Top 100 Indirect Quotes
#1. In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there- a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#2. The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric.
Louis Pasteur
#3. Boys frustrate me. I hate all their indirect messages, I hate game playing. Do you like me or don't you? Just tell me so I can get over you.
Kirsten Dunst
#4. There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.
Clayton M Christensen
#5. Search for the cause may be a hopeless pursuit because most disease states are the indirect outcome of a constellation of circumstances.
Rene Dubos
#6. The most important pathological effects of pollution are extremely delayed and indirect.
Rene Dubos
#7. As in the case of the economy, an 'invisible hand' will often be a better cultivator of ideas and allocator of effort. The challenge for intelligence officials in the Information Age is to understand how to integrate these indirect mechanisms into their operations
Allan E. Goodman
#8. If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, hassome indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#9. It has yet to be shown by direct biochemical methods, as opposed to the indirect genetic evidence mentioned earlier, that the code is indeed a triplet code.
Francis Crick
#10. receptiveness which promises a revolution both in philosophical and in religious thinking; here they are filtering in through many indirect influences, there slowly pouring through direct and open channels. There is hardly a
Sri Aurobindo
#11. The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.
John Searle
#12. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
George Orwell
#13. Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even
Carl Jung
#14. When you see someone dying in front of you from a direct and simple cause, it's easier to deal with [that] than famine or drought or a more indirect cause. It's overwhelming and frightening and kind of distant, but we do see it every day with plants and animals and species dying.
John H Richardson
#15. Just because there's an end doesn't mean existence has meaning. An end point is simply set up as a temporary marker or perhaps as an indirect metaphor for the fleeting nature of existence.
Haruki Murakami
#16. The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)
Carl Sagan
#17. Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.
William Shenstone
#18. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.
John O'Donohue
#19. Is God somehow responsible for the suffering of this world? In this indirect way, yes. But giving a child a pair of ice skates, knowing that he may fall, is a very different matter from knocking him down on the ice.
Philip Yancey
#20. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.
Carroll Quigley
#21. According to Okonkwo, the British via its indirect rule system ensured that Africans saw their native leaders as the demons who betrayed their people. He called it a demonocracy and that was the first time I had seen him become so passionate about issues that affect Africa as a people and continent.
S.A. David
#22. I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.
Salman Rushdie
#23. Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plan religion.
Thomas Browne
#24. The chief benefit, which results from philosophy, arises in an indirect manner, and proceeds more from its secret, insensible influence, than from its immediate application.
David Hume
#25. Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.
Simone Weil
#26. One direct approach had, by its vain cost, done much to undo the aggregate advantage which indirect approaches alone had built up. And it is not the least significant feature that the issue was finally settled, in the reverse way, by yet another example of the indirect approach.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#27. My experience of Chinese culture is indirect, through echoes. When I approach the cashier at my local Chinese supermarket, they switch to English before I've even said a word. They somehow know that I'm not quite Chinese enough.
Gene Luen Yang
#28. Every thoughtful, well-meaning and conscientious human being
should assume in time of peace,
the solemn and unconditional obligation
not to participate in any war, for any reason
or to lend support of any kind, whether direct or indirect.
Albert Einstein
#29. The contribution of the Western democracies to the awakening of the East has been indirect and certainly unintended. They have kindled an enthusiasm of resentment against the West; and it is this anti-Western fervor which is at present rousing the Orient from its stagnation of centuries.2
Eric Hoffer
#30. They are moved less by the direct presence of their gods than by the more indirect feeling that they would somehow like their gods to be present.
Daniel L. Pals
#31. By giving too much importance to fine actions one may end by paying an indirect but powerful tribute to evil, because in so doing one implies that such fine actions are only valuable because they are rare, and that malice or indifference are far more common motives in the actions of men.
Albert Camus
#32. The theory that everyone acts from self-interest, direct or indirect, is psychologically unsound ... Throughout history ... there have been millions of men and women with some sort of Humanist philosophy who have consciously given up their lives for a social ideal.
Corliss Lamont
#33. But picketing - picketing for or against something, and handing out literature - these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication.
