Quotes About Origins

#1. I like nature but not its substitutes ... Mondrian opposed art to nature saying that art is artificial and nature is natural. I do not share this opinion ... Art's origins are natural.

Hans Arp

#2. Science gives man ever greater powers but less significance. It gives him better tools with less purposes. It is silent on origins, values, and ultimate aims. It gives life and history no meaning or worth that is not canceled by time and death.

Will Durant

#3. Origins should never be a barrier to success. A modest start in life can be a help more than a hindrance.

Alex Ferguson

#4. What's my problem? I have so many, but violent tendencies and probable demonic origins are the ones that should concern you.

Laini Taylor

#5. Lamen though of modest origins was a thoughtful young man who spoke Veretian very well, even if his knowledge of cloth was lacking. 'I

C.S. Pacat

#6. When we look out into space, we are looking into our own origins, because we are truly children of the stars.

Brian Cox

#7. Stars were falling across the sky myriad and random, speeding along brief vectors from their origins in night to their destinies in dust and nothingness.

Cormac McCarthy

#8. The lessons learned as we try to build ever more sophisticated nanomachines will almost certainly inform our understanding of the origins of life.

Paul McEuen

#9. In the welter of statistics about selected ethnic origins (singular or multiple) in the last census, one finding was often overlooked. Of the 25,309,330 people living in Canada in 1986, only 69,065 declared themselves as Canadians.

Charlotte Gray

#10. 'Sanctus' deals with creation myths in every culture. It fascinates me that all cultures, evolving independently, have similar models of mankind's origins, of a Greater Being, of the flood, and so on. It's amazing how they crop up time and time again.

Simon Toyne

#11. Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.

Umberto Eco

#12. The arts which we now call garden design and landscape design have three separate origins: sacred space, horticultural space and domestic space. Like Homo sapiens, the arts of garden and landscape design probably spread to Europe from West Asia.

Tom Turner

#13. The creation story is ridiculous garbage. And has given us a completely false picture of our origin as a species and the origins of the cosmos. If you want a good mythical story it would be the life of Socrates.

Christopher Hitchens

#14. I've never fully understood how Christianity became quite so tame and respectable, given its origins among drunkards, prostitutes, and tax collectors.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

#15. Living truth is that alone which has its origins in thinking. Just as a tree bears year after year the same fruit which is each year new, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually born again in thought.

Albert Schweitzer

#16. The novel since its origins has been the privatization of history ... the history of private life ... and in that sense every novel is an historical novel ...

Jose Emilio Pacheco

#17. I've always really been into science, and in the last five years I've gotten into theoretical physics and the origins of the universe.

Adam Pascal

#18. By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.

Erin McKean

#19. The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.

Lewis Mumford

#20. Beauty saves. Beauty heals. Beauty motivates. Beauty unites. Beauty returns us to our origins, and here lies the ultimate act of saving, of healing, of overcoming dualism.

Matthew Fox

#21. Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

Alain De Botton

#22. However wretched her origins, she chose freely to continue her crimes against us from the moment she woke to this life. It is easy to forgive beautiful women, especially when they lay a sorrowful tale before you like a sugar-dusted meal. It does not mean they deserve forgiveness.

Catherynne M Valente

#23. At times, Singer Johnny Cash rubbed dirt from the earth under his fingernails in order to avoid any arrogance which might stem from his fame, by reminding himself of his roots and origins.

Robert Hilburn

#24. The World Wide Web was precisely what we were trying to PREVENT - ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.

Ted Nelson

#25. Everything that originates from God will endure the test of time. Therefore, it is good to check out the origins of everything to make sure they were started by God.

Eric Ludy

#26. The idea that modernisation makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness has its origins in the astonishing political, economic and military successes of western Europe in the 19th century.

Pankaj Mishra

#27. The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: Look what I killed. Aren't I the best?

Katharine Hamnett

#28. The pursuit of origins is a way of rescuing territory from death and oblivion, a reconquest that ought to be patient, devoted, relentless and faithful.

Amin Maalouf

#29. Socialism as such from its very origins is a workers' system, and when there occur deviations, it is workers that react first.

Wojciech Jaruzelski

#30. May all of you as Americans never forget your heroic origins, never fail to seek Divine guidance, and never lose your natural God-given optimism.

Ronald Reagan

#31. Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that create the wants.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#32. Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

Cormac McCarthy

#33. Archaeopteryx probably cannot tell us much about the early origins of feathers and flight in true protobirds because Archaeopteryx was, in the modern sense, a bird.

