Great paintings have gradations, large and small. . . They serve to lift the subject off the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Gradations are an essential abstract convention.
Hereafter we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the only distinction between species and well-marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed to be connected at the present day by intermediate gradations whereas species were formerly thus connected.
It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring. It is characteristic of genius to break up the artificial arrangements of conventionalism, and to view mankind in true perspective, in their gradations of inherent rather than of adventitious worth. Genius is therefore essentially democratic, and has always been so.
I regard it as a tragedy that people of a differing sexual orientation find themselves proscribed in a world that has so little understanding for homosexuals and that displays such gross indifference for sexual gradations and variations and the great significance they have for living. It is completely foreign to me to wish to regard such people as less valuable, less moral, incapable of noble sentiments and behavior.
Aren't there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth?
Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improvements. . . are adopted with hesitation, reluctance, and slow gradations.
Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.
A learned parson, rusting in his cell at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well on the nature of man; will profoundly analyse the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what; and yet, unfortunately, he knows nothing of man. . . . He views man as he does colours in Sir Isaac Newton's prism, where only the capital ones are seen; but an experienced dyer knows all their various shades and gradations, together with the result of their several mixtures.
In sovereignty there are no gradations.
I trust that absolutes have gradations.
There's many kinds of kundalini, just as there's a spectrum of light. Put light through a prism and you get different gradations. So there are different gradations of kundalini. Some gradations of kundalini are darker, some are lighter.
Pride differs in many things from vanity, and by gradations that never blend, although they may be somewhat indistinguishable. Pride may perhaps be termed a too high opinion of ourselves founded on the overrating of certain qualities that we do actually possess; whereas vanity is more easily satisfied, and can extract a feeling of self-complacency from qualifications that are imaginary.
