Illustration Drawing Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Illustration Drawing. Here they are! All 100 of them:

In spite of everything, I shall rise again; I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.
Vincent van Gogh
All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.
John Ruskin (The Elements of Drawing (Dover Art Instruction))
My interest in drawing has died down here in England, but maybe I'll be in the mood again some day or other. Right now I am doing a great deal of reading
Vincent van Gogh (Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated) (Masters of Art Book 3))
Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.
Charles Petzold (Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software)
The true purpose of illustrated journaling [is] to celebrate your life. No matter how small or mundane or redundant, each drawing and little essay you write to commemorate an event or an object or a place makes it all the more special.
Danny Gregory (The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are)
. . . children should draw [a husband & wife] nearer than ever, not separate you, as if they were all yours, and [your husband] had nothing to do but support them. . . . don't neglect husaband for children, don't shut him out of the nursery, but teach him how to help in it. His place is there as well as yours, and the children need him; let him feel that he has his part to do, and he will do it gladly and faithfully, and it will be better for you all. . . . That is the secret of our home happiness: he does not let business wean him from the little cares and duties that affect us all, and I try not to let domestic worries destroy my interest in his pursuits. Each do our part alone in many things, but at home we work together, always. . . . no time is so beautiful and precious to parents as the first years of the little lives given them to train. Don't let [your husband] be a stranger to the babies, for they will do more to keep him safe and happy in this world of trial and temptation than anything else, and through them you will learn to know and love one another as you should.
Louisa May Alcott (Good Wives. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy: Being a Sequel to 'Little Women'. With Illustrations by Jessie T. Mitchell)
And when they reached St. Albans, there would be that wretched couple, kissing under the Abbey walls. Then these folks would go and be pirates until the marriage was over.
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog): New Illustrated Edition with 67 Original Drawings by A. Frederics, a Detailed Map of Tour, and a Photo of the Three Men)
People enjoy inventing slogans which violate basic arithmetic but which illustrate “deeper” truths, such as “1 and 1 make 1” (for lovers), or “1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 1” (the Trinity). You can easily pick holes in those slogans, showing why, for instance, using the plus-sign is inappropriate in both cases. But such cases proliferate. Two raindrops running down a window-pane merge; does one plus one make one? A cloud breaks up into two clouds -more evidence of the same? It is not at all easy to draw a sharp line between cases where what is happening could be called “addition”, and where some other word is wanted. If you think about the question, you will probably come up with some criterion involving separation of the objects in space, and making sure each one is clearly distinguishable from all the others. But then how could one count ideas? Or the number of gases comprising the atmosphere? Somewhere, if you try to look it up, you can probably fin a statement such as, “There are 17 languages in India, and 462 dialects.” There is something strange about the precise statements like that, when the concepts “language” and “dialect” are themselves fuzzy.
Douglas R. Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid)
I earnestly hope that all children will spoil this book by painting the illustrations. I wanted to do this myself but the publishers would not let me. But let the colours you lay on be violent, gorgeous, terrific colours, because my feelings are like that.
G.K. Chesterton (The Coloured Lands: A Whimsical Gathering Of Drawings, Stories, And Poems)
I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?
Robert Louis Stevenson
Why? Because his hair is brown and grows away from his temples; because he opens and shuts his eyes, and his nose is a little out of drawing; because he has two lips and a square chin, and a little finger which he can't straighten from having played baseball too energetically in his youth.
Kate Chopin (The Awakening & Other Short Stories Illustrated)
It is not until you draw something, whether it is an object, a building or an activity, that you really begin to understand it.
Martin Salisbury (Illustrating Children's Books: Creating Pictures for Publication)
His bedroom was a reflection of Bryant's mind, its untidy shelves filled with games and puzzles stacked in ancient boxes, statues and mementoes competing for space with books on every subject imaginable, from Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology to Illustrated British Ballads and A History of Indian Philosophy. "What are you reading at the moment?' asked May. "Batman," said Bryant. "The drawings are terribly good.
Christopher Fowler (Seventy-Seven Clocks (Bryant & May, #3))
I thought that if I couldn’t make a living as an artist, at least I shouldn’t starve. By the time I had finished these studies, I had realized that I simply did not draw well enough to be the kind of artist and illustrator that I wanted to be, and so for two days a week over two years I drew — and drew and drew — from the models in the life classes at Chelsea School of Art. I really found out how people looked and moved and balanced, and though nowadays I almost never use a sketchbook and just make everything up as I go along, it’s those days in the life room that are the back of it all.
Quentin Blake
Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog): New Illustrated Edition with 67 Original Drawings by A. Frederics, a Detailed Map of Tour, and a Photo of the Three Men)
When the bald associate had mentioned a sleeping beauty, he was referring to a fairy tale that you have probably heard one thousand times. Like all fairy tales, the story of Sleeping Beauty begins with 'Once upon a time,' and continues with a foolish young princess who makes a witch very angry, and then takes a nap until her boyfriend wakes her up with a kiss and insists on getting married, at which point the story ends with the phrase 'happily ever after.' The story is usually illustrated with fancy drawings of the napping princess, who always looks very glamorous and elegant, with her hair neatly combed and a long silk gown keeping her comfortable as she snores away for years and years.
Lemony Snicket (The Hostile Hospital (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #8))
To be an artist means to invite an occupation into your life that requires commitment and hard work, but the rewards and satisfaction you’ll get make the work seem like play. But you have to do it every day.
Veronica Lawlor (One Drawing A Day: A 6-Week Course Exploring Creativity with Illustration and Mixed Media (One A Day))
These Taoists' ideas have greatly influenced all our theories of action, even to those of fencing and wrestling. Jiu-jitsu, the Japanese art of self-defence, owes its name to a passage in the Tao-teking. In jiu-jitsu one seeks to draw out and exhaust the enemy's strength by non-resistance, vacuum, while conserving one's own strength for victory in the final struggle. In art the importance of the same principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion. In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up the full measure of your aesthetic emotion.
Kakuzō Okakura (The Book of Tea)
The first thing I did was sit down and draw a map. I saw and named Earthsea and all its islands. I knew almost nothing about them, but I knew their names. In the name is the magic. Introduction, The Books Of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Books of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1-6))
I first read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit when I was eighteen. It felt as though the author had taken every element I'd ever want in a story and woven them into one huge, seamless narrative; but more important, for me, Tolkien had created a place, a vast, beautiful, awesome landscape, which remained a resource long after the protagonists had finished their battles and gone their separate ways. In illustrating The Lord of the Rings I allowed the landscapes to predominate. In some of the scenes the characters are so small they are barely discernible. This suited my own inclinations and my wish to avoid, as much as possible, interfering with the pictures being built up in the reader's mind, which tends to be more closely focussed on characters and their inter-relationships. I felt my task lay in shadowing the heroes on their epic quest, often at a distance, closing in on them at times of heightened emotion but avoiding trying to re-create the dramatic highpoints of the text. With The Hobbit, however, it didn't seem appropriate to keep such a distance, particularly from the hero himself. I don't think I've ever seen a drawing of a Hobbit which quite convinced me, and I don't know whether I've gotten any closer myself with my depictions of Bilbo. I'm fairly happy with the picture of him standing outside Bag End, before Gandalf arrives and turns his world upside-down, but I've come to the conclusion that one of the reasons Hobbits are so quiet and elusive is to avoid the prying eyes of illustrators.
Alan Lee
Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church's grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governments - implicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make.
Denis Johnson (The Name of the World)
...I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like "It" were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down. Where, I ask you, have I been, that no true word of Madame Glyn's literary feats has come to me? But even those far, far better informed than I must work a bit over the opening sentence of Madame Glyn's foreword to her novel" "This is not," the says, drawing her emeralds warmly about her, "the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a full character study of the story It, which the people in the picture read and discuss." I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out. ...Well it turns out that Ava and John meet, and he begins promptly to "vibrate with passion." ... ...It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam launches." -Review of the book, It, by Elinor Glyn. Review title: Madame Glyn Lectures on "It," with Illustrations; November 26, 1927.
Dorothy Parker (Constant Reader: 2)
And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings a hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls … falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heart’s condition. And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky, and the sun is like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted. The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast and bloody. And then the great winds come and the sky is blown naked, and a wild bird screams across the glittering land. And the Countess stands at the window of her room with the white cats at her feet and stares at the frozen landscape spread below her, and a year later she is standing there again but the cats are abroad in the valleys and a raven sits upon her heavy shoulder. And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy. The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity. And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.
Mervyn Peake (The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy)
There were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency.
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog): New Illustrated Edition with 67 Original Drawings by A. Frederics, a Detailed Map of Tour, and a Photo of the Three Men)
When we use our mind, not our brain, to think, to imagine, to plan, to wonder about existence, we are drawing upon the Taoversal consciousness that streams through us.
Chris Prentiss (That Was Zen, This Is Tao: Living Your Way to Enlightenment, Illustrated Edition)
I like to work in watercolor, with as little under-drawing as I can get away with. I like the unpredictability of a medium which is affected as much by humidity, gravity, the way that heavier particles in the wash settle into the undulations of the paper surface, as by whatever I wish to do with it. In other mediums you have more control, you are responsible for every mark on the page — but with watercolor you are in a dialogue with the paint, it responds to you and you respond to it in turn. Printmaking is also like this, it has an unpredictable element. This encourages an intuitive response, a spontaneity which allows magic to happen on the page. When I begin an illustration, I usually work up from small sketches — which indicate in a simple way something of the atmosphere or dynamics of an illustration; then I do drawings on a larger scale supported by studies from models — usually friends — if figures play a large part in the picture. When I've reached a stage where the drawing looks good enough I'll transfer it to watercolor paper, but I like to leave as much unresolved as possible before starting to put on washes. This allows for an interaction with the medium itself, a dialogue between me and the paint. Otherwise it is too much like painting by number, or a one-sided conversation.
Alan Lee
service, which would relay messages to his mother. Ron Wayne drew a logo, using the ornate line-drawing style of Victorian illustrated fiction, that featured Newton sitting under a tree framed by a quote from Wordsworth: “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” It was a rather odd motto, one that fit Wayne’s self-image more than Apple Computer. Perhaps
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
The Plantaris is placed between the Gastrocnemius and Soleus. It arises from the lower part of the lateral prolongation of the linea aspera, and from the oblique popliteal ligament of the knee-joint.
