Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don't mean a conceit of the producer.
We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift.
Infatuated, half through conceit, half through love of my art, I achieve the impossible working as no one else ever works.
Serial fiction is a conceit of comic books and soap operas. As one goes, so goes the other in terms of public consciousness.
Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.
Intelligent and alert, wistful but enthusiastic, frank yet tactful, assured without conceit and tender without sentimentality.
Happy indeed are the arahants! No craving can be found in them. Cut off is the conceit 'I am,' Burst asunder is delusion's net.
It is the ultimate conceit of conservatives: that more than half of American voters don't make up more than half of our country.
I have no conceit as a writer; in fact, I find it very difficult to start writing about sculpture generally & my aims in particular.
The Nationalists peddle a misplaced cultural conceit that holds that everyone south of the Solway Firth is an austerity loving Tory.
In the marginalia ... we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly - boldly - originally - with abandonment - without conceit.
None are so seldom found alone, and are so soon tired of their own company, as those coxcombs who are on the best terms with themselves.
It's not to much fun to know yourself too well or think you do - everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through & past the falls.
The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.
There is a difference between conceit and confidence. Conceit is bragging about yourself. Confidence means you believe you can get the job done.
The cynics were watchdogs terrifying malefactors. They tried to expose falseness and conceit. That's why their name is still spoken with a snarl.
The generality of friends puts us out of conceit with friendship; just as the generality of religious people puts us out of conceit with religion.
It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with.
A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves; neither vanity not conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it.
With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.
Apple excels at taking existing concepts - computers, MP3 players, conceit - and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration.
To me, Berlin is as much a conceit as a reality. Why? Because the city is forever in the process of becoming, never being, and so lives more powerfully in the imagination.
There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical. "I count only the hours that are serene.".
Sci-fi works for me as a way of getting across a social conceit couched as entertainment. Social realist movies lost their way because they are just not that entertaining.
Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.
The pretender sees no one but himself, Because he has the veil of conceit in front; If he were endowed with a God discerning eye, He would see that no one is weaker than himself.
I think it'd be pretty unrealistic to think we're the only planet in the world with thinking beings. It's kind of a strange conceit. Especially given how many universes there must be.
There are two kinds of pride, both good and bad. 'Good pride' represents our dignity and self-respect. 'Bad pride' is the deadly sin of superiority that reeks of conceit and arrogance.
Truth is, of its essence, liberating, as it is possessed of no contrivance or conceit - that it provides the only genuine basis for progress and that the future can only be found in truth.
This might be a conceit of government officials, but there's the idea that maybe you can make a difference. It's a conceit. Maybe it's unhealthy. We all believed we could make a difference.
'Atomic Blonde' is about the characters' bigger existential crisis and their world. It's not so much the conceit of the spy game; it's more that being a spy sucks. But we're going to make it fun to watch.
Those who set up a fictitious worship, merely worship and adore their own delirious fancies; indeed, they would never dare so to trifle with God, had they not previously fashioned him after their own childish conceits.
If I see my films described as 'quirky' or, even worse, 'snarky' one more time, I'm going to probably seriously consider an early retirement. All these years, I've labored under the conceit that they were "darkly humorous.'
It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life.
Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
The best and the worst thing about fashion is that anyone can do it. But because fashion can be the most unintellectual thing, you have to turn it into an intellectual exercise just for your own sanity. You have to start with a conceit.
Conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.
Virginia Woolf's literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are 'Mrs. Dalloway,' 'To the Lighthouse' and 'Orlando,' all of which have time as a central conceit.
Most of us think of pride as self-centeredness, conceit, boastfulness, arrogance, or haughtiness. All of these are elements of the sin, but the heart, or core, is still missing. The central feature of pride is enmity - enmity toward God and enmity toward our fellowmen.
The proposition of an established classification of states as slave states and free states, as insisted on by some, and into northern and southern, as maintained by others, seems to me purely imaginary, and of course the supposed equilibrium of those classes a mere conceit.
The science-fictional motif of lethal, infectious information - bad memes - is a fascinating one, with an extended history. One of the earliest instances is Robert W. Chambers's 'The King in Yellow' from 1895. Chambers's conceit is a malevolent play: read beyond Act II, and you go mad.
The quality I appreciated most about Grafton was her loyalty. She stuck with 'Kinsey Millhone' and the alphabet series conceit for her entire career but did not allow herself to stagnate as a writer. Kinsey's first-person narrative gradually made room for other, third-person perspectives.
We've all seen comedians look like they're reaching just a little bit too much for the laugh. This is counterproductive. The conceit of standup is that it is effortless, which makes the prospect of generating new comedy a tricky one: you are trying to be funny without looking like you are trying to be funny.
I think there's this essential human desire to have a unified field theory. Everyone is like, 'I want to unlock the single secret to 'Lost.' There isn't any one secret. There is not a unified field theory for 'Lost,' nor do we think there should be, because philosophically, we don't buy into that as a conceit.
I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.
I always thought if I could just put something in words perfectly enough, people would get the idea, and it would change things. That's a harmless conceit. With people, too, you constantly think, 'If I'm nice to people and treat them well, they'll appreciate it and behave better.' They won't, but it's still not a bad way to live.
Write as precisely and as lucidly and as richly as you can about what you find truly mysterious and irreducible about human experience, and not obscurely about what will prove to be received opinion or cliche once the reader figures out your stylistic conceit. There's all the difference in the world between mystery and mystification.