Extracting Quotes & Sayings

Traditionally, our ancestors boiled mushrooms in water to make a soothing tea. Boiling served several purposes: killing contaminants, softening the flesh, and extracting the rich soluble polysaccharides. — Paul Stamets

Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.

{Commenting on Henri Becquerel's process for extracting metals by voltaic means.} — Michael Faraday

You don't read a poem to find the meaning of life. The opposite. I mean, you'd be foolish to. Now, some American poets present the reader with a slice of life, saying, I went to the store today, and I saw a man, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both knew we were ... thieves. And aren't we all thieves? You know, this is extracting from everyday experience a statement about life, or a moral. — Mark Strand

Chocolate makes everything better, in the end," he announced, and Thayer fully agreed.
Thayer gave him a smile of gratitude and watched Castel lift his spoon from the saucer. He dipped it, gracefully, into his coffee and gave it a light stir.
"Too many people rush to stir such delicate flavours. Take too long and they will clog together to become a lump of bitterness in your coffee. But take your time and be gentle with them," Castel explained, quietly, "and they will create a symphony of flavours, to melt in your mouth," he said, leaning down, just until his nose was over his cup, to take a long inhale. He smiled and straightened, extracting the spoon to place it back on his saucer. "Now try it."
Thayer took a sip and almost felt his toes curl at the luxurious taste.

~ Cinnamon Kiss — Elaine White

We do not need to plug a fiber optic cable into our brains in order to access the Internet. Not only can the human retina transmit data at an impressive rate of nearly 10 million bits per second, but it comes pre-packaged with a massive amount of dedicated wetware, the visual cortex, that is highly adapted to extracting meaning from this information torrent and to interfacing with other brain areas for further processing. — Nick Bostrom

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers. — Jonathan Swift

One evening, on being quite occupied by the state of the struffoli, I seated the Duca di San Orvieta with the Duchessa opposite, and between two of his mistresses. They fought over his attentions, above the table and below, like squid intent on extracting a mollusc from its shell. The poor man was so distracted that he hardly ate a bite. The Duchessa's words to me afterwards were not lacking in picturesque vividness. — Emmanuelle De Maupassant

Bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North America returns about 15 joules. Because almost all of the input energy in tar sands production comes from fossil fuels, the process generates significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production. — Thomas Homer-Dixon

The pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are none. We assemble disconnected patches of light and dark and unconsciously try to see a face. The Man in the Moon is one result. Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup describes another. There are many other examples. — Carl Sagan

The City is a machine miraculously organised for extracting gold from the seas, airs, clouds, from barren lands, holds of ships, mines, plantations, cottage hearth-stones, trees and rocks; and he, wretchedly waiting in the exterior halls, could not even get his finger on one tiny, tiny lever. — Christina Stead

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things. — Henry Ward Beecher

If we once admit that our life is here for the purpose of race-improvement, then we question any religion which does not improve the race, or the main force of which evaporates, as it were, directing our best efforts toward the sky ... Improvement in the human race is not accomplished by extracting any number of souls and placing them in heaven, or elsewhere. It must be established on earth, either through achievement in social service, or through better children. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There are certain people that you don't have to even work at extracting their inner life. It is just there and they're happy to share it with you. — Carol Friedman

The greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material that must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt. [In contrast], extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption ... The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn't, and so to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green. — Peter W. Huber

One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him. — Thomas Mann

Declare this smite time, extracting precious gems and wholly hours you share to fruitcake a friend so dear. — Bradley Chicho

The concept of this so-called "TerraPower reactor" is that you, in the same reactor, you both burn and breed. So, instead of making plutonium and then extracting it, we take uranium - the 99.3 percent that you normally don't do anything with - we convert that, and we burn it. — Bill Gates

Everyone's just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it's a huge antidote to that to have a concept album. — Aimee Mann

Like all solitary persons he had invested friendship with a divine glamour: he imagined that the people he passed on the street, laughing together and embracing when they parted, the people who dined together with so many smiles, you will scarcely believe me, but he imagined that they were extracting from all that congeniality great store of satisfaction. — Thornton Wilder

I hardly exaggerate. Jewish life consists of two elements: Extracting money and protesting. — Nahum Goldmann