Alan Feduccia

#34. Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.42 When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive. To

Jonathan Haidt

#35. If you're looking for the origins of film culture in America, look no further than Amos Vogel.

Martin Scorsese

#36. Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement.

Michael Korda

#37. I liked the myth elements of Christmas. The way in which its origins reach back far beyond Jesus, to the rituals of people unknown to us. The celebration of the winter solstice. The coming of light in the darkest time.

Robert B. Parker

#38. In this dismissal of origins we see the new pragmatism.

Sherry Turkle

#39. In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.

Antoni Tapies

#40. Japan is very cosmopolitan - it values its origins, but a world view hovers above this narrow perspective. The interest of the Japanese in their folk culture is transcendental.

F. Sionil Jose

#41. Hate engenders hate. Hate spreads to nations, and from this cause we have devastating wars. In the contemplation of these wars and their origins there is something humiliating to our human race. No Hymn of Hate can ever be a paean of humanity.

Arthur Alfred Lynch

#42. God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer.

Gerard De Marigny

#43. When we reject our origins, we become the product of whatever soil that we find ourselves planted; the colors of our leaves change as we consume borrowed nutrients with borrowed roots and, like a tree, we grow.

Mike Norton

#44. From schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are.

David Christian

#45. I have never heard anyone speculate on the origins and function of irony, but I can say with confidence that it is only a little less pervasive in our universe than carbon.

Marilynne Robinson

#46. She was the right girl at the right time. She had only a small repertory of Child ballads, never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists because she was indifferent to the origins of her material and sang everything 'sad'.

Joan Didion

#47. The precise origins of the Mage Wars have been lost in the fogs of Time, but Disc philosophers agree that the First Men, shortly after their creation, understandably lost their temper.

Terry Pratchett

#48. The wealth they had accumulated from retail needed to hide its origins, for it is well known that the purity of gold increases the further removed it is from labor.

Diane Setterfield

#49. When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them. Before

Adam M. Grant

#50. My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language--you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing--and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves.

Walker Percy

#51. This conflict between right and fact has endured since the origins of society. To bring the duel to an end, to consolidate the pure ideal with the human reality, to make the right peacefully interpenetrate the fact, and the fact the right, this is the work of the wise.

Victor Hugo

#52. When Hegel later became a man of influence' he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.

Walter Kaufmann

#53. The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.

Mary Ruefle

#54. I think most people are interested in our origins; once we understand, it might be easier to become the people we'd like to be. Or, better, become the people we think we already are.

Alan Alda

#55. Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.

Jodi Picoult

#56. Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings.

Gregory Benford

#57. For decades, we've been trying to cook up the building blocks of life, in the lab, and recreate the origins of it all, but the parts didn't seem to fit together, until now.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#58. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

Edgar Allan Poe

#59. Calamities that are not the result of purely natural phenomena usually have their origins, distant and obscure though they may be, in common human failings.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#60. I step through origins
like a dog turning
its memories of wilderness
on the kitchen mat:
the bog floor shakes,
water cheeps and lisps
as I walk down
rushes and heather.
I love this turf-face,
it's black incisions,
the cooped secrets
of process and ritual:
-Kinship

Seamus Heaney

#61. I'm half Egyptian, and I'm Muslim. But I grew up in Canada, far from my Arab roots. Like so many who straddle East and West, I've been drawn, over the years, to try to better understand my origins.

Shereen El Feki

#62. I think it's important to be extremely proud of one's origins, especially when you are a foreign actress with ethnic features.

Freida Pinto

#63. The idea that we are to be absorbed into the Deity is Gnostic in its origins and is quite antithetical to Christianity."

~R. Alan Woods [2006]

R. Alan Woods

#64. My interest in the psychological roots of psychosis has both personal (my brother Andrew committed suicide) and professional origins (I was trained in a behaviorist approach to psychology which - whatever its limitations - at least taught me to see human behavior in its social context).

Richard Bentall

#65. Rebuilt in Victorian times, it retained the modesty of its medieval origins. Small and neat, its spire indicated the direction of heaven without trying to pierce a hole in it.

Diane Setterfield

#66. From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature - the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent.

Edmund White

#67. For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging.

Sue Monk Kidd

#68. Had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins

George Orwell

#69. Childhood trauma and sufferings does not provide us with an excuse for our problems. It explains the origins of our problems while in no way relieving us of the responsibity to understand and improve ourselves.