Tony Conrad
#35. A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength - life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#36. Economy is the first and great article (economy such as I understand it) in my financial creed. The controversy between direct and indirect taxation holds a minor, though important place.
William E. Gladstone
#37. The mathematician uses an indirect definition of congruence, making use of the fact that the axiom of parallels together with an additional condition can replace the definition of congruence.
Hans Reichenbach
#38. Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
Albert Camus
#39. Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
Adrienne Rich
#40. the only choice is that between direct or indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian.
Slavoj Zizek
#41. This high proportion of history's decisive campaigns, the significance of which is enhanced by the comparative rarity of the direct approach, enforces the conclusion that the indirect is by far the most hopeful and economic form of strategy.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#42. My dad served in the Air Force as ground crew for several years, and doesn't really talk about it. I know that it's there. I think my main thing about direct or indirect experiences as near to home as it were is the idea of self-sacrifice really.
Jeremy Northam
#43. Sound is your friend because sound is much cheaper than picture, but it has equal effect on the audience - in some ways, perhaps more effect because it does it in a very indirect way.
Francis Ford Coppola
#44. Long as I have lived, and many blasphemers as I have heard and seen, I have never yet heard or witnessed any direct and consciousblasphemy or irreverence; but of indirect and habitual, enough. Where is the man who is guilty of direct and personal insolence to Him that made him?
Henry David Thoreau
#45. However, most defects end up costing more than it would have cost to prevent them. Defects are expensive when they occur, both the direct costs of fixing the defects and the indirect costs because of damaged relationships, lost business, and lost development time.
Kent Beck
#46. During the course of the day, I write things down, things I don't do anything with. Then, when I get ready to start recording, I just look through my books and I see if I can find something that stands out. That's how I come up with the off-the-wall-kinda-strange-indirect-stuff.
Bootsy Collins
#47. When the power, prestige, and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain.
Hugo Black
#48. We are a manifestation that we perpetuate through space-time. Death is the ceasing of the observation of it whether by direct or indirect influence.
Solange Nicole
#49. There is nothing more deceitful ... than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes and indirect boast.
Jane Austen
#50. if anyone believe love can be buy at Magic Shops.
That person can not respect your love never because for that person love is not miracle.But only a thing which can be Bought Direct or indirect ,seduce by Body or Bought from Conjurer
Mohammed Zaki Ansari
#51. The teacher's first duty is to watch over the environment, and this takes precedence over all the rest. It's influence is indirect, but unless it be well done there will be no effective and permanent results of any kind, physical, intellectual or spiritual.
Maria Montessori
#52. Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
George Santayana
#53. I would absolutely refuse any direct or indirect war service and would try to persuade my friends to do the same, regardless of the reasons for the cause of a war.
Albert Einstein
#54. Unlike those other painters, Brewster hadn't resorted to indirect gazes or chiaroscuro to communicate the silence of his world. The faces were well-lit and frontal, and yet they were quiet.
Teju Cole
#55. There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.
Charles J. Shields
#56. Every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect.
Albert Camus
#57. This year I hope to introduce legislation that would require Power Administrations to list direct and indirect costs associated with ESA compliance as a line item on customer's power bills.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers
#58. Higher ceilings allow the use indirect lighting, which is much healthier and reduces glare.
Helmut Jahn
#59. Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.
Matt Ridley
#60. All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it, an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.
Peter Conrad
#61. It is in sickness that we most feel the need of that sympathy which shows how much we are dependent upon one another for our comfort, and even necessities. Thus disease, opening our eyes to the realities of life, is an indirect blessing.
Hosea Ballou
#62. I remember feeling that technology was like trying to draw with your foot. In a ski boot. It was the most indirect way to work imaginable, but the potential had us all excited. I started in stop motion.
Chris Wedge
#63. I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#64. Quotations introduced by that are regarded as in indirect discourse and not enclosed in quotation marks.
William Strunk Jr.
#65. The truth is that anyone, almost anyone, who receives the Nobel Prize has some indirect knowledge of one sort or another that they may be a candidate.
