Contrivance Quotes

#1. The reason that the little things are more important than the big ones, turns out to be very simple: one can fake the big things in one's behaviour, but not the little things. The little things lack the three "f's": feigning, fabrication, fakeness. Plus the most important "c": contrivance.

Nicos Hadjicostis

#2. Regulation is useful and proper, when aimed at the prevention of fraud or contrivance, manifestly injurious to other kinds of production, or to the public safety, and not at prescribing the nature of the products and the methods of fabrication.

Jean-Baptiste Say

#3. My Jesus! What a lovable contrivance this holy Sacrament was - that You would hide under the appearance of bread to make Yourself loved and to be available for a visit by anyone who desires You!

Alphonsus Liguori

#4. We all dread a bodily paralysis, and would make use of every contrivance to avoid it; but none of us is troubled about a paralysis of the soul.

Epictetus

#5. At each increase of knowledge, as well as on the contrivance of every new tool, human labour becomes abridged.

Charles Babbage

#6. Sexually,Woman is Nature's contrivance for perpetuating its highest achievement.

George Bernard Shaw

#7. And this,' said she, 'is the end of all his friend's anxious circumspection! of all his sister's falsehood and contrivance! The happiest, wisest, most reasonable end!

Jane Austen

#8. We should be careful not to let machinery swamp life. That we should be sure, when we are confronted with a fresh mechanical contrivance, that we are not losing more than we gain by adopting it.

Ann Bridge

#9. No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned ... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

Samuel Johnson

#10. Every contrivance of man, every tool, every instrument, every utensil, every article designed for use, of each and every kind, evolved from a very simple beginnings.

Robert Collier

#11. Take Milton Friedman, he sits at his desk pontificating about such bunk as the monetary system being the answer to our problems. The monetary system is a legal contrivance. Property, not money, is real wealth. It's physical, not legal.

Louis O. Kelso

#12. An army is a strange contrivance in which power is the sum of a vast total of impotence.

Victor Hugo

#13. You're going to have to surrender a little bit to the contrivance of how Freddy and Jason get together.

Robert Englund

#14. I had never handled a tool in my life, and yet in time, by labour, application, and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it.

Daniel Defoe

#15. The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#16. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

Adam Smith

#17. Radio is just a fashion contrivance that will soon die out. It is obvious that there never will be invented a proper receiver!

Thomas A. Edison

#18. Damn the Solar System. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better myself.

Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey

#19. I am much more aware of making the plot more original, avoiding contrivance, having the story matter much more. I used to think more about symbols consciously. Now I think much more about the story.

Dara Horn

#20. With respect to excellence of style and composition, it may perhaps be said that to practised ears the most pleasing music is such as has the merit of novelty, added to refinement, and ingenious contrivance; and to the ignorant, such as is most familiar and common.

Charles Burney

#21. It should seem that indolence itself would incline a person to be honest, as it requires infinitely greater pains and contrivance to be a knave.

William Shenstone

#22. John considered a young master as the natural enemy of an old servant, and young people in general as a poor contrivance for carrying on the world.

George Eliot

#23. Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.

Jill Lepore

#24. In viewing the scheme of redemption, I seem like one viewing a vast and complicated machine of exquisite contrivance; what I comprehend of it is wonderful, what I do not, is, perhaps, more so still.

Richard Cecil

#25. Lo, everything that made me pretty was intrinsic to motherhood, and my very desire that men find me attractive was the contrivance of a body designed to expel its own replacement.

Lionel Shriver

#26. We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#27. Anything that happens on any show is a plot contrivance because that's just storytelling.

Bryan Fuller

#28. All praise of Civilization, or Art, or Contrivance, is so much dispraise of Nature ; an admission of imperfection, which it is man's business, and merit, to be always endeavouring to correct or mitigate.

John Stuart Mill

#29. As they walked, it seemed almost every building had some similar contrivance as decoration, adorning the street in a cacophony of clangs, bangs and whirs. The street's surroundings danced with steam and smoke, the scent of oil and grease its perfume.

A.F. Stewart

#30. The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves ... these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.

Thomas Jefferson

#31. For me, marriage is a grotesque, unforgiving, clunky contrivance. Yet society pushes it as a shimmering ideal.

George Meyer

#32. Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#33. canoe is the most graceful, the most sensitive, the most inexplicable contrivance of man. With its paddle you may dip up stars along quiet shores or steal into the very harbor of dreams. I

Meredith Nicholson

#34. To be the authentic is to be detached and stand aside from oneself and the work so that the working process can take on an untrammeled life of its own. Labored self-involvement, contrivance, ulterior motives, even the extraordinary facility that one may have, must be let go.

Joshua L. Goldberg

#35. Human nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture.

Edward O. Wilson

#36. I look upon the pleasure which we take in a garden as one of the most innocent delights in human life ... It gives us a great insight into the contrivance and wisdom of Nature, and suggests innumerable subjects for meditation.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#37. Most of the methods for measuring the lapse of time have, I believe, been the contrivance of monks and religious recluses, who, finding time hang heavy on their hands, were at some pains to see how they got rid of it.

William Hazlitt

#38. How is your father?" she asks disinterestedly.
"A contrivance," I mutter. "A plot device.

Bret Easton Ellis

#39. Our political and constitutional rights, so called, are but the natural and inherent rights of man, asserted, carried out, and secured by modes of human contrivance.

Gerrit Smith

#40. The Hindu civilisation is a diabolical contrivance to enslave humanity. Its proper name would be infamy.

B.R. Ambedkar

#41. Some issues lend themselves to grassroots campaigns - homeschooling works well - but others require contrivance and connivance to whip up support. Often, lobbyists will hire vendors to dispatch blast emails and robocalls in the hopes of bombarding Congressional offices with citizen fury.

Jack Abramoff

#42. We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality.

Jamake Highwater

#43. I am of opinion, that, in the democratic ages which are opening upon us, individual independence and local liberties will ever be the produce of artificial contrivance; that centralization will be the natural form of government.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#44. Look, I don't mind summoning some demon and asking it," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "That's normal. But building some mechanical contrivance to do your thinking for you, that's ... against Nature.

Terry Pratchett

#45. in his mouth he had a holder of his own contrivance which enabled him to smoke two cigars at once. But undoubtedly the grimmest part of him was his iron claw. Let

J.M. Barrie