Henry Gray (Gray's Anatomy: Complete & Illustrated With 1247 Original Coloured Drawings)
Another analogy he made was comparing the way that light, sound, magnetism, and the percussion reverberations caused by a hammer blow all disseminate in a radiating pattern, often in waves. In one of his notebooks he made a column of small drawings showing how each force field spreads. He even illustrated what happened when each type of wave hits a small hole in the wall; prefiguring the studies done by Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens almost two centuries later, he showed the diffraction that occurs as the waves go through the aperture. Wave mechanics were for him merely a passing curiosity, but even in this his brilliance is breathtaking.
Walter Isaacson
When I started to draw, most of my influences were from other painters and illustrators, so I was drawing landscape at second hand, really. The trees were Rackham trees, or trees that I had seen in paintings rather than from my own observation...and I started to feel this was a real lack in my work. Everything was too generalised, and not based on real experience. Then in 1975, after having worked for some years in London as a book cover illustrator mainly, I came down to Devon and stayed with some friends up on the moor. In the course of this one weekend, wandering around the moor, finding rivers and ancient woods, I realised that everything that I would ever want to draw was actually here. There was so much richness in the texture and forms of these fantastic trees...and I decided in the course of that weekend to come and live here. I looked at a couple of houses, found one, and made an offer on it, all in that one weekend!
Alan Lee
I often don’t have a clear idea of what I am going to be drawing when I start, unless it is for a very specific purpose. Most of the time, I just sit down and draw a line, and it isn’t really related to anything other than this vague feeling of movement or atmosphere. That line will lead to another, and then forms will start to appear, and figures will start to appear. I usually start things very intuitively, and sort of watch the process, almost as a spectator . . . and then at some point I have to think about what I'm creating, and consciously shape it. If I am doing something for a film or book illustration, then I'm also thinking about a lot of other factors, such as composition and story-telling.
Alan Lee
Markers Markers are my go-to for coloring anime characters. They are simple to use and versatile, especially brush-tip markers. For the illustrations in this book, I only used alcohol-based markers, specifically Copic Sketch or Ciao markers.
Yoai (Anime Art Class: A Complete Course in Drawing Manga Cuties (Cute and Cuddly Art))
There is one type of scientific illustration in which this effect of scale on impression is acknowledged officially, as it were. Geographers who draw sections of mountain ranges will exaggerate the relation of height to width according to a stated proportion. They have found that a true rendering of vertical relationship looks false. Our mind refuses to accept the fact that the distance of 28,000 feet to which Mount Everest soars from sea level is no more than the distance of just over 5 miles which a car traverses in a matter of minutes.
E.H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation)
N MY early boyhood I was enraptured by the great fairytale illustrators of the period: Arthur Rackham, Edmond Dulac, Kay Nielsen. As a schoolboy, I was to discover Aubrey Beardsley, and I was extremely fond of an edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream with most imaginative drawings by Heath Robinson,
John Gielgud (Acting Shakespeare (Applause Books))
Let’s talk about ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers for a second. You’ve definitely seen them around. They’re those blue strips with white lettering that assemble a collection of religious icons and mystical symbols (e.g., an Islamic crescent, a Star of David, a Christian cross, a peace sign, a yin-yang) to spell out a simple message of inclusion and tolerance. Perhaps you instinctively roll your eyes at these advertisements of moral correctness. Perhaps you find the sentiment worthwhile, but you’re not a wear-your-politics-on-your-fender type of person. Or perhaps you actually have ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers affixed to both your Prius and your Beamer. Whatever floats your boat, man; far be it from us to cast stones. But we bring up these particular morality minibillboards to illustrate a bothersome dichotomy. If we were to draw a Venn diagram of (a) the people who flaunt their socially responsible “coexist” values for fellow motorists, and (b) the people who believe that, say, an evangelical Christian who owns a local flower shop ought to be sued and shamed for politely declining to provide floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding, the resulting circles would more or less overlap. The coexist message: You people (i.e., conservatives) need to get on board and start coexisting with groups that might make you uncomfortable. It says so right here on my highly enlightened bumper sticker. But don’t you dare ask me to tolerate the ‘intolerance’ of people with whom I disagree. Because that’s different.
Mary Katharine Ham
You can't murder a book. Even I know that. But you know what you can do with a book, what you can do is burn it, or throw it out a window, or draw, mm, big hairy moustaches on all the ancient illustrations, and blacken the teeth of the women and children, and-- Oh God, don't. It's like talking about drowning babies. You are a terrible person.
Lady Jaida
We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. Reach not after morality and righteousness, my friends; watch vigilantly your stomach, and diet it with care and judgment. Then virtue and contentment will come and reign within your heart, unsought by any effort of your own; and you will be a good citizen, a loving husband, and a tender father - a noble, pious man.
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog): New Illustrated Edition with 67 Original Drawings by A. Frederics, a Detailed Map of Tour, and a Photo of the Three Men)
I write about you too. What it is like inside you.” He took in a shaky breath and then asked, “Can I see them?” Merrick nodded. He reached for his notebook before leaning back against Cas again. He thumbed through the pages, and Cassius saw his face, his smile, his eyes, his prick, and his buttocks. “They are…they’re beautiful. I can hardly believe they’re me.” “Why?” Merrick asked. “You are beautiful.” He couldn’t believe it because they were drawn by Prince Merrick’s hand with such care…such affection, that it stole his breath. When Cas didn’t reply, Merrick continued, “What if we could do it together? I could draw illustrations and you could write the stories. We could spend eternity that way.” “It is a nice dream,” he replied, because that was all it could be
Riley Hart (Ever After)
How good one feels when one is full - how satisfied with ourselves and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal - so noble-minded, so kindly-hearted.
Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog): New Illustrated Edition with 67 Original Drawings by A. Frederics, a Detailed Map of Tour, and a Photo of the Three Men)
When it came to my turn in the super spelling bee everyone had already been given really easy words. “Ryan,” Mr H said, “I want you to spell the word icup.” “Icup?” I thought.  I clammed up and my face went all warm and prickly, that feeling you get when you know you’re going to get the answer wrong. It’s a bit like the feeling you get when you walk up on stage to collect an award and you trip going up the stairs in front of everyone, or worse still, your pants fall down. It’s called embarrassment and I was feeling it big time. Actually it was worse than big time. It was humongous, mammoth, big time. All those long, boring afternoons sitting with Mom on the couch spelling word after word meant nothing anymore. I’d never heard of the word ‘icup’. “Oh no,” I thought. If I got this wrong I might not make the necessary criteria to get a raffle ticket before the big draw. Panic stations set in. This was going to be disastrous. ​Mom always said that if you get nervous or frightened, just imagine everyone around you is only in their underwear. It will make you laugh and you’ll forget your nerves. So I did, but it wasn’t a pretty sight. ​ “Ok get a grip of yourself Rino,” I said in my head. “Think about it and just sound the word out.” I could hear my Mom’s words bleating in my head as she so often did when I got stuck on a word. I began slowly, deep in thought and not willing to put one foot wrong sounding out each letter, “I … c.. u .. pee.”  There was silence and then the whole class erupted into hysterics, laughing their heads off, followed by Mr Higginbottom. Then I realised what I had just said when I sounded out the word; “I see you pee,” and I burst out into an embarrassed sort of laughter too. Mr Higginbottom came over and gave me a friendly pat on my head and ruffled my hair. It didn’t worry me that I’d combed it just the right way and put gel in it that morning. It was ok for Mr H to mess it up, but if my sister ever did it, she’d be dead meat. “Well
Kate Cullen (Game On Boys! The Play Station Play-offs: A Hilarious adventure for children 9-12 with illustrations)
University of Otago social historian Hera Cook provides a beautiful illustration of exactly this point in her rich account of the sexual revolution.49 Cook notes that in eighteenth-century England, women were assumed to be sexually passionate. But drawing on economic and social changes, fertility-rate patterns, personal accounts, and sex surveys and manuals, Cook charts the path toward the sexual repression of the Victorian era. This was a time of reduced female economic power, thanks to a shift from production in the home to wage earning, and there was less community pressure on men to financially support children fathered out of wedlock. And so, in the absence of well-known, reliable birth control techniques, “women could not afford to enjoy sex. The risk made it too expensive a pleasure.”50
Cordelia Fine (Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society)
I suppose that really I had a training or education not so very different from a lot of other artists and illustrators — it’s just that I didn’t have it in the normal order. When I was at school I liked drawing, and I liked anything to do with humor, and I liked writing too. When I was about fourteen, I was lucky enough to be introduced to a man who both painted pictures and drew cartoons for newspapers and magazines, including Punch, the most famous English humorous magazine at the time. He was called Alfred Jackson and every few months I would take him a collection of my drawings to look at. Now I look back and realize these were in fact lessons or tutorials, and what was especially good about them was that he talked not only about the cartoonists’ drawings in Punch at the time, but also about Michelangelo and Modigliani as well.
Quentin Blake
Did I tell you that I had sent the drawings to friend Russell? At the moment I am doing practically the same ones again for you, there will be twelve likewise. You will then see better what there is in the painted studies in the way of drawing. I have already told you that I always have to fight against the mistral, which makes it absolutely impossible to be master of your stroke. That accounts for the “haggard” look of the studies.
Vincent van Gogh (Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated) (Masters of Art Book 3))
Now in her hands, the final copy- every brushstroke, every carefully thought-out color, every word of the natural histories, printed in a book. There were also drawings of the creatures who live inside- how they eat, how they move, how they mate- because people forget about creatures who live in shells. She touched the pages and remembered each shell and the story of finding it, where it lay on the beach, the season, the sunrise. A family album.
Delia Owens (Where the Crawdads Sing)
In Darwin's time no serious attempt had been made to examine the manifestations of variability. A vast assemblage of miscellaneous facts could formerly be adduced as seemingly comparable illustrations of the phenomenon "Variation." Time has shown this mass of evidence to be capable of analysis. When first promulgated it produced the impression that variability was a phenomenon generally distributed amongst living things in such a way that the specific divisions must be arbitrary. When this variability is sorted out, and is seen to be in part a result of hybridisation, in part a consequence of the persistence of hybrids by parthenogenetic reproduction, a polymorphism due to the continued presence of individuals representing various combinations of Mendelian allelomorphs, partly also the transient effect of alteration in external circumstances, we see how cautious we must be in drawing inferences as to the indefiniteness of specific limits from a bare knowledge that intermediates exist.