As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective. — Naomi Klein

Resentment is a storytelling passion,' says the philosopher Charles Griswold in his book Forgiveness. I know well how compelling those stories are, how they grant immortality to an old injury. The teller goes in circles like a camel harnessed to a rotary water pump, diligently extracting misery, reviving feeling with each retelling. Feelings are kept alive that would fade away without narrative, or are invented by narratives that may have little to do with what once transpired and even less to do with the present moment. — Rebecca Solnit

Some read books only with a view to find fault, while others read only to be taught; the former are like venomous spiders, extracting a poisonous quality, where the latter, like the bees, sip out a sweet and profitable juice. — Roger L'Estrange

I aspire to make a record that sounds better 10 listens in than it does after two, and still, at 50 listens, you're picking out things that add a depth and a thoughtfulness to it; there's enough in there that you can still be extracting pieces out of it. — Trent Reznor

Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today's richest men have made their money out of intellectual property. — Mark Getty

Rob Engle and I are concerned with extracting useful implications from economic data, and so the properties of the data are of particular importance. — Clive Granger

Men. I saw in Rome a statue of a boy extracting a thorn from his foot; I went my way, and returned in a year's time, and ;here sat the selfsame boy, extracting the intruder still, Is this to be our model? — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I went from escaping into books to extracting things from them, from being inspired by books to trying to do things that inspired me - many of which I first encountered in stories. I went from wishing I were like a character in books to being a character in my books. I went from reading books to wrestling with them to writing them, all the while still learning from what I read. The — Pamela Paul

For me, cooking is about seeking the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything I make. About extracting the absolute most out of every ingredient, whether it is a beautiful piece of salmon or a plain old onion. — Michael Pollan

He leaned in toward her, and as he gave her a hug said Give Cora a kiss from me. He said it the same way he gave her the hug, like it wasn't his sister he was hugging, like it wasn't his mother he was sending a kiss to, but just a polite platitude. Like he was ripping out her heart, like he was cleanly extracting it and placing it in a plastic bag and storing it in the refrigerator to eat later. — Yuri Herrera

The poor homosexuals
they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution (AIDS). — Pat Buchanan

The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory. — Gary Zukav

Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary? — Jean-Luc Godard

We have been far too aggressive about extracting ocean wildlife, not appreciating that there are limits and even points of no return. — Sylvia Earle

Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities: Long ago and far away, ever so long ago. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

(Rude Scrabble)
You played this game with your parents?" he asked skeptically.
Yep. And Mom always won, the dirty bitch. I guess being older she'd been around more than me and Carrie," Sophie said, extracting replacement tiles from the box. "Although I don't know what Dad's excuse was. lack of imagination, I guess. Your turn. — Sarah Mayberry

they contain the essence of the plant from which they were extracted. Actually, the term essential oil is short for the original term 'quintessential oil'. This is based on the Aristotelian idea that all matter is made up of four main elements (water, earth, air, and fire). Additionally, there was the fifth element, the quintessence, which was considered to be in spirit form or rather life force. Evaporation and distillation were viewed as ways of extracting the spirit from the plant. This has been reflected to even today's world where we can see the word 'spirits' being used to describe distilled alcoholic drinks such as eau de vie, whiskey and brandy. In the current days, the idea has been let go of since we know that essential oils are actually — Matt Hall

I kind of have to be a master of cleaning, extracting and trusting my data before I do anything with it. — Scott Nicholson

I'm not against extracting a modest amount of wildlife out of the ocean for human consumption, but I am really concerned about the large-scale industrial fishing that engages in destructive practices like trawling and longlining. — Sylvia Earle

Recognizing that the current form of globalization is nothing more than a generalized downward leveling in which global corporations are extracting more and more of the wealth, power, and productive energies from communities and the environment is the right approach ... And knowing that in every specific battle, what we are fighting for is merely the substitution of the human agenda for the corporate agenda is what can guide and sustain us. — Robin Hahnel

In the future, it may turn out that fossil fuels are the blood of the Earth and by extracting them may lead to serious consequences to the Earth's survival, and by association, that of the humans. — Steven Magee