James Rothman
#66. In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.
Sun Tzu
#67. For Caesar met failure each time he relied on the direct, and retrieved it each time he resorted to the indirect.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#68. Before seeing 'The Pride of the Yankees,' you may or may not know that the Yankees referred to are the ones who win the World Series each year. After seeing it you will find that the reference is indirect.
Manny Farber
#69. I was the chief sponsor of the Business Employment Incentive Program bill, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect jobs here in New Jersey.
Joseph M. Kyrillos
#70. The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial.
Isaiah Berlin
#71. Maybe the Indirect Surveillance thing cost him brain cells. Good thing he was so pretty.
Erin Kellison
#72. For even the best of peace training is more theoretical than practical experience ... indirect practical experience may be the more valuable because infinitely wider.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#73. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform ... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself.
Ada Lovelace
#74. Dreaming, in short, is one of the devices we employ to circumvent repression, one of the main methods of what may be called indirect representation in the mind.
Sigmund Freud
#75. Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.
Anais Nin
#76. I take a lot of inspiration from the nature of the universe and visualize my work as a direct or indirect reflection of life, inside and around us.
Jeet Aulakh
#77. The malignity that never forgets or forgives is found only in base and ignoble natures, whose aims are selfish, and whose means are indirect, cowardly, and treacherous.
George Stillman Hillard
#78. There's always going to be a little bit of autobiographical content to everything. It's how you lend some authority to what you write - you give it that weight by drawing on your direct experiences and indirect experiences from people that you know well, or a little.
Ian Anderson
#79. Air forces offered the possibility of striking a the enemy's economic and moral centres without having first to achieve 'the destruction of the enemy's main forces on the battlefield'. Air-power might attain a direct end by indirect means - hopping over opposition instead of overthrowing it.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#80. Government has no wealth, and when a politician promises to give you something for nothing, he must first confiscate that wealth from you
either by direct taxes, or by the cruelly indirect tax of inflation.
John Wayne
#82. Everything direct is positive, everything indirect is negative.
Martin Walser
#83. Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.
Jane Austen
#84. Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult ... The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.
T. S. Eliot
#85. His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.
(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James)
Herbert A. Wise
#86. Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.
Simone Weil
#87. The results you are churning out are a direct or indirect reflection of what you allowed into your life. Unlearning what you already know and practice is no easy task, but sometimes it's necessary for the programming or re-programming that must take place for success to be made deliberate.
Archibald Marwizi
#88. The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.
Teju Cole
#89. Very little mathematics has direct applications - though fortunately most of it has plenty of indirect ones.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#90. Countries are effectively paid deference in direct and indirect ways if they're huge oil suppliers.
James Woolsey
#91. Sense-perceptions can only be indirect knowledge, and not direct knowledge. Only one's own awareness is direct knowledge.
Ramana Maharshi
#92. The deeper irony is that the evidence of sin that are always found in and around the body of Christ may become indirect intimations of its holiness. It could not be a holy church if it had clean hands, as if severed from its task of saving sinners and healing human hurt.
Thomas C. Oden
#93. Most people are passive aggressive in this world. I have the idea that the human being is born with a kind of reservoir of aggression. We are inherently somewhat aggressive creatures and we either channel that in direct ways or we channel it in indirect ways and become passive aggressive.
Robert Greene
#94. There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
J.M. Coetzee
#95. A writer shouldn't be restricted to any single race, society or even country, he or she has to be for the entire world, and writers should try to write on global issues that are affecting peoples' life in a direct or indirect way.
Tim I. Gurung
#96. WhatsApp will bring Facebook another billion users. We will be a billion-user product. Whether there is a direct valuation or an indirect valuation, there is value, and Facebook understands that well.
Brian Acton
#97. A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. [Here] one is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#98. People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe.
Jonathan Haidt
#99. Simply put, the direct power over the money supply is the indirect power over the people.
Orrin Woodward
#100. There is a law of retribution in all things, direct or indirect, visible or invisible.
Miles Franklin
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