William Bateson (Problems of Genetics (Yale Studies in the History of Science a))
A good exercise session leaves an athlete person gasping for air, sweating, and exhausted, and so is writing and drawing for writers and artists, but the brain is what pants and feels exhaustion. Writing and drawing are a great mental effort that equals tiring physical training. When you write and draw, you need to use all your brain muscles to transfer your ideas into the paper. Concentration, knowledge, experience, creativity, imagination, all unite, trying hard to finish a text or an art piece.
Noora Ahmed Alsuwaidi
Designing a railway using slime mold might seem like an esoteric illustration of learning simple rules from the experience of others, but drawing inspiration for simple rules from the animal world is not so rare. Termites, bees, and other social insects provide a particularly fertile source of simple rules. They have enough collective intelligence to accomplish complex tasks like finding nests or migrating long distances, but since each animal has little brainpower and few physical skills, their actions can often be captured by simple rules.
Donald Sull (Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World)
Three researchers at Stanford University noticed the same thing about the undergraduates they were teaching, and they decided to study it. First, they noticed that while all the students seemed to use digital devices incessantly, not all students did. True to stereotype, some kids were zombified, hyperdigital users. But some kids used their devices in a low-key fashion: not all the time, and not with two dozen windows open simultaneously. The researchers called the first category of students Heavy Media Multitaskers. Their less frantic colleagues were called Light Media Multitaskers. If you asked heavy users to concentrate on a problem while simultaneously giving them lots of distractions, the researchers wondered, how good was their ability to maintain focus? The hypothesis: Compared to light users, the heavy users would be faster and more accurate at switching from one task to another, because they were already so used to switching between browser windows and projects and media inputs. The hypothesis was wrong. In every attentional test the researchers threw at these students, the heavy users did consistently worse than the light users. Sometimes dramatically worse. They weren’t as good at filtering out irrelevant information. They couldn’t organize their memories as well. And they did worse on every task-switching experiment. Psychologist Eyal Ophir, an author of the study, said of the heavy users: “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing. The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.” This is just the latest illustration of the fact that the brain cannot multitask. Even if you are a Stanford student in the heart of Silicon Valley.
John Medina (Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School)
Because it wasn’t enough to be accompanied by the beast who scared the crap out of every god in Heaven, Xuanzang was assigned a few more traveling companions. The gluttonous pig-man Zhu Baijie. Sha Wujing, the repentant sand demon. And the Dragon Prince of the West Sea, who took the form of a horse for Xuanzang to ride. The five adventurers, thusly gathered, set off on their— “Holy ballsacks!” I yelped. I dropped the book like I’d been bitten. “How far did you get?” Quentin said. He was leaning against the end of the nearest shelf, as casually as if he’d been there the whole time, waiting for this moment. I ignored that he’d snuck up on me again, just this once. There was a bigger issue at play. In the book was an illustration of the group done up in bold lines and bright colors. There was Sun Wukong at the front, dressed in a beggar’s cassock, holding his Ruyi Jingu Bang in one hand and the reins of the Dragon Horse in the other. A scary-looking pig-faced man and a wide-eyed demon monk followed, carrying the luggage. And perched on top of the horse was . . . me. The artist had tried to give Xuanzang delicate, beatific features and ended up with a rather girly face. By whatever coincidence, the drawing of Sun Wukong’s old master could have been a rough caricature of sixteen-year-old Eugenia Lo from Santa Firenza, California. “That’s who you think I am?” I said to Quentin. “That’s who I know you are,” he answered. “My dearest friend. My boon companion. You’ve reincarnated into such a different form, but I’d recognize you anywhere. Your spiritual energies are unmistakable.” “Are you sure? If you’re from a long time ago, maybe your memory’s a little fuzzy.” “The realms beyond Earth exist on a different time scale,” Quentin said. “Only one day among the gods passes for every human year. To me, you haven’t been gone long. Months, not centuries.” “This is just . . . I don’t know.” I took a moment to assemble my words. “You can’t walk up to me and expect me to believe right away that I’m the reincarnation of some legendary monk from a folk tale.” “Wait, what?” Quentin squinted at me in confusion. “I said you can’t expect me to go, ‘okay, I’m Xuanzang,’ just because you tell me so.” Quentin’s mouth opened slowly like the dawning of the sun. His face went from confusion to understanding to horror and then finally to laughter. “mmmmphhhhghAHAHAHAHA!” he roared. He nearly toppled over, trying to hold his sides in. “HAHAHAHA!” “What the hell is so funny?” “You,” Quentin said through his giggles. “You’re not Xuanzang. Xuanzang was meek and mild. A friend to all living things. You think that sounds like you?” It did not. But then again I wasn’t the one trying to make a case here. “Xuanzang was delicate like a chrysanthemum.” Quentin was getting a kick out of this. “You are so tough you snapped the battleaxe of the Mighty Miracle God like a twig. Xuanzang cried over squashing a mosquito. You, on the other hand, have killed more demons than the Catholic Church.” I was starting to get annoyed. “Okay, then who the hell am I supposed to be?” If he thought I was the pig, then this whole deal was off. “You’re my weapon,” he said. “You’re the Ruyi Jingu Bang.” I punched Quentin as hard as I could in the face.
F.C. Yee (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, #1))
Another misnomer concerned the relationship between audience size and advertising rates. One common interpretation propounded that programs with higher ratings produced higher revenues - a logical fallacy insofar as it flagrantly disregarded crucial influencing factors (notably, content and demographics). In 1994, to cite one illustrative example, Seinfeld commanded $390,000 for a 30-second spot - $40,000 more than Home Improvement - despite attracting fewer overall viewers. Its ability to draw more young viewers (often defined as the ‘highly desirable’ 18-49 demographic) instead made all the difference. In sum, as industry experts realized, advertisers bought ‘demos’ before they did households.
Guy Evans (Nitro: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW)
The reader should bear in mind that there were two ways of doing battle: using the law and using force. Typically, humans have laws and animals force. But since playing by the law often proves inadequate, it makes sense to resort to force as well. Hence a ruler must be able to exploit both the man and the beast in himself to the full. In ancient times writers used fables to teach their leaders this lesson: they tell how Achilles and many other leaders were sent to the centaur Chiron to be fed and brought up under his discipline. This story of having a teacher who was half-man and half-beast obviously meant that a ruler had to be able to draw on both natures. If he had only one, he wouldn't survive.
Niccolò Machiavelli ("The Prince (classics illustrated) ")
Most of Leonardo’s drawings for Pacioli’s book, which was finished in 1498, are variations of the five shapes known as Platonic solids. These are polyhedrons that have the same number of faces meeting at each vertex: pyramids, cubes, octahedrons (eight faces), dodecahedrons (twelve), and icosahedrons (twenty). He also illustrated more complex shapes, such as a rhombicuboctahedron, which has twenty-six facets, eight of them equilateral triangles that are bordered by squares (fig. 58). He pioneered a new method for making such shapes understandable: instead of drawing them as solids, he made them see-through skeletons, as if constructed of wooden beams. His sixty illustrations for Pacioli were the only drawings he published during his lifetime. Fig.
Walter Isaacson (Leonardo da Vinci)
Listen, one of the first days after I came to this spot I talked to a painter friend of mine, who said, “How boring it would be to do this.” I didn’t say anything, but I thought it so astounding that I didn’t even have the strength to give that idiot a piece of my mind. And I am still going there, over and over again. All right! I have done two drawings of it - of that flat landscape, where there was nothing but ... infinity - eternity. All right! While I was drawing, there came along a fellow who is not a painter but a soldier [Milliet]. I said to him “Does it amaze you that I think this as beautiful as the sea?” Now this fellow knew the sea. “No, it doesn’t amaze me,” he said, “that you think this as beautiful as the sea, but I myself think it even
Vincent van Gogh (Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated) (Masters of Art Book 3))
Before drawing any affirmative conclusions let us first note the absence of the concept of imitation as a general pastoral or moral guideline. There is in the New Testament no Franciscan glorification of barefoot itinerancy. Even when Paul argues the case for celibacy, it does not occur to him to appeal to the example of Jesus. Even when Paul explains his own predilection for self-support there is no appeal to Jesus' years of village artisan. Even when the Apostle argues strongly the case for his teaching authority, there is no appeal to the rabbinic ministry of Jesus. Jesus' trade as a carpenter, his association with fishermen, and his choice of illustrations from the life of the sower and the shepherd have through Christian history given momentum to the romantic glorification of the handcrafts and the rural life; but there is none of this in the New Testament, which testifies throughout to the life and mission of a church going intentionally into the cities in full knowledge of the conflicts which awaited here there. That the concept of imitation is not applied by the New Testament at some of those points where Franciscan and romantic devotion has tried most piously to apply it, is all the more demonstration of how fundamental the thought of participation in the suffering of Christ is when the New Testament church sees it as guiding and explaining her attitude to the powers of the world. Only at one point, only on one subject - but then consistently, universally - is Jesus our example: in his cross.
