Home > Topic > some notion
1 " Write from the soul, not from some notion about what you think the marketplace wants.The market is fickle; the soul is eternal'. "
― Jeffrey Carver
2 " A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one. "
― J.R.R. Tolkien , The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
3 " By what criteria can one decide which of a person's countless beliefs are primitive? The essential factor is that they are taken for granted: a person's primitive beliefs represent the basic truths he holds about physical reality, social reality, and himself and his own nature. Like all beliefs, conscious or unconscious, they have a personal aspect: they are rooted in the individual's experience and in the evidence of his senses. Like all beliefs, they also have a social aspect: with regard to every belief a person forms, he also forms some notion of how many other people have the experience and the knowledge necessary to share it with him, and of how close the agreement is among this group. Unlike other beliefs, however, primitive beliefs are normally not open to discussion or controversy. Either they do not come up in conversation because everyone shares them and everyone takes them for granted, or, if they do come up, they are virtually unassailable by outside forces. The criterion of social support is totally rejected; it is as if the individual said: " Nobody else could possibly know or have experienced what I have." Or, to quote a popular refrain: " Nobody knows the trouble I've seen." A person's primitive beliefs thus lie at the very core of his total system of beliefs, and they represent the subsystem in which he has the heaviest emotional commitment. "
4 " At heart men are antagonistic to the lordship of Jesus Christ. It is not antagonism to creeds or points of view, but antagonism encountered for My sake. Many of us awaken antagonism by our way of stating things; we have to distinguish between being persecuted for some notion of our own and being persecuted “for My sake. "
― Oswald Chambers , The Highest Good/The Shadow of an Agony
5 " Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is?I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born. "
― Robertson Davies , Fifth Business (The Deptford Trilogy, #1)
6 " Just when we are in many ways moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. This is in part because of the fact that our ethical individualism, deriving, as I have argued, from the Protestant religious tradition in America, is linked to an economic individualism that, ironically, knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. Its only standard is money, and the only thing more sacred than money is more money. What economic individualism destroys and what our kind of religious individualism cannot restore is solidarity, a sense of being members of the same body. In most other North Atlantic societies, including other Protestant societies, a tradition of an established church, however secularized, provides some notion that we are in this thing together, that we need each other, that our precious and unique selves are not going to make it all alone. "
7 " The Fool in the Tarot deck frequently depicted a boy with a dog at his heels, staring at the sky while he walked blithely off a cliff, burdened only by a bundle on a stick. The diabolist had admitted a relationship to the card.No single detail was quite right, but much as something might appear similar if one were to unfocus their vision…The young diabolist walked with the sparrow at his shoulder, eyes on the windows without looking through the windows, walking forward as if he were afraid to stop. His burden here was the gas containers.No, he was burdened not just by the gas containers, but by some notion of responsibility.A man, when facing death, aspires to finish what he started.What had the custodian of the Thorburn estate started? What drove him?She knew he sought to do good and to vanquish evil, and she could surmise that both good acts and the existence of evil had touched him deeply.The Fool card was akin to the ace. Depending on the game being played, it was often the lowest card or the highest. Valueless or highly valued. Powerless or powerful.It all depended on context. He sought to kill the demon, and he would either catastrophically fail or succeed.This Fool sought to slay the metaphorical dragon. He felt his own mortality, which was quite possibly her fault, in part, and now he rushed to finish the task he’d set for himself. To better the world.The Fool was wrought with air – the clouds he gazed at, the void beyond the cliff, the feather in his cap, even the dog could often be found mid-step, bounding, just above the ground.He was a Fool wrought with a different element. The familiar didn’t quite fit for the departure from the air, but the traditional dog didn’t conjure ideas of air right off the bat either.What was he wrought with? That was another question that begged an answer. "
― , Pact
8 " As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have. "
― Yann Martel , Beatrice and Virgil