Peter R. Breggin

#70. The 'natural' is not necessarily a 'human' value. Humanity has begun to transcend nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it.

Shulamith Firestone

#71. it mattered less what your origins were, and more what work you were willing to do; how hard you'd fight for the men around you.

Alexandra Bracken

#72. Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.

Shulamith Firestone

#73. I soaked the conversations up like a sponge, pulled them apart, rearranged them to make their origins disappear, and when I told them to the same people who had told the stories earlier, they were bewildered by the coincidence between what I said and what they were thinking.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#74. Emphasis on the common emotive or affective origins of music and words in the first cries of humankind undermines words.

Jean-Philippe Rameau

#75. I think there is some resistance when people talk about ethical fashion, and a tendency to panic that if you're bringing a moral agenda and highlighting the origins of the garments, you can't incorporate style. But there's no reason why style and conscience can't co-exist.

Erin O'Connor

#76. Ruins provide the incentive for restoration, and for a return to origins. There has to be an interim of death or rejection before there can be renewal and reform.

J. B. Jackson

#77. Fishing should be a ceremony that reaffirms our place in the natural world and helps us resist further estrangement from our origins.

Thomas McGuane

#78. We're quite happy with our Big Bang description of cosmic origins. But actually, the Big Bang accounts for what happened only after the beginning. The beginning itself, and especially what happened before, remains the biggest mystery of all.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#79. Antiwhite racism is developing in sections of our cities where individuals - some of whom have French nationality - contemptuously designate French people as gaulois on the pretext they don't share the same religion, color or origins.

Jean-Francois Cope

#80. The psychological origins of love are in attachment to parents and sexual partners. We do not attach to ourselves; we do not seek security and fulfillment in ourselves.

Jonathan Haidt

#81. Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.

Timothy Noah

#82. Knowing something about the deep origins of humanity only adds to the remarkable fact of our existence: all of our extraordinary capabilities arose from basic components that evolved in ancient fish and other creatures.

Neil Shubin

#83. The discovery informs about the origins and early evolution of arthropods, the most ubiquitous, species-rich, morphologically diverse and successful animal group on Earth.

Benjamin Van Roy

#84. As a member of the Protestant British squirearchy ruling Ireland, he was touchy about his Irish origins. When in later life an enthusiastic Gael commended him as a famous Irishman, he replied A man can be born in a stable, and yet not be an animal.

Duke Of Wellington

#85. Yet as human beings we have to accept-with humility-that the question of ultimate origins will always remain with us, no matter how deeply we understand the brain and the cosmos that it creates.

V.S. Ramachandran

#86. In America, our origins matter less than our destination, and that is what democracy is all about.

Ronald Reagan

#87. Will we ever learn that certain things can be understood only if we take the trouble to trace them to their origins.

Jose Saramago

#88. Leadership is inherent in our nature and is fundamental to our origins, our human makeup -and our destiny.

Myles Munroe

#89. Somewhere in the background of magnificence lurks the kitchen staff. But a magnificent person only forgets about his origins, never his brunch.

Bauvard

#90. I'll be a Quebecker-Canadian. I'm from Quebec, and every time I go to a country, I say that. It's my roots, my origins, and it's the most important thing to me.

Celine Dion

#91. I come from very humble origins, so the last thing I would ever do is to look down my nose at people who can't afford to come here to my shop.

Bruce Oldfield

#92. The spiritual sense of our place in nature ... can be traced to the origins of human civilization ... The last vestige of organized goddess worship was eliminated by Christianity.

Al Gore

#93. His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

J.M. Coetzee

#94. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

Cormac McCarthy

#95. I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades, who also happens to be Muslim.

Reza Aslan

#96. Throughout history, different cultures have produced creation myths that explain our origins as the result of cosmic forces shaping our destiny. These histories have helped us to ward off feelings of insignificance.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#97. I am not saying do not give people equal health services but do not pretend that giving more money for diabetes or chronic diseases means you are going to deal with the origins of health inequalities.

Andrew Lansley

#98. The knowledge that [he] had passed a loveless, institutionalized childhood and had escaped from his origins by prodigies of pure intellect, at the cost of all other human qualities, helped one to understand him - but not to like him.

Arthur C. Clarke

#99. Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all the good stuff was use to grease propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.
It is the smell of War.

Neal Stephenson

#100. Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.

David Christian