John Howard Yoder (The Politics of Jesus)
I shoot up out of my chair. “It’s Bree. Hide the board!” Everyone hops out of their chairs and starts scrambling around and bumping into each other like a classic cartoon. We hear the door shut behind her, and the whiteboard is still standing in the middle of the kitchen like a lit-up marquee. I hiss at Jamal, “Get rid of it!” His eyes are wide orbs, head whipping around in all directions. “Where? In the utensil drawer? Up my shirt?! There’s nowhere! That thing is huge!” “LADY IN THE HOUSE!” Bree shouts from the entryway. The sound of her tennis shoes getting kicked off echoes around the room, and my heart races up my throat. Her name is pasted all over that whiteboard along with phrases like “first kiss—keep it light” and “entwined hand-holding” and “dirty talk about her hair”. Yeah…I’m not sure about that last one, but we’ll see. Basically, it’s all laid out there—the most incriminating board in the world. If Bree sees this thing, it’s all over for me. “Erase it!” Price whispers frantically. “No, we didn’t write it down anywhere else! We’ll lose all the ideas.” I can hear Bree’s footsteps getting closer. “Nathan? Are you home?” “Uh—yeah! In the kitchen.” Jamal tosses me a look like I’m an idiot for announcing our location, but what am I supposed to do? Stand very still and pretend we’re not all huddled in here having a Baby-Sitter’s Club re-enactment? She would find us, and that would look even worse after keeping quiet. “Just flip it over!” I tell anyone who’s not running in a circle chasing his tail. As Lawrence flips the whiteboard, Price tells us all to act natural. So of course, the second Bree rounds the corner, I hop up on the table, Jamal rests his elbow on the wall and leans his head on his hand, and Lawrence just plops down on the floor and pretends to stretch. Derek can’t decide what to do so he’s caught mid-circle. We all have fake smiles plastered on. Our acting is shit. Bree freezes, blinking at the sight of each of us not acting at all natural. “Whatcha guys doing?” Her hair is a cute messy bun of curls on the top of her head and she’s wearing her favorite joggers with one of my old LA Sharks hoodies, which she stole from my closet a long time ago. It swallows her whole, but since she just came from the studio, I know there is a tight leotard under it. I can barely find her in all that material, and yet she’s still the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen. Just her presence in this room feels like finally getting hooked up to oxygen after days of not being able to breathe deeply. We all respond to Bree’s question at the same time but with different answers. It’s highly suspicious and likely what makes her eyes dart to the whiteboard. Sweat gathers on my spine. “What’s with the whiteboard?” she asks, taking a step toward it. I hop off the table and get in her path. “Huh? Oh, it’s…nothing.” She laughs and tries to look around me. I pretend to stretch so she can’t see. “It doesn’t look like nothing. What? Are you guys drawing boobies on that board or something? You look so guilty.” “Ah—you caught us! Lots of illustrated boobs drawn on that board. You don’t want to see it.” She pauses, a fading smile hovering on her lips, and her eyes look up to meet mine. “For real—what’s going on? Why can’t I see it?” She doesn’t believe my boob explanation. I guess we should take that as a compliment? My eyes catch over Bree’s shoulder as Price puts himself out of her line of sight and begins miming the action of getting his phone out and taking a picture of the whiteboard. This little show is directed at Derek, who is standing somewhere behind me. Bree sees me watching Price and whips her head around to catch him. He freezes—hands extended looking like he’s holding an imaginary camera. He then transforms that into a forearm stretch. “So tight after our workout today.” Her eyes narrow.
Sarah Adams (The Cheat Sheet (The Cheat Sheet, #1))
Listen, one of the first days after I came to this spot I talked to a painter friend of mine, who said, “How boring it would be to do this.” I didn’t say anything, but I thought it so astounding that I didn’t even have the strength to give that idiot a piece of my mind. And I am still going there, over and over again. All right! I have done two drawings of it - of that flat landscape, where there was nothing but ... infinity - eternity. All right! While I was drawing, there came along a fellow who is not a painter but a soldier [Milliet]. I said to him “Does it amaze you that I think this as beautiful as the sea?” Now this fellow knew the sea. “No, it doesn’t amaze me,” he said, “that you think this as beautiful as the sea, but I myself think it even more beautiful than the ocean; because it is inhabited
Vincent van Gogh (Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated) (Masters of Art Book 3))
Words present to us little pictures of things, lucid and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter’s bench, a bird, an ant-hill; things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us — of persons and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons — a confused picture, which draws from the names, from the brightness or darkness of their sound, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction, or by a whim on the designer’s part, are blue or red not only the sky and the sea, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets.
Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7])
He had grown up among people to whom such emotions were unknown. The old Marquess's passion for his fields and woods was the love of the agriculturist and the hunter, not that of the naturalist or the poet; and the aristocracy of the cities regarded the country merely as so much soil from which to draw their maintenance. The gentlefolk never absented themselves from town but for a few weeks of autumn, when they went to their villas for the vintage, transporting thither all the diversions of city life and venturing no farther afield than the pleasure-grounds that were but so many open-air card-rooms, concert-halls and theatres. Odo's tenderness for every sylvan function of renewal and decay, every shifting of light and colour on the flying surface of the year, would have been met with the same stare with which a certain enchanting Countess
Edith Wharton (Edith Wharton: Collection of 115 Works with analysis and historical background (Annotated and Illustrated) (Annotated Classics))
The train scooted along the fried coast. We made solid headway into the Marston's. Mo was down a testicle since the spring. We'd called in at the Royal the night of his operation. We'd stopped at the Ship and Mitre on the way—they'd a handsome bitter from Clitheroe on guest tap. We needed the fortification: when Real Ale Club boys parade down hospital wards, we tend to draw worried glances from the whitecoats. We are shaped like those chaps in the warning illustrations on cardiac charts. We gathered around Mo and breathed a nice fog of bitter over the lad and we joshed him gently. “Sounding a little high-pitched, Mo?” “Other lad's going to be worked overtime.” “Diseased bugger you'll want in a glass jar, Mo. One for the mantelpiece.” Love is a strong word, but. We were family to Mo when he was up the Royal having the bollock out. We passed Flint Castle and Everett Bell piped up.
Kevin Barry (Beer Trip to Llandudno)
My attitude toward all other persons is well illustrated by this story from a celebrated traveler: He arrived one day in the midst of a tribe of savages, where a child had just been born. A crowd of soothsayers, magicians, and quacks ― armed with rings, hooks, and cords ― surrounded it. One said: "This child will never smell the perfume of a peace- pipe unless I stretch his nostrils." Another said: "He will never be able to hear unless I draw his ear-lobes down to his shoulders." A third said: "He will never see the sunshine unless I slant his eyes." Another said: "He will never stand upright unless I bend his legs." A fifth said: "He will never learn to think unless I flatten his skull." "Stop," cried the traveler. "What God does is well done. Do not claim to know more than He. God has given organs to this frail creature; let them develop and grow strong by exercise, use, experience, and liberty.
Frédéric Bastiat (The Law)
In explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to meaningful work, Horning draws on the writing of political theorist Jon Elster. In his 1986 book An Introduction to Karl Marx, Elster used a simple example to illustrate the psychic difference between the hard work of developing talent and the easy work of consuming stuff: Compare playing the piano with eating lamb chops. The first time one practices the piano it is difficult, even painfully so. By contrast, most people enjoy lamb chops the first time they eat them. Over time, however, these patterns are reversed. Playing the piano becomes increasingly more rewarding, whereas the taste for lamb chops becomes satiated and jaded with repeated, frequent consumption. Elster then made a broader point: Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages. “Consumerism,” comments Horning, “keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena—a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. . . . But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.” Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A
Nicholas Carr (Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations)
Of all the works by Victor Hugo the poetic generation of 1880 preferred above all the Chansons des Rues et des Bois ('Songs of the Streets and Woods') and the late poems such as Ce que dit Ia Bouche d'Ombre ('What says the mouth of shadow'), written during a period of intense spiritualism. Quite apart from drawings done during seances, for the most part caricatures, hob-goblins and ghouls, the graphic work of Hugo is that of a visionary. Wood engravers beautifully reproduced these visions as illustrations for Le Rhin ('The Rhine') or Les Travailleurs de la Mer ('The Toilers of the Sea'). Drawn beside cursed romantic castles and storm-tossed lighthouses, ink blots become angels or skeletons, accidental stains become souls or flowers, ambiguities and metamorphoses provide prodigious leaven for the imagination: 'The magnificent imagination which flows through the drawings of Victor Hugo like the mystery in the sky' (Baudelaire).
Philippe Jullian (The symbolists)
The gables of the houses, like a fading road below a blue sky studded with stars, are dark blue or violet with a green tree. Here you have a night painting without black, with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green and in this surrounding the illuminated area colours itself sulfur pale yellow and citron green. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. Normally, one draws and paints the painting during the daytime after the sketch. But I like to paint the thing immediately. It is true that in the darkness I can take a blue for a green, a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since it is hard to distinguish the quality of the tone. But it is the only way to get away from our conventional night with poor pale whitish light, while even a simple candle already provides us with the richest of yellows and oranges.” Café Terrace at Night is the first painting in which van Gogh used starry backgrounds. Later, he went on to use this technique more prominently in The Starry Night.
Vincent van Gogh (Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated) (Masters of Art Book 3))
Several years ago, I was invited to deliver a lecture on art and literature to the Tinworth Historical Society. While searching in the attic for a treatise of mine written during my student days at the Sorbonne, I came upon a large, dust-and-cobweb-covered trunk bearing the initials W.W. which I had never before noticed. Inside were stacks of paper tied in neat bundles and a large quantity of fascinating memorabilia - faded flowers, old invitations, scraps of satin, velvet and lace, postage stamps, jewelry, postcards from foreign capitals. The variety was endless. As I examined several bundles of paper more carefully, I realized I was holding a collection of drawings by Amelia Woodmouse, a promising young artist and a member of the family who had lived in the house at the turn of the century. From the delightful portraits and paintings depicting the life around her, and the accumulation of personal mementos, it was obvious that the artist had begun her collection in order to compile a family album, which for some reason, sadly, she never completed.
Pamela Sampson
The soul stands on unassailable ground, if it has abandoned external things; it is independent in its own fortress; and every weapon that is hurled falls short of the mark. Fortune has not the long reach with which we credit her; she can seize none except him that clings to her. Let us then recoil from her as far as we are able. This will be possible for us only through knowledge of self and of the world of Nature. The soul should know whither it is going and whence it came, what is good for it and what is evil, what it seeks and what it avoids, and what is that Reason which distinguishes between the desirable and the undesirable, and thereby tames the madness of our desires and calms the violence of our fears. Some men flatter themselves that they have checked these evils by themselves even without the aid of philosophy; but when some accident catches them off their guard, a tardy confession of error is wrung from them. Their boastful words perish from their lips when the torturer commands them to stretch forth their hands, and when death draws nearer!
Epictetus (Stoic Six Pack (Illustrated): Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Golden Sayings, Fragments and Discourses of Epictetus, Letters from a Stoic and The Enchiridion: ... Letters from a Stoic and The Enchiridion)
This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium that is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming, streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren … The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens. Nothing tangible is planned. But we are promised there will be ‘innovative developments’, ‘local strategic partnerships’ and ‘urban policy units’. Town councils will have new powers to ‘promote well-being’ … and, just in case we think this will never happen, we are promised that ‘visions for the future will be developed’. There will be a ‘key focus’ here and a ‘co-ordinated effort’ there. The government in its wisdom has ‘established a framework’. The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect’s drawings in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths.
Chris Mullin (A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin)
The essay was entitled “Gibbon Through the Night,” and from it Isao was able to draw this essential portion: By any standard Gibbon’s work is a masterpiece. It goes without saying that I am far too deficient in scholarship and intellect to comprehend its wisdom, but I may safely contend that no Japanese translation can possibly convey the monumental significance of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The lavishly illustrated 1909 edition edited by Professor Bury, seven volumes, unabridged, is absolutely without peer. When I give myself over to the pleasure of reading Gibbon by the light afforded by my bedside lamp, the hour inevitably grows far advanced. The breathing of my sleeping wife beside me, the rustle of the pages of my Bury edition of Gibbon, and the ticking of the antique clock purchased from LeRoi’s of Paris become by and by the only sounds that occupy the silence of my bedroom, forming a kind of delicate nocturnal trio. And the small lamp that illumines Gibbon’s pages is, within the whole house, the last torch of the intellect to be extinguished each night.
