Directions By Quotes

#1. Scattered wits take a long time picking up; and often before I had got them well together, they would be dispersed in all directions by one stray thought,

Charles Dickens

#2. Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

Roger Scruton

#3. I'm a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all directions by the elephants

Charles Dickens

#4. Sensorial perception, for example, certainly occurs with greater or less accuracy according to the degree of interest; it is constantly given other directions by the change of external stimuli and by ideas.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

#5. The fact that alienated people can be counted on to vent their spleen in ineffectual directions - by fighting among themselves - relieves the government of the need to deal fundamentally with the conditions which cause their frustrations,

Chris Hedges

#6. The frontier orbital approach was further developed in various directions by my own group and many other scientists, both theoretical and experimental.

Kenichi Fukui

#7. Our whole lives are a struggle with mysteries. Mysteries endanger us, support us, destroy us. Our great scientists have cleared away these mysteries in some directions by deepening them in others.

Alasdair Gray

#8. Gentlemen," returned Mr. Micawber, "do with me as you will! I am a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all directions by the elephants- I beg your pardon; I should have said the elements.

Charles Dickens

#9. Neither are the pig-skins, in common use to hold wine, and hung out in the sun in all directions, by any means ornamental, as they always preserve the form of very bloated pigs, with their heads and legs cut off, dangling upside-down by their own tails.

Charles Dickens

#10. It is usual to think of good and evil as two poles, two opposite directions, the antithesis of one another ... We must begin by doing away with this convention.

Martin Buber

#11. He who travels in the middle of the road is hit by traffic from both directions.

Anonymous

#12. Compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her. This will be lessened by any expenditure of force in fighting among themselves, or in pulling in different directions.

Henry George

#13. There's something exciting about weekly strips in that you're following the way the story reveals itself to the writer week by week. All the possible directions it could have taken are there; it's a kind of participatory reading that I think books discourage.

Ben Katchor

#14. Diamond, for all its great beauty, is not nearly as interesting as the hexagonal plane of graphite. It is not nearly as interesting because we live in a three-dimensional space, and in diamond, each atom is surrounded in all three directions in space by a full coordination.

Richard Smalley

#15. And from a poise at this station the plane may swoop down, at great disadvantage if close to the back of the wave, at various slopes and directions till it cuts into the air that is being raised by the face of the following wave, which again enables it to resume its velocity.

Lawrence Hargrave

#16. Confessing I didn't, I scribbled the directions on the notepad I always kept by the phone. I hung up and my feet were already on the floor as adrenaline hit my nerves like espresso. The house was quiet. I grabbed my black medical bag, scuffed and worn from years of use. The

Patricia Cornwell

#17. The duty of the artist is not to be calculating in any sense, so that he may be free himself of human emotions while carried by the universal forces of life. Only then does one not think about making art, or about styles, or directions. Something comes about, something happens.

Karel Appel

#18. It's amazing how flexible the human mind is in terms of jumping into a backstory or an aside. Vonnegut is a great example - it's not a linear story by any means, but somehow your brain is keeping it moving in one direction even though the story is taking you in all these different directions.

Noah Hawley

#19. I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

Barry Schwartz

#20. Underneath it, he had snuck out of the house wearing a T-shirt that said I'M WITH STUPID, with arrows pointing in all different directions. It pretty much summed up how I was feeling today, too. Surrounded by stupid.

Kami Garcia

#21. Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

Rebecca Solnit

#22. For life is tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which its impetus is divided.

Henri Bergson

#23. People in my village had this mindset that in big cities like New York, if you are lost or without directions, no one will help you. The first time I came here, I tried to make sure not to walk by myself, because it would be difficult for me if I got lost. But people will help you.

William Kamkwamba

#24. My friend Kathy is the only person who'll be halfway honest with me. 'Did you ever see a cowboy film, where someone has been caught by the Indians and tied between two wild stallions, each pulling in opposite directions?' she asked.
I nodded mutely.
'That's a bit what giving birth is like.

Marian Keyes

#25. The way kids learn to make good decisions is by making decisions, not by following directions.

Alfie Kohn

#26. I feel kind of depressed today ... Do you ever have the feeling that life has passed you by?
Worse than that ... Sometimes I think life and I are going in opposite directions!

Charles M. Schulz

#27. What opposes unites, and the finest attunement stems from things bearing in opposite directions, and all things come about by strife.

