Preliminary Quotes

#1. There's something about sitting face-to-face with an attorney in an office that enables people to come to grips with the very idea of divorce - or to reconsider the idea. Like a number of my colleagues - not all - I offer that preliminary consultation for free.

Laura Wasser

#2. It is evident that one cannot say anything demonstrable about the problem before having resolved these preliminary questions, and yet we hardly possess the necessary information to solve some of them.

Georges Cuvier

#3. If I have the choice of traveling to Russia, India or New Zealand alone for a week for preliminary discussions or to spend that week with my family, I routinely choose my family.

Olafur Eliasson

#4. When you're doing kidney transplants, you have to find out who can exchange kidneys with whom, doing blood tests to make sure it's true. You can't just work on the preliminary data. Then you have to organize the logistics.

Alvin E. Roth

#5. Advanced yoga is not withdrawal from the world. That's a preliminary state.

Frederick Lenz

#6. If they are truly nonviolent, they must also realize that civil disobedience is an impossibility till the preliminary work of construction is done.

Mahatma Gandhi

#7. The pictures were painted directly through me, without preliminary drawings and with great power. I had no idea what the pictures would depict and still I worked quickly and surely without changing a single brush-stroke.

Hilma Af Klint

#8. I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Ezra Pound

#9. Sometimes a technology is so awe-inspiring that the imagination runs away with it - often far, far away from reality. Robots are like that. A lot of big and ultimately unfulfilled promises were made in robotics early on, based on preliminary successes.

Daniel H. Wilson

#10. WH Auden: "The first criterion of success in any human activity, the necessary preliminary, whether to scientific discovery or artistic vision, is intensity of attention or, less pompously, love.

ESPN Cricinfo

#11. Perhaps, in retrospect, there would be little motivation even for malevolent extraterrestrials to attack the Earth; perhaps, after a preliminary survey, they might decide it is more expedient just to be patient for a little while and wait for us to self-destruct.

Carl Sagan

#12. A sense of the value of time ... is an essential preliminary to efficient work; it is the only method of avoiding hurry.

Arnold Bennett

#13. When I went to the analyst for a kind of preliminary meeting, he said, 'I'll be able to fix you so that you'll write much more music than you do now.' I said, 'Good heavens! I already write too much, it seems to me.' That promise of his put me off.

John Cage

#14. Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary stage in the ego's evolution.

Muhammad Iqbal

#15. When I meet a new person, I am on the lookout for signs of what he or she is loyal to. It is a preliminary clue to the sense of belonging, and hence of his or her humanity.

Haniel Long

#16. This hearing came about very quickly. I do have a few preliminary comments, but I suspect you're more interested in asking questions, and I'll be happy to respond to those questions to the best of my ability.

David Kay

#17. An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the death march.

Simon Blackburn

#18. Spurting out like formula from a colicky baby's mouth, drops ejected from boiled frosting boiling, preliminary spurts from Old Faithful before the earthquake.

Dennis Vickers

#19. I am Psmith," said the old Etonian reverently. "There is a preliminary P before the name. This, however, is silent. Like the tomb. Compare such words as ptarmigan, psalm, and phthisis.

P.G. Wodehouse

#20. When I was doing preliminary research on this case, I remembered the story about Tlazolteotl.' [Mulder] glanced at the old archaeologist. 'Am I pronouncing it correctly? It sounds like I'm swallowing a turtle.

Kevin J. Anderson

#21. But always and sometimes questioning the old modes
And the new wondering, the poem, growing up through the floor,
Standing tall in tubers, invading and smashing the ritual
Parlor, demands to be met on its own terms now,
Now that the preliminary negotiations are at last over.

John Ashbery

#22. Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

James Lasdun

#23. Only ... from personal experience [can a man] take the necessary measures without a preliminary process of trial and error.

Karl Donitz

#24. The scientific dictator of tomorrow will set up his whispering machines and subliminal projectors in schools and hospitals (children and the sick are highly suggestible), and in all public places where audiences can be given a preliminary softening up by suggestibility-increasing oratory or rituals.

Aldous Huxley

#25. After preliminary research, I zero in on an idea, and then I spend at least four months exploring the topic and in plot-building. I jot down every single detail of the plot as bullet points per chapter, and only when the skeleton is complete do I start writing.

Ashwin Sanghi

#26. Only if God IS ultimate reality, can he be our unconditional concern; only then can he be the object of surrender, obedience, and assent. Faith in anything which has only preliminary reality is idolatrous.

Paul Tillich

#27. Preliminary drawings or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.

Paul Mellon

#28. His manner invited easy confidence. The preliminary stage of becoming acquainted was one which he always endeavored to ignore when a pretty and engaging woman was concerned.

Kate Chopin

#29. If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what methodological representation to apply to that society.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

#30. Earthly providence is a travesty of justice on any other theory than that it is a preliminary stage, which is to be followed by rectifications. Either there must be a future, or consummate injustice sits upon the throne of the universe. This is the verdict of humanity in all the ages.