Yukio Mishima (Runaway Horses: The Sea of Fertility, 2 (Vintage International))
Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both. 'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable. By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance at which you catch sight of your prey—or your predators. And, as with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom. A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak—not the highest peak but a high one.
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
Balade de Bon Conseyl Flee fro the prees and dwelle with sothfastnesse; Suffyce unto thy thing, though it be smal, For hord hath hate, and climbing tikelnesse, Prees hath envye, and wele blent overal. Savour no more than thee bihove shal, Reule wel thyself that other folk canst rede, And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede. Tempest thee noght al croked to redresse In trust of hir that turneth as a bal; Gret reste stant in litel besinesse. Be war therfore to sporne ayeyns an al, Stryve not, as doth the crokke with the wal. Daunte thyself, that dauntest otheres dede, And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede. That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnesse; The wrastling for this world axeth a fal. Her is non hoom, her nis but wildernesse: Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal! Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al; Hold the heye wey and lat thy gost thee lede, And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede. Envoy Therefore, thou Vache, leve thyn old wrecchednesse; Unto the world leve now to be thral. Crye him mercy, that of his hy goodnesse Made thee of noght, and in especial Draw unto him, and pray in general For thee, and eek for other, hevenlich mede; And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede. Explicit Le bon counseill de G. Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (The Riverside Chaucer)
The poetical term fête galante refers to a new genre of paintings and drawings that blossomed in the early 18th century during the [French] Regency period (1715-1723) and whose central figure was Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). Inspired by images of bucolic merrymaking in the Flemish tradition, Watteau and his followers created a new form, with a certain timelessness, characterised by greater subtlety and nuance. These depict amorous scenes in settings garlanded with luxuriant vegetation, real or imaginary: idealised dancers, women and shepherds are shown engaged in frivolous pursuits or exchanging confidences. The poetical and fantastical atmospheres that are a mark of his work are accompanied by a quest for elegance and sophistication characteristic of the Rococo movement, which flourished during the Age of Enlightenment, evidenced in his flair for curved lines and light colours. The flexibility of the fête galante theme proved to be an invitation to experimentation and innovation, and the genre was to inspire several generations of artists, occupying a central place in French art throughout the 18th century. Works by other highly creative painters, such as François Boucher (1703-1770) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), illustrate their very personal visions of the joys of the fête galante as first imagined by Watteau.
Christoph Vogtherr (De Watteau à Fragonard: Les fêtes galantes)
However, it looks somewhat different when viewed not from the personalistic standpoint, i.e., from the personal situation of Miss Miller, but from the standpoint of the archetype’s own life. As we have already explained, the phenomena of the unconscious can be regarded as more or less spontaneous manifestations of autonomous archetypes, and though this hypothesis may seem very strange to the layman, it is amply supported by the fact the archetype has a numinous character: it exerts a fascination, it enters into active opposition to the conscious mind, and may be said in the long run to mould the destinies of individuals by unconsciously influencing their thinking, feeling, and behaviour, even if this influence is not recognized until long afterwards. The primordial image is itself a “pattern of behaviour”4 which will assert itself with or without the co-operation of the conscious personality. Although the Miller case gives us some idea of the manner in which an archetype gradually draws nearer to consciousness and finally takes possession of it, the material is too scanty to serve as a complete illustration of the process. I must therefore refer my reader to the dream-series discussed in Psychology and Alchemy, where he will be able to follow the gradual emergence of a definite archetype with all the specific marks of its autonomy and authority.
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
As with most thoughtful natures, Odo's first disillusionment was to come from discovering not what his God condemned, but what He condoned. Between Cantapresto's coarse philosophy of pleasure and the refined complaisances of his new confessor he felt the distinction to be one rather of taste than of principle; and it seemed to him that the religion of the aristocracy might not unfairly be summed up in the ex-soprano's cynical aphorism: "As respectful children of our Heavenly Father it behoves us not to speak till we are spoken to." Even the religious ceremonies he witnessed did not console him for that chill hour of dawn, when, in the chapel at Donnaz, he had served the mass for Don Gervaso, with a heart trembling at its own unworthiness yet uplifted by the sense of the Divine Presence. In the churches adorned like aristocratic drawing-rooms, of which some Madonna, wreathed in artificial flowers, seemed the amiable and indulgent hostess, and where the florid passionate music of the mass was rendered by the King's opera singers before a throng of chattering cavaliers and ladies, Odo prayed in vain for a reawakening of the old emotion. The sense of sonship was gone. He felt himself an alien in the temple of this affable divinity, and his heart echoed no more than the cry which had once lifted him on wings of praise to the very threshold of the hidden glory — Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae et
Edith Wharton (Edith Wharton: Collection of 115 Works with analysis and historical background (Annotated and Illustrated) (Annotated Classics))
He was tired of gossip. God, was he tired of gossip. By the time he sold it, SpeakEasyMedia had fully morphed into the very thing Leo most loathed. It had become a pathetic parody of itself, not any more admirable or honest or transparent than the many publications and people they ruthlessly ridiculed—twenty-two to thirty-four times a day to be exact, that was the number the accountants had come up with, how many daily posts they needed on each of their fourteen sites to generate enough clickthroughs to keep the advertisers happy. An absurd amount, a number that meant they had to give prominence to the mundane, shine a spotlight of mockery on the unlucky and often undeserving—publishing stories that were immediately forgotten except by the poor sods who’d been fed to the ever-hungry machine that was SpeakEasyMedia. “The cockroaches of the Internet,” one national magazine had dubbed them, illustrating the article with a cartoon drawing of Leo as King Roach. He was tired of being King Roach. The numbers the larger media company dangled seemed huge to Leo who was also, at that particular moment, besotted with his new publicist, Victoria Gross, who had come from money and was accustomed to money and looked around the room of Leo’s tiny apartment the first time she visited as if she’d just stepped into a homeless shelter. (“When you said you lived near Gramercy,” she said, confused, “I thought you’d
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (The Nest)
More or less the same can be said for Art Therapy, which is organized infantilism. Our class was run by a delirious young woman with a fixed, indefatigable smile, who was plainly trained at a school offering courses in Teaching Art to the Mentally Ill; not even a teacher of very young retarded children could have been compelled to bestow, without deliberate instruction, such orchestrated chuckles and coos. Unwinding long rolls of slippery mural paper, she would tell us to take our crayons and make drawings illustrative of themes that we ourselves had chosen. For example: My House. In humiliated rage I obeyed, drawing a square, with a door and four cross-eyed windows, a chimney on top issuing forth a curlicue of smoke. She showered me with praise, and as the weeks advanced and my health improved so did my sense of comedy. I began to dabble happily in colored modeling clay, sculpting at first a horrid little green skull with bared teeth, which our teacher pronounced a splendid replica of my depression. I then proceeded through intermediate stages of recuperation to a rosy and cherubic head with a “Have-a- Nice-Day” smile. Coinciding as it did with the time of my release, this creation truly overjoyed my instructress (whom I’d become fond of in spite of myself), since, as she told me, it was emblematic of my recovery and therefore but one more example of the triumph over disease by Art Therapy.
William Styron
Animals are the lower intelligent of creatures, yet God illustrates man as one of them. Why? To demonstrate to us how careless, how thoughtless, and sometimes how cruel and low-life we can be without him. Without God, we go through a hard, disappointing, and dreadful life. We are like fearful, untrained, and bitter children that have played all day and are afraid to go to sleep at night, thinking we are going to miss out or be left out of things. A sailor out on a stormy sea needs a strong sail and anchor for the days and a lighthouse for the nights to survive. This is a good illustration of witnessing. We draw from one another’s strength for the day and mediate on it in the nights in accordance with God’s Word. God has faded out of the mind of this generation, we like immature children, believe that the Toyland of material wealth is a sufficient world. Yet houses, cars, and money really do not fulfill. Abraham begot Isaac, and Isaac begot Jacob – a generation of God-fearing men. But in the next generation, God was not the God of Isaac. He had faded and became second place in their lives. Even in the mother’s womb, there was a struggle for honor and success. Jacob stole his brother’s birthright. Morals were decaying, rottenness appeared. The same things have happened with us. Our whole nation is reaping the results of a fading faith and trust, which is producing decaying morals and a decaying country. We are morally out of control. Unless we, like Jacob, who when frightened for his life desired a moral renewal, acknowledge that we are wrong and find God in the process. We must seek God with our whole hearts. The future of this world is in the hands of the believers. God has left everything in the hands of the church. Therefore, we must witness. An evangelical team must go out and bring the people back to the Garden of Eden as God had originally planned. Grace is always available!
Rosa Pearl Johnson
Quoting from page 308: The Competitive Exclusion Principle. No two organisms that compete in every activity can coexist indefinitely in the same environment. To coexist in time, organisms that are potentially completely competitive must be geographically isolated from each other. Otherwise, the one that is the less efficient yields to the more efficient, no matter how slight the difference. When two competing organisms coexist in the same geographical region, close examination always shows that they are not complete competitors, that one of them draws on a resource of the environment that is not available to the other. The corollary of the principle is that where there is no geographical isolation of genetically and reproductively isolated populations, there must be as many ecological niches as there are populations. The necessary condition for geographical coexistence is ecological specialization. Quoting page 86: The Exclusion Principle in biology plays a role similar to that of the Newtonian laws of motion in physics. It is a prime guide to the discovery of facts. We use the principle coupled with an axiom that is equally fundamental but which is almost never explicitly stated. We may call this the Inequality Axiom, and it states: If two populations are distinguishable, they are competitively unequal. Quoting page 87: Because of the compound-interest effect, no difference between competing populations is trivial. The slightest difference--and our acceptance of the Inequality Axiom asserts that a difference always exists--will result in the eventual extinction of one population by another. Put in another way, the Exclusion Principle tells us that two distinguishable populations can coexist in the same geographical region only if they live in different ecological worlds (thus avoiding complete competition and strict coexistence). Quoting page 88-89: Recall now the sequence of development in the process of speciation. Initially, the freshly isolated populations are nearly the same genetically; as time goes on, they diverge more and more. When they are distinguishably different, but still capable of interbreeding (if put together), we may speak of them as races. Ultimately, if the physical isolation endures long enough, they become so different from each other that interbreeding is impossible; we then say that the two populations are reproductively isolated from each other, and we speak of them as distinct species. ... What are the various possible outcomes of the speciation process, and what their relative frequencies? In the light of our assumption, it is clear that, most often, the speciation process will go no further than the formation of races before the physical isolation comes to an end and the germ plasm of the two races is melded into one by interbreeding. If, however, the speciation process continues until separate species are formed before the physical barrier breaks down, then what happens? The outcome is plainly dependent on the extent to which ecological differentiation has occurred: Do the two species occupy the same ecological niche, or not--that is, are they completely competitive? It seems probable that the degree of ecological differentiation will also increase with time spent in physical isolation. On this assumption, we would predict that, more often than not, "sister species" will be incapable of coexistence: when the physical isolation is at an end, one sister species will extinguish the other. Quoting page 253: The example illustrates the general rule that as a species becomes increasingly "successful," its struggle for existence ceases to be one of struggle with the physical environment or with other species and come to be almost exclusively competition with its own kind. We call that species most successful that has made its own kind its worst enemy. Man enjoys this kind of success.
