example, the opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy, etc.

Roman Jakobson

#74. When I breathe down my nose to say how do you do to a horse, it can hear that breath at anything up to twenty yards, for horses have the most acute sense of hearing.

Barbara Woodhouse

#75. What worse illness can there be than acute conventionality. You should pray every night that you don't wake up with it.

George Weinberg

#76. Supposing you've got an acute appendicitis. You've got to be operated on tonight. Would you like to have a surgeon who's read some books of anatomy and knows how to do that operation - or would you prefer to have a surgeon who refused to read all books about anatomy and relied on his own instinct?

David Ogilvy

#77. There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semi-colon. (the author is actually quoting a friend here)

Mary Norris

#78. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#79. What we should admire is the acute fulfillment of the unspoken assumptions, the smooth harmony of the whole activity, which only become evident in the final success.

Carl Von Clausewitz

#80. Chandler again: "I have never liked anyone who disliked cats, because I've always found an element of acute selfishness in their dispositions.

The New Yorker

#81. This man was no servant. She looked up at him in acute agitation and knew: this man was now her master.

V.S. Carnes

#82. The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression.

Harold Pinter

#83. There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

Robert A. Heinlein

#84. Only an artist as preternaturally acute and copacetic, as oddly visionary and just odd as Richard Artschwager, would be able to lay out the whole course of human evolution and have it make some kind of sense while also seeming like a dazzling insight.

Jerry Saltz

#85. I have never had demands on me as acute as when I was a parish priest.

Justin Welby

#86. That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#87. It was just public opinion in an acute state of indigestion.

William Faulkner

#88. Like all her friends, I miss her greatly ... But ... I am sure there is no case for lamentation ... Virginia Woolf got through an immense amount of work, she gave acute pleasure in new ways, she pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness. Those are facts.

E. M. Forster

#89. In a moment of acute anxiety a year earlier, John Adams had wondered what would happen if "the multitude, the vulgar, the herd, the rabble" maintained such open defiance of authority. 13

Ron Chernow

#90. Then, cutting across it all like a stick through the sand, a child's voice wailed, an acute, high-pitched sound, such as a small animal makes when, out of sheer boredom, you break its leg.

Zadie Smith

#91. He devoted a considerable amount of his acute intelligence to the cause of doing as little as possible.

James Herriot

#92. There's nothing wrong with me ... except acute chronic fear.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#93. I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

John Updike

#94. Ninety percent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment.

Terry Pratchett

#95. Are you dying?"
Cato lit his cigarette. "It's not acute, perhaps, but we're all dying, Harry.

Jo Nesbo

#96. There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.

Alain De Botton

#97. Every child is at some point a small Perseus, and this infatuation with the dark and the lonely is for most people an acute condition, best caught early in life like mumps, and which seldom recurs.

Luca Turin

#98. The first and most important impact of climate change on human civilisation will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply. Eating regularly is a non-negotiable activity and countries that cannot feed their people are unlikely to be reasonable about it.

Gwynne Dyer

#99. What we know from World War I is that some of our troops had acute symptoms of exposure to chemicals, had bad health and died because of chemical exposure in World War I.

Christopher Shays

#100. To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.

W. Somerset Maugham