Alexandrian Quotes & Sayings

In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, 'not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him'.* — Lawrence Durrell

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The difference between self love and being in love with yourself is that one results in giving and the other in taking. — Jeffrey Fry

The Alexandrian Mystics' emphasis on silent prayer gave their teachings interior depth missing from Western theology today. — Amos Smith

Sometimes, the things we think are so simple but not so easy to grasp are the things that work the best. — Howard Graham Buffett

The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC. — Gary Wolf

Man's greatest victory is over oneself. — Plato

Glamour is not something you possess but something you perceive, not something you have but something you feel. It is a subjective response to a stimulus. — Virginia Postrel

So we have textual critics who believe desperately in the 44 Alexandrian manuscripts (against more than 5,000 copies favoring the Textus Receptus). They use these to translate all modern New Testaments. But these Alexandrian manuscripts also include the Septuagint Old Testament (with the Apocrypha). They have fallen for a trap. — David N. Daniels

A religion that teaches you God is something outside the world
something separate from everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear
is nothing but a cheap hustle. — Matthew Woodring Stover

Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body. — Friedrich Nietzsche

SMaC recipe is a set of durable operating practices that create a replicable and consistent success formula. The word "SMaC" stands for Specific, Methodical, and Consistent. You can use the term "SMaC" as a descriptor in any number of ways: as an adjective ("Let's build a SMaC system"), as a noun ("SMaC lowers risk"), and as a verb ("Let's SMaC this project"). A solid SMaC recipe is the operating code for turning strategic concepts into reality, a set of practices more enduring than mere tactics. Tactics change from situation to situation, whereas SMaC practices can last for decades and apply across a wide range of circumstances. — James C. Collins

Tell me she doesn't have her hand in his back pocket. That is so lame."
"I don't care," I tell her, easing any worries she might have about me being upset. "If they want to date, all the more power to them."
She's only doing it because she wants everything you had. It's a competition thing with her. First taking your position on the squad, now putting her claws into Colin. Next thing you know she'll want to change her name to Brittany."
"Very funny."
"You say that now," she says, then moves in close and whispers, "it won't be so funny if she wants Alex next."
"Now that's not funny. — Simone Elkeles

One should have wit, but not wish to have it; otherwise there will be witticism, the Alexandrian style of wit. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

As we gain information we are more likely to focus on what we don't know : Someone who knows the state capitals of 17 of 50 states may be proud of her knowledge. But someone who knows 47 may think of herself as not knowing 3 capitals — Chip Heath

The plural of anecdotes is not data — Ben Goldacre

The Alexandrian man, who is basically a librarian and copy editor and goes miserably blind from the dust of books and printing errors. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Your father always suspected that being pretty-minded is simply the natural state for most people. They want to be vapid and lazy and vain - Maddy glanced at Tally - and selfish. It only takes a twist to lock in that part of their personalities. He always thought that some people could think their way out of it. — Scott Westerfeld

I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play. — Dana Schutz

The Alexandrian Library was a tragedy of some moment, for it was believed to contain the complete published works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, and a hundred others, who have come down to us in mangled form; full texts of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who survive only in snatches; and thousands of volumes of Greek, Egyptian, and Roman history, science, literature, and philosophy. — Will Durant

The Alexandrian School In opposition to the previously named Church Fathers, the Alexandrians openly embraced Greek philosophy, thought of it as being of divine origin, and brought its allegorizing technique into their exegesis. — Anonymous

You have to scuba dive in the Alexandrian harbor if you want to see what remains of the lighthouse of Cleopatra's day, and the water in the Alexandrian harbor is not really something you want to come into contact with. — Stacy Schiff

To one visitor Alexandrian life was just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined. — Stacy Schiff

You don't need schooling to be a philosopher. Just an active mind and experience with life. — Isaac Asimov

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay. — Raymond Chandler

The best that can be said of the Alexandrian War is that Caesar acquitted himself brilliantly in a situation in which he stupidly found himself. — Stacy Schiff

The Alexandrian Mystics taught that Jesus' divinity with a capital D and his humanity with a lower case h are always in dynamic tension and can never be separated. — Amos Smith

In his numerous historical and Scriptural works Bauer rejects all supernatural religion, and represents Christianity as a natural product of the mingling of the Stoic and Alexandrian philosophies ... — Joseph McCabe

Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy. The troubles began in Alexandrian Egypt, circa 300 B.C. King Ptolemy I was the first leader to deem it a-okay for medical types to cut open the dead for the purpose of figuring out how bodies work. — Mary Roach

Know what happened to these Alexandrian manuscripts? The Roman Catholics used them as the foundation for their Bible. Then they spent nine centuries hunting down the real Bible to destroy it. But faithful Christians protected it - even with their blood. — David W. Daniels

To have this gold medal around my neck is an indescribable feeling. I'm the happiest person right now. — Jordyn Wieber

He makes a beggar first that first relieves him;
Not us'rers make more beggars where they live
Than charitable men that use to give. — John Heywood

- you can't even find any two Alexandrian Bibles that agree with each other. — David W. Daniels

In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water. — Brendan Gill

A few books well chosen, and well made use of will be more profitable than a great confused Alexandrian library. — Thomas Fuller

It doesn't seem to matter how often vaccines are proved safe or supplements are shown to offer nothing of value. When people don't like facts, they ignore them. — Michael Specter