Small people delight in what they call consistency-that is, it gives them immense pleasure to say that they believe now exactly as they did ten years ago. This simply amounts to a certificate that they have not grown-that they have not developed-and that they know just as little now as they ever did. The highest possible conception of consistency is to be true to the knowledge of today, without the slightest reference to what your opinion was years ago.
All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre.
Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception.
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
The Bible stands alone in human literature in its elevated conception of manhood, in character and conduct.
I'm very proud of my pro-life record, and I've always adopted the idea that, the position that the method of conception doesn't change the definition of life.
When people grow gradually rich their requirements and standard of living expand in proportion, while their present-giving instincts often remain in the undeveloped condition of their earlier days. Something showy and not-too-expensive in a shop is their only conception of the ideal gift.
Many scientists have been drawn to Buddhism out of a sense that the Western tradition has delivered an impoverished conception of basic, human sanity. In the West, if you speak to yourself out loud all day long, you are considered crazy. But speaking to yourself silently - thinking incessantly - is considered perfectly normal.
Set your ideal as near to perfection as your imagination is capable of forming the conception.
I never consciously tried to conceive of what my sound should be. . . I never tried to imitate anybody, but when you love somebody's music, you're influenced. . . I really don't know how I developed my sound, but it comes from a combination of my musical conception and no doubt the basic shape of the oral cavity.
Being in front of the camera, you never got to see the whole process from the conception of the script all the way through to the filming process.
If God gives me the privilege of dying for the Hinduism of my conception, I shall have sufficiently died for the unity of all and even for Swaraj.
Any conception of a god that is less than sovereign is an idol and no god at all.
You could conceive spirituality as the study of the immeasurable, of the qualitative. But that's very different from the way we typically use the word. A spiritual person, in the popular conception, is somebody who's kind of aloof from the world, introspective, meditating, communing with non-material beings. That's the spiritual realm, and we elevate it above the material realm. What's more worthy, what's more admirable? Who's the one who has done this hard work on the self, and has done a lot of "practice"? That's the spiritual person.
How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty.
All writers are autobiographical to a degree and writing about the nature of their inner life. My inner life has always been a struggle between my conception of myself and the world versus reality.
It seems to me that whereas power usually means power-over, the power of some person or group over some other person or group, it is possible to develop the conception of power-with, a jointly developed power, a co-active, not a coercive power.
The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.
We can have no conception of God higher than man, so our God is man, and man is God.