Randolph Sinks Foster

#31. My life as a working theorist began three months after this preliminary study and background reading, when Oscar gently nudged me toward working on a particular problem.

Rudolph A. Marcus

#32. Cosmoe is nearing the stage where I would feel comfortable doing a preliminary release aimed at developers.

Bill Hayden

#33. Cleaning me up is just a preliminary step to determining my new look. With my acid-damaged hair, sunburned skin, and ugly scars, the prep team has to make me pretty and then damage, burn, and scare me in a more attractive way.

Suzanne Collins

#34. The physical fabric of the world had to be such as to enable that ten billion year preliminary evolution to produce the raw materials of life. Without it there would not have been the chemical materials to allow life to evolve here on earth.

John Polkinghorne

#35. A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

John Maynard Keynes

#36. Maybe I hadn't been a big dating success because I was a boring person, but possibly it had been because I had limited tolerance for all this preliminary maneuvering and signal reading. - Aurora

Charlaine Harris

#37. Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

Edith Wharton

#38. In the hierarchy of man's activities, eating was the lowest. Eating had become the object of a cult, but in fact it was but the preliminary to other, utterly contemptible motions. It occurred to him that he wanted to perform one of these too.

Elias Canetti

#39. It seems thus possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.

Michel De Certeau

#40. The small figures that appear in my paintings are there only because they were there when I was working from nature on my preliminary sketches with pencil.

E. J. Hughes

#41. I try not to look like a university man here ... My fellow-guests think of a university degree as a disgraceful preliminary to the blood-sucking life of the bourgeoisie. A sign, moreover, that a man has to earn his own living.

Eilis Dillon

#42. Humanity has emerged from its former degrees of limitation and preliminary training. Man must now become imbued with new virtues and powers, new moralities, new capacities. New bounties, bestowals and perfections are awaiting and already descending upon him.

Abdu'l- Baha

#43. Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life. Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich

#44. Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

Jack Kerouac

#45. Some preliminary conversation, he said, You look like you're in a good place, despite the bad times I understand you've been through.

Spencer Johnson

#46. I pushed the process forward by saying, 'We should do this, this, and this right now. Please find the budget for me to find a structural engineer, a mechanical engineer, a civil engineer, so we can do the preliminary work.'

Michael Arad

#47. I made the assumption, wrong of course, that conceptual analysis was a brief preliminary on the road to finding out about the nature of free will, consciousness, the self, the origin of values, and so forth.

Patricia Churchland

#48. There are people who are so presumptuous that they know no other way to praise a greatness that they publicly admire than by representing it as a preliminary stage and bridge leading to themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#49. The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one's life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget of 24 hours is the calm realization of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands.

Arnold Bennett

#50. On March 10, 1764, preliminary resolutions passed the House of Commons looking towards the Stamp Act.

Albert Bushnell Hart

#51. It was not feasible to lose time in making careful surveys or extensive preliminary studies of possible control methods; learn how to get rid of Anopheles gambiae by actually getting rid of Anopheles gambiae.

Fred Lowe Soper

#52. Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#53. Well.. Is that all you've got?.. I hope not..cuz you haven't finished entertaining me yet..
-Gaara to Rock Lee during the Chunin preliminary

Masashi Kishimoto

#54. Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.

Kingsley Amis

#55. Do you have any preliminary intel? Gwen asked, and from her words I figured she'd had ongoing commando's woman lessons.

Kristen Ashley

#56. My chief task has been to conquer fear. The public sees only the thrill of the accomplished trick; they have no conception of the tortuous preliminary self-training that was necessary to conquer fear.

Harry Houdini

#57. Historical exegesis is only the preliminary part of interpretation; application is its essence. Exegesis without application should not be called interpretation at all.

J.I. Packer

#58. The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer ... It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do.

Joseph Campbell

#59. Gaiaguys are free to think for themselves, and since their translations of our texts - even if these are of a preliminary nature - are sought for by many people, we see no reason for withdrawing our permission.

Billy Meier

#60. Paradoxically, the toddler's "No" is also a preliminary to his saying yes. It is a sign that he is getting ready to convert his mother's restrictions and prohibitions into the rules for behavior that will belong to him.

Louise J. Kaplan

#61. The mantra is a very preliminary exercise for the student to begin to grasp a sense of focus. When they are used by persons who have reached very high levels of attention, they can open up doorways to other worlds.

Frederick Lenz

#62. Steps can then be taken to slow down the natural progression before it gets started. It doesn't work to allow all the preliminary intimacies and then hope to stop the progression just short of intercourse. Very few people have the willpower to do that.

James C. Dobson

#63. Let's dispense with the preliminary round of 'will we or won't we' so we can get down to the when will we.

