Quotes About Mechanical

#1. It turns out that if you optimize the performance of a car and of an airplane, they are very far away in terms of mechanical features. So you can make a flying car. But they are not very good planes, and they are not very good cars.

Gregory Benford

#2. For a while I wanted to be a professional baseball pitcher, and then I wanted to be a musician and then sometimes I think I'd like to start a store for gift-wrapping Christmas presents ... But I feel I could do most things I set my mind to, except mechanical things, I'm not very good at that.

John Malkovich

#3. The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.

Raymond Chandler

#4. Perhaps the most striking of all the on-demand services is Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which allows customers to post any "human intelligence task", from flagging objectionable content on websites to composing text messages; workers on the site choose what to do according to task and price.

Anonymous

#5. Like their Martian ancestors, men pride themselves on being experts, especially when it comes to fixing mechanical things, getting places, or solving problems. These are the times when he needs her loving acceptance the most and not her advice or criticism.

John Gray

#6. That's all the difficulty and the challenge and the battle: to look through this mechanical thing, these bits of glass and metal, at someone. And not lose the sense that this shape is a human being.

Eva Rubinstein

#7. The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.

Michael Pollan

#8. Hence! home, you idle creatures get you home:
Is this a holiday? what! know you not,
Being mechanical, you ought not walk
Upon a labouring day without the sign
Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou?

William Shakespeare

#9. All the women knitted. They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.

Charles Dickens

#10. When they argue they're like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. You go past the same scenery time after time, but you don't see the landscape. You see the rabbit.

Stephen King

#11. Cars like that shouldn't be left in storage. It causes mechanical issues. With brakes and tires and engines and such."
My smile returned. "You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?"
"Not a word.

Kelley Armstrong

#12. In man, the mechanical breathing is essential to life, and it is one of the old tests for death to see whether these movements have ceased completely.

August Krogh

#13. Dying nowadays is more gruesome in many ways, namely, more lonely, mechanical, and dehumanized; at times it is even difficult to determine technically when the time of death has occurred.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

#14. 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

#15. His treatment of mechanical problems wasn't divorced from the worldly situations in which they arise, and as a result [John Muir's service manual on Volkswagens] is extraordinarily clear and useful. It has a human quality, as well.

Matthew B. Crawford

#16. There has never been a boy painter, nor can there be. The art requires a long apprenticeship, being mechanical, as well as intellectual.

John Constable

#17. By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg!

Lewis Mumford

#18. When there is freedom from mechanical conditioning, there is simplicity.

Bruce Lee

#19. When I was in my teens, I made an appraisal of how comfortable my life could turn out when I became the age I am now. Because of a mechanical failure, the prediction was inexact.

Arthur Nersesian

#20. Photography is a mechanical device; photomontage is a piece of work done with the products of photography. This entire process forms one whole ... If I assemble documents and juxtapose them with intelligence and skill, the effect of agitation and propaganda on the masses will be enormous.

John Heartfield

#21. Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary.

Robert A. Heinlein

#22. At the present time there exist problems beyond our ability to solve, not because of theoretical difficulties, but because of insufficient means of mechanical computation.

Howard Aiken

#23. He turned away from me, the better to hide the exclamation of annoyance which he muttered under his breath; I caught only what seemed to be the syllable cog (perhaps a reference to my mechanical trade) and the word succour (a prayer for divine assistance?).

K.W. Jeter

#24. Mercedes Benz : A mechanical device that increases sexual arousal in women.

P. J. O'Rourke

#25. A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn.

C. Northcote Parkinson

#26. The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.

Hans Christian Von Baeyer

#27. Without a conscious life-purpose a man is totally lost, drifting, adapting to events rather than creating events. Without knowing his life-purpose a man lives a weakend, impotent existence, perhaps even becoming even sexually impotent or prone to mechanical and disinterested sex.

David Deida

#28. It frequently happens that two persons, reasoning right on a mechanical subject, think alike and invent the same thing without any communication with each other.

Oliver Evans

#29. If I say [electrons] behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before.

Richard P. Feynman

#30. One day he (Einstein) said that the only mechanical force more powerful than steam, electricity and atomic energy is will. That Alberto bloke was not stupid. With will you can achieve things.