Heraclitus

#28. Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
[Reviewing A Feminist Dictionary by Cheris Kramarae and Paula A Treichler in New Directions for Women (1986)]

Marie Shear

#29. The only worthwhile constant in human existence is our heart which can only be nourished by sincere love. A good strong heart radiates love in all directions perpetually. The heart is also the most fragile of human existence. Therefore, take good care of it. Give it constant love.

Sohail Mahmood

#30. The forces of nature aren't arbitrarily selected in some way by
chance or design, they are simply the possible directions of time.

Gevin Giorbran

#31. Working models can be altered in negative directions as well by family changes such as divorce or a parent's illness,

Douglas Davies

#32. Tufts of hair stuck out of my head in all directions, like I'd been cow-licked by a drunken heifer.

Allen Eskens

#33. She was secretly amused by the man who managed to give the impression of moving in all directions while standing still.

Peggy Darty

#34. In November 2008, the day of the presidential election, Israeli military forces invaded Gaza and killed half a dozen Hamas militants. Well, that was followed by a missile exchange for a couple of weeks in both directions.

Noam Chomsky

#35. The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

Donald Barthelme

#36. The whole universe in all directions is the Flower of Dharma.* All Buddhas everywhere and all enlightened beings twirl and are twirled by the Flower of Dharma.

Brad Warner

#37. I stood there and watched thirty-five children disappear in almost as many different directions and was suddenly horrified by what I'd done. What if someone got lost or hurt? Suppose they didn't come back on time? What would I do then?

Katherine Paterson

#38. True friendship is when two friends can walk in opposite directions, yet remain side by side.

Josh Grayson

#39. It is true that I am often startled and even angered and repulsed by the strange directions and provocative content of new forms that seem to pop up every few months.

David Rockefeller

#40. We began intercepting Japanese radio transmissions, which indicated the two forces were very close to each other. We found out later that we were moving in opposite directions and passed each other by 32 miles.

Jack Adams

#41. While day by day the overzealous student stores up facts for future use, he who has learned to trust nature finds need for ever fewer external directions. He will discard formula after formula, until he reaches the conclusion: Let nature take its course.

Larry Bird

#42. The main discomfort in being a middle-of-the-roader is that you get sideswiped by partisans going in both directions.

Sydney J. Harris

#43. Love, the magician, knows this little trick whereby two people walk in different directions yet always remain side by side ...

Hugh Prather

#44. I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.

Ovid

#45. When you're in transition, you will need to find a different kind of security. It's not one of labels, guarantees or bank balances. It's guidance - the directions of your own inner voice. Moment by moment you know what to do. You are safer than ever before.

Tama J. Kieves

#46. If you walk and talk with God, you will never miss the direction to your divine future. Be bold and offer your heart to be led by God.

Israelmore Ayivor

#47. While in the course of ages the nucleus of social custom inscribed in law has been subjected to but slight and gradual modifications, the other portion has been largely developed in directions indicated by the interests of the dominant classes, and to the injury of the classes they oppress.

Peter Kropotkin

#48. I am inspired by both Japanese Samurai films, in particular the films of Kurosawa, and how they share the spirit of American Westerns, with the influences running in both directions, and including the 'Spaghetti Westerns' and films of Sam Peckinpah.

Ann Nocenti

#49. Stories continue in all directions to include even the retelling of the stories themselves, as legend is informed by interpretation, and interpretation is informed by time.

Garth Stein

#50. Give me something to assemble, I won't look at the directions, I'll try to figure it out by myself. It's why I love Ikea furniture.

Dave Grohl

#51. No solution can ever be found by running in three different directions.

Deepak Chopra

#52. History is us squinting into the past, mistaking millions of tiny vibrations in all directions for unified, unidirectional movements by entire civilizations.

Joseph Fink

#53. Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.

David Mamet

#54. You cannot look in a new direction by looking harder in the same direction.

Edward De Bono

#55. See you now your bait of falsehood take this carp of truth; and thus do we of wisdom and of reach, with windlasses and with assays of bias, by indirections find directions out.

William Shakespeare

#56. There is such a rebound from parental influence that it generally seems that the child makes use of the directions given by the parent only to avoid the prescribed path.

Margaret Fuller

#57. For me, personally, the most interesting music comes from the popular sector - from film and pop music - since contemporary classical music got stuck and went into directions where it lost a lot of the public by over-intellectualizing.

Aleksey Igudesman

#58. Can't you just read the directions?"
"I could if I wasn't fueled by testosterone and stupidity, but where's the fun in that?

Robert Kirkman