Garrett Hardin (Nature and Man's Fate)
The traditional reluctance in this country to confront the real nature of racism is once again illustrated by the manner in which the majority of American whites interpreted what the Kerner Commission had to say about white racism. It seems that they have taken the Kerner Report as a call merely to examine their individual attitudes. The examination of individual attitudes is, of course, an indispensable requirement if the influence of racism is to be neutralized, but it is neither the only nor the basic requirement. The Kerner Report took great pains to make a distinction between racist attitudes and racist behavior. In doing so, it was trying to point out that the fundamental problem lies in the racist behavior of American institutions toward Negroes, and that the behavior of these institutions is influenced more by overt racist actions of people than by their private attitudes. If so, then the basic requirement is for white Americans, while not ignoring the necessity for a revision of their private beliefs, to concentrate on actions that can lead to the ultimate democratization of American institutions. By focusing upon private attitudes alone, white Americans may come to rely on token individual gestures as a way of absolving themselves personally of racism, while ignoring the work that needs to be done within public institutions to eradicate social and economic problems and redistribute wealth and opportunity. I mean by this that there are many whites sitting around in drawing rooms and board rooms discussing their consciences and even donating a few dollars to honor the memory of Dr. King. But they are not prepared to fight politically for the kind of liberal Congress the country needs to eradicate some of the evils of racism, or for the massive programs needed for the social and economic reconstruction of the black and white poor, or for a revision of the tax structure whereby the real burden will be lifted from the shoulders of those who don't have it and placed on the shoulders of those who can afford it. Our time offers enough evidence to show that racism and intolerance are not unique American phenomena. The relationship between the upper and lower classes in India is in some ways more brutal than the operation of racism in America. And in Nigeria black tribes have recently been killing other black tribes in behalf of social and political privilege. But it is the nature of the society which determines whether such conflicts will last, whether racism and intolerance will remain as proper issues to be socially and politically organized. If the society is a just society, if it is one which places a premium on social justice and human rights, then racism and intolerance cannot survive —will, at least, be reduced to a minimum. While working with the NAACP some years ago to integrate the University of Texas, I was assailed with a battery of arguments as to why Negroes should not be let in. They would be raping white girls as soon as they came in; they were dirty and did not wash; they were dumb and could not learn; they were uncouth and ate with their fingers. These attitudes were not destroyed because the NAACP psychoanalyzed white students or held seminars to teach them about black people. They were destroyed because Thurgood Marshall got the Supreme Court to rule against and destroy the institution of segregated education. At that point, the private views of white students became irrelevant. So while there can be no argument that progress depends both on the revision of private attitudes and a change in institutions, the onus must be placed on institutional change. If the institutions of this society are altered to work for black people, to respond to their needs and legitimate aspirations, then it will ultimately be a matter of supreme indifference to them whether white people like them, or what white people whisper about them in the privacy of their drawing rooms.
Bayard Rustin (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin)
I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in spring, to come upon the name Balbec in a book sufficed to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for Norman Gothic; even on a stormy day the name Florence or Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria del Fiore. But if these names thus permanently absorbed the image I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels. They magnified the idea that I had formed of certain places on the surface of the globe, making them more special and in consequence more real. I did not then represent to myself cities, landscapes, historical monuments, as more or less attractive pictures, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, different in essence from all the rest, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing. How much more individual still was the character they assumed from being designated by names, names that were for themselves alone, proper names such as people have! Words present to us a little picture of things, clear and familiar, like the pictures hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's bench, a bird, an anthill, things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us— of persons, and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons— a confused picture, which draws from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction or by a whim on the designer's part, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets.
Marcel Proust (Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1))
CRUNCH! Izzy jumped off the bench, which made Alex laugh all over again. “Chill out.” He pointed at a cloud of smoke. “Look, it’s over, see? Number fifty-seven won.” Terrific. The driver of a purple-and-gray wreck waved at the cheering crowd as he circled the other dead and crunched cars. “Survival of the fittest, huh?” Alex put on that smirk that signaled he was about to pass out a little more college wisdom. “Just one more example of how evolution works.” “You’re kidding, right?” This was too lame. He actually believed that smashed cars at the demolition derby proved…what? “No, look.” Alex pointed to a big green car with the back end curled up. “See that Chevy there?” The one with all the smoke coming out of it? He went on. “That’s a ‘79. You can tell by the front end.” What was left of it. But Professor Alex wasn’t done. “Then look at that Chevy right next to it. It’s a ‘77, but it came from the same assembly line. The body is almost the same.” “Okay…” “So that’s the example my professor at Tech used to explain it. Cars that look alike. It’s how scientists look at fossils too. How they can tell that one life-form comes from the next…You know, evolution.” Oh. By that time they had followed the crowd off the grandstands and were making their way to Uncle John’s minivan out in the parking lot. Who was she to argue with a college kid? And yet…something occurred to Izzy about what her cousin was trying to tell her. She turned to him after they’d piled into the backseat. “Those cars you pointed out…” she started. “Yup.”Alex knew the answers. “Just another illustration of evolution.” “Whatever.” This time she couldn’t just smile and nod. “I was just wondering, though. Do you think a real person designed the older car?” “Well, sure.” This time Alex’s face clouded a bit. “And did a real person design the newer car too?” “Sure, but—” “And would there be a chance the designer might have used some of the same ideas, or maybe some of the same drawings, for both cars?” Alex frowned and sighed this time. “That’s not the point.” Wasn’t it? Izzy tried not to rub it in, just let her cousin stew on it. Yeah, so if the cars looked like they were related, that could mean the same person thought them up. Couldn’t it? Just like in creation. Only in creation it would be the same God who used the same kind of plans for the things—and the people—he made. Good example, Alex, she thought, and she tried to keep from smiling as they drove away from the fairgrounds. “Thanks for taking us to the derby,” she told her uncle John. “Maybe we should do it again next year.
Lee Strobel (Case for a Creator for Kids)
I wrote almost every word of this book sitting in a coffee shop about two blocks from my home. Most weekdays I would walk in, find a spot near an electrical outlet, fire up my laptop, and then head to the counter to order my beverage. I am a person of routines when it comes to food and drink, so every day for about 6 months I placed the same order: medium green tea. The coffee shop had its routines as well, which meant that most of the time I was placing my order with the same young woman. Yet in spite of the fact that she saw my smiling face 3 or 4 days a week making the same order, she always looked up at me expectantly when I arrived, as if I had not requested the same thing a hundred times before. She would even ask me the same two questions about my tea order every time: “Hot or cold?” “Honey or lemon?” Hot and No. Every time. As the weeks and months of this stretched on, it became a mild source of amusement to me to see if she would ever remember my order. She never did. Until, that is, I walked in one day and felt a little mischievous. “Can I help you?” she said. “Can you guess?” I replied. She looked up as if seeing me for the first time, and she smiled sheepishly. “Oh gosh,” she said. “Why am I blanking?” “It's OK,” I said. “No problem. Medium green tea. Hot, nothing in it.” The next time I showed up at the coffee shop was a couple of days later. I walked in, found my spot, fired up the laptop, and approached my forgetful friend at the counter. To my astonishment, she pointed at me with a smile and said: “Medium green tea, hot, no honey or lemon?” This little story illustrates perfectly a learning phenomenon called the retrieval effect (and sometimes also called the testing effect). Put as simply as possible, the retrieval effect means that if you want to retrieve knowledge from your memory, you have to practice retrieving knowledge from your memory. The more times that you practice remembering something, the more capable you become of remembering that thing in the future. Every time I walked into that coffee shop and told the barista my order, she was receiving the information afresh from me; she did not have to draw it from her memory. She was doing the student equivalent of staring at her notes over and over again—a practice that cognitive psychologists will tell you is just about the most ineffective study strategy students can undertake. When I made one very small change to our interaction by “testing” her to remember my order—even though she didn't get it right—she had to practice, for the first time, drawing that piece of information from her memory. And because it was such a simple piece of information, one practice was enough to help her remember it for the next time.