Jose Mourinho

#31. Through the Reformation, the mechanical relation of nature and grace was superceded by an ethical one, so that the restoration of the law of God in every sphere of life became the concern of the believer.

Henry R. Van Til

#32. We cannot tell by looking at the diamond that it is a commodity. When it serves as a use-value, asthetic or mechanical, on the breast of a harlot, or in the hand of a glasscutter, it is a diamond and not a commodity.

Karl Marx

#33. I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious monsters.

Bertrand Russell

#34. The computer, being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.

Peter Drucker

#35. Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.

Clifford D. Simak

#36. I have taught my students not to apply rules or mechanical ways of seeing.

Josef Albers

#37. A really great actor, in a lucky performance, can transform himself or herself. I've seen actors do that. But often it's a mechanical transformation, which isn't as interesting, and you've got to be careful how you go about something like that, I think.

Alan Alda

#38. Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig!

D.H. Lawrence

#39. Perhaps I have something of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to modern feminine education. Often youngsters are sadly miscast. I have known girls who should be tinkering with mechanical things instead of making dresses, and boys who would do better at cooking than engineering.

Amelia Earhart

#40. What is destiny - a mechanical fact, a theoretical possibility, a concept, a superstition, a mere word? Ian McCullough was inclined to think one or another of these depending upon his mood. Destiny, the seemingly benign verso of fate.

Joyce Carol Oates

#41. I have an innate incompetence for anything mechanical. It has always seemed to me that a machine can tell from far away that I am afraid of it and that I don't understand anything about it, and breaks down on the spot out of sheer self-preservation.

Heda Margolius Kovaly

#42. The manufacturers of mechanical typewriters believed that they had developed sufficiently when they introduced electric typewriters. Then came the PC, and the deeply traditional makers of typewriters disappeared from the market.

Norbert Reithofer

#43. Divide in yourself the mechanical from the conscious, see how little there is of the conscious, how seldom it works, and how strong is the mechanical - mechanical attitudes, mechanical intentions, mechanical thoughts, mechanical desires.

P.D. Ouspensky

#44. 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

#45. What art does is coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous

Jeanette Winterson

#46. Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.

Neal Stephenson

#47. I think, that after the arrival of the mechanical clock we see an explosion in scientific thinking and scientific discovery.

Nicholas G. Carr

#48. The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#49. Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical.

Ralph Adams Cram

#50. There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.

P. J. O'Rourke

#51. For me, most comedy scripts fail in the mechanical playing-out of the setup. They'll pay lip service to a moral lesson or a psychological progression.

Harold Ramis

#52. - It is far more complicated to have the sex one sees being carried out nowadays, a mere mechanical act, causing tension during the act, and emptiness afterwards.

Paulo Coelho

#53. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Anonymous

#54. Destiny' is the state of perfect mechanical causation in which everything is the consequence of everything else. If choice is an illusion, what's life? Consciousness without volition. We'd all be passengers, no more real than model trains.

Nick Harkaway

#55. We have to WORK OUT in the mechanical [physical] realm what Gods WORKS IN [us] in the mysterious [spiritual] realm. Beware of any spiritual emotion that you do not work out mechanically ...

Oswald Chambers

#56. I wanted to write a song about sexism, but I didn't want to do it in a mechanical way and be like, "Don't be sexist!" because that's not how I talk in regular life.

Boots Riley

#57. Why then had I heard nothing? Everyone knows that the killing of a human being requires the exertion of a certain amount of mechanical energy. I forget the exact formula, although I know there is one.

Alan Bradley

#58. I think love is the most unbelievable, and critical, thing in civilization. Everything else is very mechanical and predictable, but love, you can't catch it.

Ambrose Bierce

#59. In some ways we live in a world where things appear to be very logical, very rational, and mechanical aspects of our world are rather scientific and rather straightforward.

Paul McCartney

#60. We see that every external motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind.

Helena Blavatsky

#61. The studies concluded that the graviton must be massless and chargeless, and must have the quantum mechanical property known as spin-2. (Very roughly, the graviton should spin like a top, twice as fast as the spin of a photon.)

Brian Greene

#62. Behavior of a system whose parts display a choice cannot be explained by mechanical or biological models.