I doubt that Fleming could have obtained a grant for the discovery of penicillin on that basis [a requirement for highly detailed research plans] because he could not have said, 'I propose to have an accident in a culture so that it will be spoiled by a mould falling on it, and I propose to recognize the possibility of extracting an antibiotic from this mould. — Hans Selye

We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. — John Dewey

The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits, in which our whole attention and faculties are engaged, is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature. The common soldier mounts the breach with joy; the miser deliberately starves himself to death; the mathematician sets about extracting the cube-root with a feeling of enthusiasm; and the lawyer sheds tears of admiration over "Coke upon Littleton." It is the same through life. He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he maybe wise, cannot be a very happy man. — William Hazlitt

And extracting one molecule's signature in spectral analysis from the rest of the signatures is hard work, sort of like picking out the sound of your toddler's voice in a roomful of screaming children during playtime. It's hard, but you can do it. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Anger was a reliable defense, but one that allowed no chance of final victory. Anger was a medicine but never a cure, briefly numbing the pain without extracting the thorn that caused the agony. — Dean Koontz

to support this privileged class as long as they kept up their end of the bargain with effective rituals. But after 650, deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion began reducing crop yields. The working classes, the farmers and monument builders, may have suffered increasing hunger and disease, even as the rulers hogged an ever-larger share of resources. The society was heading for a crisis. Diamond writes: "We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities." (If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century.) — Douglas Preston

Psychedelics are not flashlights into the chaos of the Freudian unconscious, they are tools for mathematically unpacking your mind into a higher dimensional space. In the Newtonian and print created space that we are walking around in you, are like a self extracting archive, that hasn't self extracted itself yet. — Terence McKenna

There is no such thing as self-awareness. Imagine thought retreating into itself to think about itself. It would be easier to imagine a revolver bullet extracting itself from its victim's wound and re-entering the barrel. Yes, it would be easier to imagine the universe's explosion suddenly halting its outflow of energy, so that the galaxies congeal once more, and the millions of light-years of their flight through space are immediately annulled. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher's stone. — Anton Chekhov

I have come to believe that extracting natural gas from shale using the newish technique called hydrofracking is the environmental issue of our time. And I think you should, too. — Sandra Steingraber

few days, or even weeks." Weeks. "And now we beg, borrow or steal another vehicle and slip out of town?" "Bingo." Ray flipped the glove compartment open and dug around inside, extracting a flashlight, some maps and a first aid kit. "Though borrowing is out. We don't wanna lead men — Norah Wilson

As you may know, I'm the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids. — Peter Diamandis

Photography is the act of "fixing" time, not of "expressing" the world. The camera is an inadequate tool for extracting a vision of the world or of beauty. — Daido Moriyama

Life is a means of extracting fiction. — Robert Stone

The week passed by swiftly, like a dream ... a dream where minutes flew as rapidly as heartbeats. Such a breathless week when something within her drove Scarlett with mingled pain and pleasure to pack and cram every minute with incidents to remember after he was gone, happenings which she could examine at leisure in the long months ahead, extracting every morsel of comfort from them - dance, sing, laugh, fetch and carry for Ashley, anticipate his wants, smile when he smiles, be silent when he talks, follow him with your eyes so that each line of his erect body, each lift of his eyebrows, each quirk of his mouth, will be indelibly printed on your mind - for a week goes by so fast and the war goes on forever. — Margaret Mitchell

Take linseed and dry it in a pan, without water, on the fire. Put it in a mortar and pound it to a fine powder; then replacing it in the pan and pouring a little water on it, make it quite hot. Afterwards wrap it in a piece of new linen; place it in a press used for extracting the oil of olives, of walnuts, and express this in the same manner. With this oil grind minium or vermilion, or any other colour you wish, on a stone slab...prepare tints for faces and draperies...distinguishing, according to your fancy, animals, birds, or foliage with their proper colours. — Theophilus

This patchwork approach to problem solving leads to what Steven Teles of Johns Hopkins University calls "kludgeocracy". Mr Teles compares the government's veto points to toll booths, with the toll-takers extracting promises of pork-barrel spending and the protection of favoured programmes in exchange for passage. Needing the approval of so many, often ideologically opposed actors makes it almost impossible to craft coherent policy. Inaction is often the result, but also the creation over time of confusing systems for education, health care, taxes, welfare, — Anonymous