James M. Lang (Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning)
Where the bloody hell is my wife?” Godric yelled into the aether. As if in response, a footman came up the stairs and handed Cedric a slip of paper. Dumbfounded, Cedric opened it and read it aloud. My Dear Gentlemen, We await you in the dining room. Please do not join us until you have decided upon a course of action regarding the threat to Lord Sheridan. We will be more than delighted to offer our opinions on the matter, but in truth, we suspect you do not wish to hear our thoughts. It is a failing of the male species, and we shan’t hold it against you. In the future, however, it would be advisable not to lock us in a room. We simply cannot resist a challenge, something you should have learned by now. Intelligent women are not to be trifled with. Fondest Regards, ~ The Society of Rebellious Ladies ~ “Fondest regards?” Lucien scoffed. A puzzled Jonathan added, “Society of Rebellious Ladies?” “Lord help us!” Ashton groaned as he ran a hand through his hair. “They’ve named themselves.” “I’ll wager a hundred pounds that Emily’s behind this. Having a laugh at our expense,” Charles said in all seriousness. “Let’s go and see how rebellious they are when we’re done with them.” Cedric rolled up the sleeves of his white lawn shirt as he and the others stalked down the stairs to the dining room. They found it empty. The footman reappeared and Cedric wondered if perhaps the man had never left. At the servant’s polite cough he handed Cedric a second note. “Another damn note? What are they playing at?” He practically tore the paper in half while opening it. Again he read it aloud. Did you honestly believe we’d display our cunning in so simple a fashion? Surely you underestimated us. It is quite unfair of you to assume we could not baffle you for at least a few minutes. Perhaps you should look for us in the place where we ought to have been and not the place you put us. Best Wishes, ~ The Society of Rebellious Ladies ~ “I am going to kill her,” Cedric said. It didn’t seem to matter which of the three rebellious ladies he meant. The League of Rogues headed back to the drawing room. Cedric flung the door open. Emily was sitting before the fire, an embroidery frame raised as she pricked the cloth with a fine pointed needle. Audrey was perusing one of her many fashion magazines, eyes fixed on the illustrated plates, oblivious to any disruption. Horatia had positioned herself on the window seat near a candle, so she could read her novel. Even at this distance Lucien could see the title, Lady Eustace and the Merry Marquess, the novel he’d purchased for her last Christmas. For some reason, the idea she would mock him with his own gift was damned funny. He had the sudden urge to laugh, especially when he saw a soft blush work its way up through her. He’d picked that particular book just to shock her, knowing it was quite explicit in parts since he’d read it himself the previous year. “Ahem,” Cedric cleared his throat. Three sets of feminine eyes fixed on him, each reflecting only mild curiosity. Emily smiled. "Oh there you are.
Lauren Smith (His Wicked Seduction (The League of Rogues, #2))
From an essay on early reading by Robert Pinsky: My favorite reading for many years was the "Alice" books. The sentences had the same somber, drugged conviction as Sir John Tenniel's illustrations, an inexplicable, shadowy dignity that reminded me of the portraits and symbols engraved on paper money. The books were not made of words and sentences but of that smoky assurance, the insistent solidity of folded, textured, Victorian interiors elaborately barricaded against the doubt and ennui of a dreadfully God-forsaken vision. The drama of resisting some corrosive, enervating loss, some menacing boredom, made itself clear in the matter-of-fact reality of the story. Behind the drawings I felt not merely a tissue of words and sentences but an unquestioned, definite reality. I read the books over and over. Inevitably, at some point, I began trying to see how it was done, to unravel the making--to read the words as words, to peek behind the reality. The loss entailed by such knowledge is immense. Is the romance of "being a writer"--a romance perhaps even created to compensate for this catastrophic loss--worth the price? The process can be epitomized by the episode that goes with one of my favorite illustrations. Alice has entered a dark wood--"much darker than the last wood": [S]he reached the wood: It looked very cool and shady. "Well, at any rate it's a great comfort," she said as she stepped under the trees, "after being so hot, to get into the--into the--into what?" she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. "I mean to get under the--under the--under this, you know!" putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. "What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name--why to be sure it hasn't!" This is the wood where things have no names, which Alice has been warned about. As she tries to remember her own name ("I know it begins with L!"), a Fawn comes wandering by. In its soft, sweet voice, the Fawn asks Alice, "What do you call yourself?" Alice returns the question, the creature replies, "I'll tell you, if you'll come a little further on . . . . I can't remember here". The Tenniel picture that I still find affecting illustrates the first part of the next sentence: So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. "I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And dear me! you're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed. In the illustration, the little girl and the animal walk together with a slightly awkward intimacy, Alice's right arm circled over the Fawn's neck and back so that the fingers of her two hands meet in front of her waist, barely close enough to mesh a little, a space between the thumbs. They both look forward, and the affecting clumsiness of the pose suggests that they are tripping one another. The great-eyed Fawn's legs are breathtakingly thin. Alice's expression is calm, a little melancholy or spaced-out. What an allegory of the fall into language. To imagine a child crossing over from the jubilant, passive experience of such a passage in its physical reality, over into the phrase-by-phrase, conscious analysis of how it is done--all that movement and reversal and feeling and texture in a handful of sentences--is somewhat like imagining a parallel masking of life itself, as if I were to discover, on reflection, that this room where I am writing, the keyboard, the jar of pens, the lamp, the rain outside, were all made out of words. From "Some Notes on Reading," in The Most Wonderful Books (Milkweed Editions)
Robert Pinsky
Perhaps the most impressive illustration of all is to suppose that you could label the molecules in a tumbler of water. ... threw it anywhere you please on the earth, and went away from the earth for a few million years while all the water on the earth, the oceans, rivers, lakes and clouds had had time to mix up perfectly. Now supposing that perfect mixing had taken place, you come back to earth and draw a similar tumbler of water from the nearest tap, how many of those marked molecules would you expect to find in it? Well, the answer is 2000. There are 2000 times more molecules in a tumbler of water than there are tumblers of water in the whole earth.
Francis William Aston
You know that pen drawing of a brain on the wall above the desk in your study?” my wife said. “There's a single eye in the middle of it, and judging from the size of that eye, the brain seems a little smaller than normal. I wonder if that isn't a sketch of the other brain?” I did prize that sketch of a brain. It had been used as the frontispiece in a collection of essays that Professor W had published just after the war, On Madness and Other Matters, But, as far as I was consciously aware, I had placed the illustration in a wooden frame and hung it on the wall because I had been profoundly influenced by the following passage in that book: “There are those who say that great achievements are impossible in the absence of madness. That is untrue! Achievements enabled by madness are invariably accompanied by desolation and sacrifice. Truly great achievements are attained by humanistic individuals laboring honestly, tirelessly, humbly while acutely conscious, far more so than others, that they are susceptible to madness.
Kenzaburō Ōe (Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age!)
Spread over the extravagant supper table was a silk tapestry of moons and stars and the six symbols of death. Talis couldn’t help but stare at the design, for the weavings glowed and the drawing was animated with a nefarious life of its own. A frightful illustration that seemed to follow his eyes as they perused the tapestry. Etched along the tassels flowed a river of blood, the river leading into the Underworld. Farther up, layers of bodies were piled high, their vicious fumes rising as incense to the lesser demons above, who devoured the mortals’ flesh. Then above them were the taskmasters of the Underworld, great demons with spiked whips. They endlessly struck the lesser demons as punishment for the act of consuming the mortals’ flesh. Arranged around the center of the tapestry were the gods themselves. At the head stood Zagros, the Lord of the Underworld, then Ractan, the Lord of the Dragons, and Ishta, the Lord of the Genie Sorcerers. At the other side hovered Nestria, the Goddess of the Sky, and Nacrea, the Goddess of the Sun, and opposite her was Satvis, the God of Darkness. Between both sets of gods sat two mythological heroes: Nyx the Destroyer and Lord Heti of Calabastria. Here were the triumphant gods, playing with the lives and flesh of all mortals. Talis stifled a groan. Atop the tapestry were glass jars filled with what looked like trapped souls. Their ghastly faces peered out, eyes desperate and longing for freedom. How did they get inside? He felt a sickness rising in his stomach. The dark sorcerers studied him with grave looks, as if they glimpsed something distasteful inside. He could tell they were suspicious of him. He was too young, from a strange land untouched by their power, and to their murmuring voices, unsuitable to attend this grand feast. Now, all he could think about was leaving this wretched city. Whatever danger lay ahead, he’d rather face it than fester here in the insidious poison seeping through the black and gold walls of Darkov. “To your charmed fortune.” A sorcerer raised a crystal vial filled with some bubbling substance. The man appeared to be hundreds of years old. Deep, harsh wrinkles lined his eyes and forehead, and yet his hands were perfectly smooth. He wore a black silk cloak fastened around his neck with a gold broach, ornately designed like the sun. He drank the vial and after a while, he appeared as youthful as a young man. Talis was taken aback at the man’s sudden transformation. He steadied his wine cup with his other hand. “Fortune smiles on you...” “Every day.” The sorcerer frowned at Talis. “You’d be wise to remember that. Without fortune shining on you daily”—he leaned in close to Talis—”your life is at risk.” Turning, the man whisked away and disappeared behind another group of sorcerers mingling in the corner of the room. Talis tried to discover where he’d gone, but the man had vanished. Just then Talis felt a cold hand settle on his right shoulder. He turned, glimpsed the eyes of Aurellia, and resisted the desire to flee. “I see you’ve finally joined us here in our illustrious
John Forrester (Fire Mage (Blacklight Chronicles, #1))
TWO FORMS OF IMAGINATION The imaginative faculty functions in two forms. One is known as "synthetic imagination," and the other as "creative imagination." SYNTHETIC IMAGINATION: Through this faculty, one may arrange old concepts, ideas, or plans into new combinations. This faculty creates nothing. It merely works with the material of experience, education, and observation with which it is fed. It is the faculty used most by the inventor, with the exception of the who draws upon the creative imagination, when he cannot solve his problem through synthetic imagination. CREATIVE IMAGINATION:-Through the faculty of creative imagination, the finite mind of man has direct communication with Infinite Intelligence. It is the faculty through which "hunches" and "inspirations" are received. It is by this faculty that all basic, or new ideas are handed over to man. It is through this faculty that thought vibrations from the minds of others are received. It is through this faculty that one individual may "tune in," or communicate with the subconscious minds of other men. The creative imagination works automatically, in the manner described in subsequent pages. This faculty functions ONLY when the conscious mind is vibrating at an exceedingly rapid rate, as for example, when the conscious mind is stimulated through the emotion of a strong desire. The creative faculty becomes more alert, more receptive to vibrations from the sources mentioned, in proportion to its development through USE. This statement is significant! Ponder over it before passing on. Keep in mind as you follow these principles, that the entire story of how one may convert DESIRE into money cannot be told in one statement. The story will be complete, only when one has MASTERED, ASSIMILATED, and BEGUN TO MAKE USE of all the principles. The great leaders of business, industry, finance, and the great artists, musicians, poets, and writers became great, because they developed the faculty of creative imagination. Both the synthetic and creative faculties of imagination become more alert with use, just as any muscle or organ of the body develops through use. Desire is only a thought, an impulse. It is nebulous and ephemeral. It is abstract, and of no value, until it has been transformed into its physical counterpart. While the synthetic imagination is the one which will be used most frequently, in the process of transforming the impulse of DESIRE into money, you must keep in mind the fact, that you may face circumstances and situations which demand use of the creative imagination as well.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich [Illustrated & Annotated])
The four essential virtues that humanity, love, ethics, and attitude illustrate and draw a picture of a real human.