Jamshid Gharajedaghi

#63. Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.

Ludwig Von Mises

#64. The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#65. Building a mechanical device for its appearance is like putting lace on a bowling ball.

Andrew Vachss

#66. To be sensitively aware of thought, of feeling, of the world about you, of your office and of nature, is to explode from moment to moment in affection. Without affection, every action becomes burdensome and mechanical and leads to decay.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#67. A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.

Mary Lascelles

#68. On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works at computer speeds.

K. Eric Drexler

#69. I loved problems on paper, and I was good at math, but I was a mechanical engineer, and I never understood - or cared to - how a car worked.

Rabih Alameddine

#70. Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?

William Hazlitt

#71. Cinema is made to film material: the body. By filming the material, the mechanical, the worker, we arrive at the spiritual.

Bruno Dumont

#72. Apart from direct mistakes, there is nothing more ruinous than routine play, the aim of which is mechanical development.

Alexey Suetin

#73. A rat is more alive than a turtle.
A turtle is slow, cold, mechanical, nearly a toy, a shell with legs. Their deaths didn't count. But a white rat is quick and warm in its envelope of skin

Leonard Cohen

#74. In speaking of the Energy of the field, however, I wish to be understood literally. All energy is the same as mechanical energy, whether it exists in the form of motion or in that of elasticity, or in any other form. The energy in electromagnetic phenomena is mechanical energy.

James Clerk Maxwell

#75. The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as 'Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With'.

Douglas Adams

#76. I love that men like to look at women, that they love sports, that they need to know the inner workings of mechanical objects. I love the whole makeup of men - that they never mature and are always just boys.

Krista Allen

#77. Hinged to forgetfulness like a door,
she slowly closed out of sight,
and she was the woman I loved,
but too many times she slept like
a mechanical deer in my caresses,
and I ached in the metal silence
of her dreams.

Richard Brautigan

#78. Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.

G.I. Gurdjieff

#79. Not a superman who stumbles, but an ape with makeshift manners in whose nickel-plated jungles roam mechanical bananas.

William Tenn

#80. The physiologist who succeeds in penetrating deeper and deeper into the digestive canal becomes convinced that it consists of a number of chemical laboratories equipped with various mechanical devices.

Ivan Pavlov

#81. The technologically-aided destruction of old, mechanical professions drives us to higher-functioning tasks that tap more fully into what makes us human.

Winston Damarillo

#82. If your objective is to tell time, you will not buy a mechanical watch. You have the time on your phone.

Ricardo Guadalupe

#83. One fall day in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne

Dan Ariely

#84. God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies which we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne. ...

James Gleick

#85. No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.

Garrett Hardin

#86. The mechanical and social achievements of our day must not blind our eyes to the fact that, in all that relates to man, his nature and aspirations, we have added little or nothing to what has been so finely said by the great men of old.

James Loeb

#87. Instead of exposures to toxic materials and mechanical dangers, we are discovering the toxicity of social circumstances and patterns of social organization.

Richard G. Wilkinson

#88. Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for - they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?

William Hazlitt

#89. The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.

Damien Hirst

#90. Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#91. a huddle of robot sheep bleating their terror with mechanical lungs of a hundred horsepower.

Sinclair Lewis

#92. Between the marriages, I shagged my way round television studios like a mechanical digger.

Steven Moffat

#93. The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter ... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.

James Jeans

#94. But, I don't think any arranger should ever write a drum part for a drummer because if a drummer can't create his own Interpretation of the chart and he plays everything that's written, he becomes mechanical; he has no freedom.

Buddy Rich

#95. No excuse for those mechanical errors to be happening.

Troy Aikman

#96. Traffic was as much an emotional problem as it was a mechanical one.

Tom Vanderbilt

#97. We must not show to all and sundry the secrets of the waters flowing in ocean and river, or the devices that work on these waters. Let there be convened a council of experts and masters in mechanical art to deliberate what is needed to compose and construct these works.

Filippo Brunelleschi

#98. There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster.

Anne Truitt

#99. Extremely unlikely events occur every moment and it is not a priori unthinkable that the evolution of life should be due to mere chance than that a particular order in a pack of cards should result from mechanical shuffling.

Leszek Kolakowski

#100. Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.

Terence McKenna