Amanda Usen

#64. Doubt, the essential preliminary of all improvement and discovery, must accompany the stages of man's onward progress. The faculty of doubting and questioning, without which those of comparison and judgment would be useless, is itself a divine prerogative of the reason.

Albert Pike

#65. The start-up life kept me busy and surfaced the problem of not being able to stay on top of my personal finances, which led me to invent Mint. I was working 80-hour weeks, and had done enough preliminary work and research to know I had a big idea: To make money management effortless and automated.

Aaron Patzer

#66. Why did she do this to me?" I mumble. "Actually, Samuel, from my preliminary scans of your internal organs, it does not appear that our mother has done anything to you. Were you in need of repair as well? If so, I am certain she will -

James Patterson

#67. The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

#68. My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.

Edward Weston

#69. Preliminary research-most of it published outside the medical literature-indicates that a significant number of our patients have experienced some form of violence and abuse during their lifetime, including elder abuse, child abuse, gang-related violence, sexual abuse, and domestic violence.

David Schneider

#70. DUEL, n. A formal ceremony preliminary to reconciliation of two enemies. Great skill is necessary to its satisfactory observance; if awkwardly performed ... deplorable consequences sometimes ensue. A long time ago a man lost his life.

Ambrose Bierce

#71. Seeking is a necessary preliminary to finding, and one who cannot endure the hardship of inquiry cannot expect to harvest the fruit of knowledge.

John Of Salisbury

#72. No other island received as much preliminary pounding as did Iwo Jima.

Chester W. Nimitz

#73. I love those preliminary conversations about who a character is. You try on wigs, shoes and clothes. It's preferable when it's not about looking pretty. It can get a little dull to just be cute. We talk about things like, maybe my character can't afford these Christian Louboutins.

Rachel McAdams

#74. These preliminary studies then prompted hundreds of millions of dollars of studies that failed to confirm the initial hypothesis that fat or animal fat led to cancer.

Gary Taubes

#75. A hypothetical theory is necessary, as a preliminary step, to reduce the expression of the phenomena to simplicity and order before it is possible to make any progress in framing an abstractive theory.

William John Macquorn Rankine

#76. After all, when you come across the word prothalamium and find it means a preliminary nuptial song and a yaffle is a green woodpecker-well, I ask you! You cannot let matters rest there-or can you? Peradventure you will develop into lexicomaniacs.

E. Norman Torry

#77. Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

Lewis Mumford

#78. It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected.

Mircea Eliade

#79. After preliminary work by a number of other distinguished mathematicians and economists, game theory as a systematic theory started with von Neumann and Morgenstern's book, 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,' published in 1944.

John Harsanyi

#80. The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about 'what is true for me' is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death.

Lesslie Newbigin

#81. Bolor-Erdene urged Dinah to address her as Bo. She was obviously of Far Eastern stock, and yet there was something in her eyes and cheekbones that did not look precisely Chinese. Dinah's preliminary googling had already told her that Bo was Mongolian. Yuri

Neal Stephenson

#82. Setting is preliminary to brighter rising; decay is a process of advancement; death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

#83. At various times over 20 years, I did preliminary designs for aircraft like the Stratolaunch. For that whole time I was encouraging us to do something that almost everyone else felt you could not do.

Burt Rutan

#84. I'm in that very preliminary stage of wondering how exactly to "pressurize" the novel in some way I've never considered before.

Mark Leyner

#85. It is indeed an odd business that it has taken this Court nearly two centuries to 'discover' a constitutional mandate to have counsel at a preliminary hearing.

Warren E. Burger

#86. Preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).

Alan Watts

#87. I've been urged by people forever to try and start a real Rock Hall of Fame. I've had some very, very preliminary discussions about doing it. Obviously, I can't do it myself, but there are a lot of people interested in that.

Eddie Trunk

#88. It is well to open one's mind but only as a preliminary to closing it ... for the supreme act of judgment and selection.

Irving Babbitt

#89. The dance commonly begins about the middle of the afternoon or later, after sundown. When it begins in the afternoon, there is always an intermission of an hour or two for supper. The preliminary painting and dressing is usually the work of about two hours.

James Mooney

#90. The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms.

Robert Jastrow

#91. This cabin, Mary, in my sight appears,
Built as it has been in our waning years,
A rest afforded to our weary feet,
Preliminary to - the last retreat.

William Cowper

#92. If Joanie dies before me, I wonder if I'll ever be with another woman. I can't imagine going through all of the preliminary stuff - the talk, the chatter, the dinners. I'd have to take someone places, explain my history, make jokes, dole out compliments, hold back farts.

Kaui Hart Hemmings

#93. Of all American cities of whatever size the most friendly on preliminary inspection, and on further acquaintance the most likable. The happiest-hearted, the gayest, the most care-free city on this continent.

Irvin S. Cobb

#94. In my work I've never done preliminary drawing, because it's sometimes difficult to repeat something or to continue when the urgency's gone.

Deanna Petherbridge