Ehsan Sehgal
Graffiti and Tearing55: Designed by Norlander et al. (1998) participants are given an illustration of "Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise" and are told to draw or doodle on it (hence the "graffiti” part.) Next, they are given an illustration of "Samson and the Lion" which, theoretically, is intended to provoke participants to exhibit aggressiveness. The participants are told to tear apart that image into little pieces. The number of graffitis and their content (if sexual or violent) and the bits and pieces from the second image are the dependent variable (i.e. the thing being measured,) and, allegedly, an indicator of aggression. The experiment can be adapted to study the influence of sex differences, alcohol consumed before the experiment, or any variable you can imagine (like having played video games before the experiment.)
Xavier Lastra (Dangerous Gamers: The Commentariat and its war against video games, imagination, and fun)
According to Justin, patience is central to the life of his community in Rome. Justin uses various sayings of Jesus to illustrate the significance of patience for members of his community: turning the other cheek when someone hits them in the face; giving their tunics to someone who takes their cloak; avoiding the incendiary sin of anger; and, if they are compelled to go one mile, going two miles. When people see Christians behaving like this, Justin comments, people are intrigued; they “wonder” at the God whom the Christians say motivates their behavior. 10 So it is important for Christians not to quarrel like other people, and it is essential that they live their “good works” visibly in the sight of others. Then, when Christians live with integrity and visibility, “by our patience [hypomonēs] and meekness [Christians will] draw all men from shame and evil desires.” 11 According to Justin, patience attracts people.
Alan Kreider (The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire)
William Duncan Strong was a scholar, a man ahead of his time: quiet, careful and meticulous in his work, averse to spectacle and publicity. He was among the first to establish that Mosquitia had been inhabited by an ancient, unknown people who were not Maya. Strong spent five months traversing Honduras in 1933, going by dugout canoe up the Río Patuca and several of its tributaries. He kept an illustrated journal, which is preserved in the Smithsonian’s collections—packed with detail and many fine drawings of birds, artifacts, and landscapes.
Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God)
So you are tired of your life, young man! All the more reason have you to live. Anyone can die. A murderer has moral force enough to jeer at his hangman. It is very easy to draw the last breath. It can be accomplished successfully by a child or a warrior. One pang of far less anguish than the toothache, and all is over. There is nothing heroic about it, I assure you! It is as common as going to bed; it is almost prosy. LIFE is heroism, if you like; but death is a mere cessation of business. And to make a rapid and rude exit off the stage before the prompter gives the sign is always, to say the least of it, ungraceful. Act the part out, no matter how bad the play. What say you?
Marie Corelli (Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 22))
Philosophers have long regarded intentionality as a puzzling phenomenon, for it is hard to see how it can arise in a purely physical world. After all, mental states presumably depend ultimately on the brain, and thus on neurons and their interconnections, but neurons do not seem to be ‘about’ anything, nor to have representational content. So how can intentionality fit into the world that modern science describes? In the 1980s, the philosopher Ruth Millikan suggested an ingenious solution to this puzzle by drawing on Darwinism. To illustrate her basic idea, consider the honey bee’s waggle-dance. This is the complex figure-of-eight dance that honey bees use to signal to their hive mates the location of a food source. Since the bee’s dance has been shaped by natural selection for a particular purpose—correctly indicating where the food is—this allows us to discern a kind of proto-intentionality in the waggle-dance. We can sensibly say that a particular dance routine means that the food is located 30 metres away in the direction of the sun, in the sense that the biological function of the dance is to induce its hive mates to fly to this location. The bee’s waggle-dance is thus capable of misrepresentation—for the food may not actually be in this location, for example if the bee has accidentally performed the wrong routine. In short, Millikan’s idea is that representational content may be rendered scientifically respectable by reducing it to biological function, a notion which plays a bona fide role in evolutionary biology. This bold attempt to naturalize intentionality is controversial, but it illustrates how a biological perspective can help illuminate an old philosophical issue.
Samir Okasha (Philosophy of Biology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
… my imagemaking and storymaking are associated… My sketches act as notes… It’s almost like the drawing is the equivalent of the first curl of an idea… In Nightbreed, the drawing would be the equivalent of just writing on a piece of paper, as I did once, ‘How about a saint for monsters?’ Finally, that idea of ‘How about a saint for monsters?’ became Cabal. By an incredibly different route, but that’s what it ended up becoming. This idea, Saint Boone of Midian, of something that was holy to monsters - a saviour for monsters - became intriguing to me, and yet eventually it had to become this public thing as well, because you have to sell the idea to your publisher, and you have to hone it, and then your agent has something to say, and then your editor has something to say, whereas the drawing or the sketch is simply that first statement.
Clive Barker (Clive Barker : Illustrator)
I love masks for two completely contrary reasons… One is that they they’re a way of covering up an experience or a feeling. The other is that they’re a way of exposing through a liberation. A mask is a way of taking on another personality for a period of time. Now, I play it both ways, I think, in the drawings, and in the fiction as well. Clearly there are some things that we can do in masked form that we would not otherwise – this is the classic dramatic device of the masked ball. You put on the mask and you’re allowed to do all kinds of things that hitherto you wouldn’t do: you seduce the people you would fear to seduce unmasked; you say the things you most fear to say unmasked. But there’s another way, which is that masks can be something that we plaster onto our faces to cover up the possibility of this eruption. I think masks have two quite contrary forms… I think some of the masks I’ve put on characters are very bland – wilfully bland. And then others seems to want erupt in all directions. That’s the paradox.’ Barker’s love affair with the stage also plays a part in his affection for these symbols of theatre. ‘There’s a whole series of sketches of actors, basically… People with masks on killing each other with wooden swords. People with masks on seducing each other. Just very simple ideas for things. They compare, forcibly, I think, with the masks which are just simply hanging up or floating in the air, as though the person who had once occupied them has just flitted away.’ Indeed, one of the most powerful of these pictures is a simple study of a mask hanging from a tree, laid aside carefully while its owner has a moment in which he doesn’t require it. There are also those masks which allow the wearers to express themselves in a way maybe they couldn’t otherwise… expressing themselves more strongly than human physiognomy will allow.’ Seen in this light, the monsters of Nightbreed and The Skins of the Fathers are clearly just a larger than life version of humanity - just like us beneath their demon masks; seen in this light, we could all just as easily put on the tragic button eyes and zipper mouth of a homicidal maniac. Barker, both in his artwork and his words, remains sagely mute on the obvious (and moralistic) question: are we truest to ourselves when we put on our masks, or when we take them off? If anything, his drawings will admit only to unembroidered irony and acceptance. When two lovers sit in a studied yet impassioned embrace – his penis erect, her nipples swollen – they are able to reveal these most private parts of themselves freely. It is their faces, seemingly the most public part of their personae, that are, in reality, still hidden, as they proceed through life as actors in this stageplay of their own creation. By trying on masks, people experiment with who they are and with who they want to be, free in the knowledge that they can turn back at any time. After all, pretending to be a fish is still a long way from becoming one. It should come as no surprise that, when we begin with humanity and then expose its masks, we find ourselves at transformation, the heart of Barker’s fiction. It is not always an easy place to be. ‘These images of transformation are, for me, ways to draw characters that are exploding out of their condition into something else. Becoming something else. Dissolving into something else… There isn’t rage in the drawings. There’s an awful lot less anger in the drawings than there is in the fiction. When there are images of constriction they tend to be very strong images of constriction, and then there is an eruption from that constriction. There are a lot more images of peace, or at least the possibility of peace, in my drawings than there are in the fiction.
Clive Barker (Clive Barker : Illustrator)
So says God to a gracious heart: 'You lack this, your estate is plundered-Why? Am not I to you instead of ten homes, and ten shops, I am to you instead of all; and not only instead of all, but come to me, and you shall have all again in me.' This indeed is an excellent art, to be able to draw from God what one had before in the creature. Christian, how did you enjoy comfort before? Was the creature anything to you but a conduit, a pipe, that conveyed God's goodness to you? 'The pipe is cut off,' says God, 'come to me, the fountain, and drink immediately.' Though the beams are taken away, yet the sun remains the same in the firmament as ever it was.
Jeremiah Burroughs (THE RARE JEWEL OF CHRISTIAN CONTENTMENT (Faithful Classic): With Illustration)
So if a certain activity really matters to you—a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause—the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention. After years of trying and failing to make time for her illustration work, by taming her to-do list and shuffling her schedule, Abel saw that her only viable option was to claim time instead—to just start drawing, for an hour or two, every day, and to accept the consequences, even if those included neglecting other activities she sincerely valued. “If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
Measuring replication rates across different experiments requires that research be reviewed in some fashion. Research reviews can be classified into four types. A type 1 review simply identifies and discusses recent developments in a field, usually focusing on a few exemplar experiments. Such reviews are often found in popular-science magazines such as Scientific American. They are also commonly used in skeptical reviews of psi research because one or two carefully selected exemplars can provide easy targets to pick apart. The type 2 review uses a few research results to highlight or illustrate a new theory or to propose a new theoretical framework for understanding a phenomenon. Again, the review is not designed to be comprehensive but only to illustrate a general theme. Type 3 reviews organize and synthesize knowledge from various areas of research. Such narrative reviews are not comprehensive, because the entire pool of combined studies from many disciplines is typically too large to consider individually. So again, a few exemplars of the “best” studies are used to illustrate the point of the synthesis. Type 4 is the integrative review, or meta-analysis, which is a structured technique for exhaustively analyzing a complete body of experiments. It draws generalizations from a set of observations about each experiment.1 Integration Meta-analysis has been described as “a method of statistical analysis wherein the units of analysis are the results of independent studies, rather than the responses of individual subjects.”2 In a single experiment, the raw data points are typically the participants’ individual responses. In meta-analysis, the raw data points are the results of separate experiments.
Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
All these searchings and hungerings and longings that are in your heart, I tell you, they are the drawings of the divine magnet, Christ Jesus.
Andrew Murray (The LIFE AND WORKS of ANDREW MURRAY - 50 Titles - [Illustrated])
Here is another illustration of how the self-image operates. Picture us living inside two boxes. The line farthest out, the solid line, represents real or realistic limits. The dotted line, in the first drawing shown tightly confining Self, represents self-imposed limits. The area between the two is your area or range of under-utilized potential. As you discover the means of strengthening and liberating your self-image, you move the dotted line closer to the solid line, permitting greater use of your true potential. Success
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
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Meru Illustrations (HOW TO DRAW ANIME BEAUTIFUL EYES: The Master guide to draw eyes with reflections, learn step by step for how to make beautiful kawaii illustrations)