115 Context Quotes

If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.

That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?

I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of.

To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.

Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion - to say nothing of the shape of his sentences - are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.

History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology.

When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.

The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense if quoted as it stands.

I went camping and borrowed a circus tent by mistake. I didn't notice until I got it set up. People complained because they couldn't see the lake.

The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down:. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.

With all deference to Chairman Mao and other authors whose quotations derive from longer works, it seemed that I was becoming the world's first writer of self-contained ready-made quotations.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

The height of ability consists in a thorough knowledge of the real value of things, and of the genius of the age in which we live.

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

Circumstances...give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

... life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man's difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole ...

This is the Fourth?

'Yes,' I answered you last night; 'No,' this morning, Sir, I say. Colours seen by candlelight, Will not look the same by day.

There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

I don't know who discovered water but it certainly wasn't a fish.

In this sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. For the consciousness which obtains in creativity is not the superficial level of objectified intellectualization, but is an encounter with the world on a level that undercuts the subject-object split. 'Creativity' to rephrase our definition, 'is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world.'

(dialogue between Dan 'Nite Owl' Dreiberg and Laurie 'Silk Spectre' Juspeczyk, two retired superheroes)

On John McCain's then-possibility of being the 2008 Republican Party nominee for President [12]

The books of Father Anthony de Mello were written in a multi-religious context to help the followers of other religions, agnostics and atheists in their spiritual search, and they were not intended by the author as manuals of instruction of the Catholic faithful in Christian doctrine or dogma.

Interviewer: Is it important for you to be understood? Anton: That would depend on the context of your question. If I was speaking to a doctor, for instance, and describing a medical condition, I would surely want to be understood. On the other hand, if I was creating a secret code, depending on the situation, then I would hope that certain people would not understand anything.

A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.

Each form of the sacrosanct was regarded by members of the culture which gave rise to it as a revelation of the Truth; at Byzantium it was not a mere hypothesis that was sponsored by the majesty of the Byzantine style. To us, however, these forms make their appeal as forms alone - in other words, as they would be were they the work of a contemporary (and, since this actually is unthinkable, they affect us in a puzzling manner); or else as so many grandiose vestiges of a faith that has died out. We look at them from outside; they are still emotive, but they are no longer true. Thus we deprive them of what was their most vital element; for a religious civilization that regarded what it revered as a mere hypothesis is inconceivable.

Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.

We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence - presence is the most trivial notion, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something.

Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside of the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

One day my father asked me, 'Do you love the Lord?' I said, 'Yes.' He said, 'Then stand up and shout, 'Hallelujah!'' So I did, and I fell off the roller coaster.

Sorry we hurt your field, mister.

Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.

Outside of a dog, a book is Man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

'You know Adam?' Teddy asked him. 'Do I know who?' 'Adam. In the Bible.' Nicholson smiled. 'Not personally,' he said dryly.

A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.

Who wants to understand the poem Must go to the land of poetry; Who wishes to understand the poet Must go to the poet's land.

Archie Rice: Don't clap too hard - it's a very old building.

I essentially said the United States is a very young country compared with Europe. We're still growing. That's it. I wouldn't say anything anti-American. I'm an American, and I love my country. (2004)

Men are products, expressions, reflections; they live to the extent that they coincide with their epoch, or to the extent that they differ markedly from it.

If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

As for those who condemned these operations looked at the event [9/11] in isolation and failed to connect them to past events and did not look at the causes that lead to this result. So their point of view is narrow.

She laughed - a solo effort. Nothing in the prevailing circumstances made me feel like turning it into a duet.

In sterculino plurimum gallus potest.

Darling, a true lady takes off her dignity with her clothes and does her whorish best. At other times you can be as modest and dignified as your persona requires.

The way that helps will not be the same; it changes according to the situation.

I also bought a copy of The New York Times, the previous day's issue of which I had seen the previous day in Puerto Rico. I was interested in newspapers and knew this paper to be one of the foremost in the world. But to read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. It made me feel a stranger, that paper.

The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

(when walking to his dressing room) 'Fibber McGee... and Molly. Burns... And Allen. Lady and... Here's mine.'

Don't get me wrong, I love Schindler's List, but it's not like 'Hey man let's get loaded and watch Schindler's List.' - SModcast 4: Can I get a (Masturbatory) Witness

During the Famous 'Beer Truck' Episode of Raw before w:Wrestlemania XV, March 1999