Consequently, the first thing to be done in any search after philosophic principles is to travel over the special sciences with a view to extracting from them such information as is relevant to our purpose. — Hugh Elliot

The slight variations in extracting procedure cause many of the amygdalin (Vitamin B-17, Laetrile) molecules to change to a form unknown to nature( isomers ... There are ... purveyors who label their 'iso-amygdalin' products 'amygdalin' contrary to all of the recognized specs ... For commercial or political purposes, they certainly cannot justify such a fallacy ... This scientific heresy and commercial fraud ... (is) tremendously reducing the effectiveness of amygdalin therapy ... To mislabel iso-amygdalin as amygdalin is scientifically, medically, and morally indefensible. — Ernst T. Krebs

My mouth is sore from continually extracting my foot from it. — Gordon Gee

Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business. — Jeff Goodell

An organism is not an inert lump of matter, but a dynamic system: it survives by taking in new matter, extracting energy from it, and then expelling it. Matter flows through an organism like water through a fountain, only slower. — Eric T. Olson

My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed ... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is. — Saint Augustine

Civilization has imposed countless restrictions and conventions on each of us, with the result that the subconscious in the majority of us has become a storage room without a key. We are forced to suppress or forget so many events and ideas and thoughts that those to which we should have access are lost in the welter. However, there are people who seem capable of unlocking this part of their minds and extracting relevant information. — Margaret Millar

A stock market index helps investors track the performance of a group of stocks. NRDC worked with FTSE to develop comprehensive and transparent methodologies that screen out companies linked to owning, exploring, or extracting fossil fuels. — Frances Beinecke

I guess my biggest failure was not getting reelected. [The loss taught me] not to ever let American hostages be held for 444 days in a foreign country without extracting them. I did the best I could, but I failed. — Jimmy Carter

Fortunate is the person who can succeed in extracting honey from such a flower as this life, whose root and every petal is bitterness. — Lynn Cullen

The fact that our traditional method of extracting doctrine from Scripture does not work well on narrative does not mean that Bible stories do not send clear messages. Instead, it suggests that the way we apply our traditional method of interpretation is inadequate because we are ignoring too much of God's Word. — Craig S. Keener

You dare laugh at the fall of Suyodhana and all the noble men like Bhishma, my father, Karna, and the others who fought for him? Read Jaya to know how Karna rejected the temptation to become Emperor and instead chose to stand by the man who had given him everything when he had nothing. Read how Karna was trapped by own nobility, how impossible promises were extracted from him; know how he was shot while extracting the wheel of his chariot that was stuck in the mud. Know that Arjuna did not keep his word, as any honourable warrior would have done, when he failed to kill Jayadratha before sunset, hiding behind the lame excuse that the sunset had been maya, an illusion created by an avatar. Sleep in your beds peacefully by all means, if your conscience still allows you to do so, you lucky devils. — Anand Neelakantan

May I ask a personal question?" She looked at him. He waited until she nodded. "That dragon tattoo ... Why did you get it?" "You didn't see it before?" He smiled all of a sudden. "I mean I've glanced at it, but when you were uncovered I was pretty busy stopping the bleeding and extracting bullets and so on. — Stieg Larsson

Therapies administered included but were not limited to: turning things off, then on again; picking them up a couple of inches and then dropping them; turning off nonessential appliances in this and other rooms; removing lids and wiggling circuit boards; extracting small contaminants, such as insects and their egg cases, with nonconducting chopsticks; cable-wiggling; incense-burning; putting folded-up pieces of paper beneath table legs; drinking tea and sulking; invoking unseen powers; sending runners to other rooms, buildings, or precincts with exquisitely calligraphed notes and waiting for them to come back carrying spare parts in dusty, yellowed cardboard boxes; and a similarly diverse suite of troubleshooting techniques in the realm of software. — Neal Stephenson

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams. — Oskar Kokoschka

Male chauvinism is ... a shrewd method of extracting the maximum of work for the minimum of compensation. — Michael Korda