Circumscribe Quotes & Sayings

Little minds instinctively seek to circumscribe the things around them, to pull in the walls to the size of their own small existence, to get everything squared off to their own scale so they can feel safe and snug. This process invariably means that a lot of the material used in their walls is from the last house they lived in, is very much what they were accustomed to before they moved, so to speak. Big minds, on the contrary, push the horizons further away, create new frontiers, leave room for growth. — Amatu'l-Baha Ruhiyyih Khanum

Do not disturb yourself by thinking of the whole of your life. Do not let your thoughts at once embrace all the various troubles that you may expect to befall you: but on every occasion ask yourself, What is there in this that is intolerable and past bearing? For you will be ashamed to confess. In the next place remember that neither the future nor the past pains you, but only the present. But this is reduced to a very little, if you only circumscribe it and chide your mind, if it is unable to hold out against even this. — Marcus Aurelius

Books, Manuals, Directives, Regulations. The geometries that circumscribe your working life draw norrower and norrower until nothing fits inside them anymore. — Lord Byron

Its form doesn't matter: no form manages to circumscribe and alter it. Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror. — Clarice Lispector

The laws were not made so much for the direction of good men, as to circumscribe the bad. — Samuel Richardson

One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by a colonial or national government, particularly if they had an exaggerated culture of manly honor. — Steven Pinker

I don't have a cellphone or a computer. I deliberately circumscribe my mental life within the periods that I write about, and the power of Perfidia is that it's the result of complete immersion. I was there for the two years that it took me to write that book. — James Ellroy

But sometimes the best help a person can find is helping someone else. — Patrick Rothfuss

A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be 'treated' and 'cured' by any means possible - often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person's interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity. — Neel Burton

The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I'm not sophisticated when it comes to politics, when it comes to journalism. — Aaron Sorkin

The armchairs, with their flat, sedentary cushions, were designed for society, but the bed was made for solitude. It had a straitened and measured narrowness, an austere frame made to contain the curves of a single body, to circumscribe it, carry it, give it a place, and when I slept at night, I possessed it entirely. — Amit Chaudhuri

Let the part of your soul that leads and governs be undisturbed by the movements in the flesh, whether of pleasure or of pain; and let it not unite with them, but let it circumscribe itself and limit those affects to their parts. But when these affects rise up to the mind by virtue of that other sympathy that naturally exists in a body that is all one, then you must not strive to resist the sensation, for it is natural: but do not let the ruling part of itself add to the sensation the opinion that it is either good or bad. — Marcus Aurelius

[A]nother thing about myths: they gather in and circumscribe their target audience. They make a collection into a collective. — Margaret Atwood

Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the 'I'm a Fraud' phase. You go through the 'I'll Never Finish' phase. And every once in a while you think, 'What if I actually have created what I set out to create, and it's received as such?' — Lin-Manuel Miranda

A fool believes that the society of the future will transcend the laws of economics. A person of reason hopes that it will finally learn to respect them. — Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential. — Frances Wright

On the rare occasions when our dreams succeed and achieve perfection - most dreams are bungled - the are symbolic chains of scene and images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our experiences or expectations or situations with such poetic boldness and decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed when we remember our dreams. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The 'deep' civic function of the humanities ... is something understood very well by totalitarian societies, which tend to keep close tabs on them, and to circumscribe them in direct proportion to how stringently the population is controlled. — Mark Slouka

Possession which cloys man, only increases the affection of woman — Matthew Gregory Lewis

Chomsky also reveals how neoliberalism is hardly a new thing, but merely the current version of the battle for the wealthy few to circumscribe the political rights and civic powers of the many. Chomsky — Noam Chomsky

Webcomics are much bigger than any one scene can circumscribe. — Scott McCloud

Titles are like a magicians wand which circumscribe human facility and prevent us from living the lives of man. — Thomas Paine

Grant had dealt too long with the human intelligence to accept as truth someone's report of someone's report of what that someone remembered to have seen or been told. — Josephine Tey

What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing.
It's the same with painting. All I can say of still life must finally fall short; I may inventory, weigh, suggest, but I cannot circumscribe; some element of mystery will always be left out. What is missing is, precisely, its poetry. — Mark Doty