Gradations Quotes & Sayings

Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay. — Lord Chesterfield

There are a hundred or perhaps a thousand other emotions, or gradations, created by the mixing, blending, and overlapping of the basic ones. — Anabel Jensen

The heart is a place of great light and their are different gradations of light that pass through the heart. — Frederick Lenz

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery. — Franz Kafka

It's easy to say you will do what's right and shun what's wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that there is no black or white. There are gradations of gray. — Jodi Picoult

Maybe what I told her was a lie. Maybe I could be what she deserved. Maybe I could make the same teeth-clenching, sweat-pouring effort I'd put into my PT, and channel that into living blind, so that she wouldn't have to constantly be cleaning up after me, or dragging my ass out of the house. My endless black was never going to go away. That was certainty. But kissing Charlotte had been a burst of light streaking across it, like a comet.
Maybe. Maybe is gradations of darkness. The sweetest torture.
Maybe is hope. — Emma Scott

The insanely gorgeous competition documentary on surfing obsession, Step Into Liquid - directed by Dana Brown and photographed by John-Paul Beeghly in hypnotic gradations of aquamarine - will send you into a dream state. — Elvis Mitchell

For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes. — Cesare Beccaria

You are asking us to lie, Colonel?"
"I am asking you to omit. Surely, amidst the ... the infinite gradations of human venality, that particular sin ranks low." The old man kneaded the folds of his throat. "What happened out there belongs out there. The jungle has it; let the jungle keep it ... — Louis Bayard

Where some may see flat, static narratives, I see a spectrum of tonal gradations and realities. What I am creating is literally black portraiture with ballpoint pen ink. I'm looking for that in-between state in an individual where the overarching definition is lost. Skin as geography is the terrain I expand by emphasizing the specificity of blackness, where an individual's subjectivity, various realities and experiences can be drawn onto the diverse topography of the epidermis. From there, the possibilities of portraying a fully-fledged person are endless. — Toyin Odutola

In Poland a man must be one thing: white or black, here or there, with us or against us
clearly, openly, without hesitations ... We lack the liberal, democratic tradition rich in all its gradations. We have instead the tradition of struggle: the extreme situation, the final gesture. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: - through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom). and then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. — Herman Melville

A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly. — Lionel Trilling

There are two gradations of cold that are always acceptable: Mild Frost, which is preferable for reading and writing and any other activity done indoors, and Absolute Zero, which is the only temperature suitable for sleep. There is nothing more delicious than being swathed in a cocoon of blankets and awaking with a nose frosted over with rime, and once I do achieve vampiric heights and fall asleep with the mastery of a corpse lately dead, I am best left alone until I wake up at my usual time. I do tend to bite when rattled out of my flocculent coffin, and everyone in my building knows never to disturb me during the early morning hours. Authors, being crepuscular creatures, should never be roused before 11am: the creative mind is never turned off; it only dies momentarily and its revived by the scent of coffee at the proper time.

Bacon is also an acceptable restorative. — Michelle Franklin

There is no hard and fast line that can be drawn that says: Up to here there was no love; from here on there is now love. Love is a gradual thing, it may take a moment, a month, or a year to come on, and in each two its gradations are different. With some it comes fast, with some it comes slowly. Sometimes one kindles from the other, sometimes both kindle spontaneously. And once in a tragic while one kindles only after the other has already dimmed and gone out, and has to burn forlornly alone.
("Too Nice A Day To Die") — Cornell Woolrich

Put the mind in alignment with the ten thousand radiances of enlightenment and experience them in various gradations forever. That's the total purpose of a monk. — Frederick Lenz

Through all his years of roving, even on nights like this, he had remained blind to the beauty of the sea, and now his feeling toward it had settled into weary hatred. He knew its effects of blended color, its wide gradations of sound and action, the tireless charm of a sailing ship's effortless movement, the quality of silent distance and the wonder of the skies. Dimly at times, in moments of rare emotion, he had caught a glimpse of the mystic hand that beckons beyond the horizon and felt for a little while the fated urge of the wanderer. But that was in the beginning, long ago when he had first gone to sea, and he had forgotten it.
("Fire In The Galley Stove") — William Outerson

In sovereignty there are no gradations. — Samuel Johnson

Then with no throbs of fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed his soul the nearest way. — Samuel Johnson

Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness. — Arthur Koestler

Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms. — Charles Darwin

There's a wide range of sales ability: there are many gradations between novices, experts, and masters. There are even sales grandmasters. If you don't know any grandmasters, it's not because you haven't encountered them, but rather because their art is hidden in plain sight. — Peter Thiel

Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape. — William Hazlitt

Oldboy makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion. — Stephanie Zacharek

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word. — Stan Brakhage

A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Everything suddenly seems displaced, subtle gradations erase borders, but it's more forceful than that. — Bret Easton Ellis

When I first left drama school, I was too posh for the working-class parts and not posh enough for the upper-class roles. You know what England is like: the gradations of accent and how you're judged by them are still there. I discovered that to get a break you have to lie about where you're from. — Ben Chaplin

In standard American English, the word with the most gradations of meaning is probably run. The Random House unabridged dictionary offers one hundred and seventy-eight options, beginning with "to go quickly by moving the legs more rapidly than at a walk" and ending with "melted or liquefied." In — Stephen King

When Leonardo da Vinci wanted to create a whole new style of painting, one that was more lifelike and emotional, he engaged in an obsessive study of details. He spent endless hours experimenting with forms of light hitting various geometrical solids, to test how light could alter the appearance of objects. He devoted hundreds of pages in his notebooks to exploring the various gradations of shadows in every possible combination. He gave this same attention to the folds of a gown, the patterns in hair, the various minute changes in the expression of a human face. When we look at his work we are not consciously aware of these efforts on his part, but we feel how much more alive and realistic his paintings are, as if he had captured reality. — Robert Greene

She waited for so long that something strange happened. She started to be able to see. There wasn't any more light to see by. It was just that her eyes decided to give her more information. She'd been told in a lesson once about something called accommodation. The rods and cones of the eye, especially the rods, change their zone of sensitivity so that they can see details and distinctions in what previously looked like total darkness. But there are functional limits to that process, and the resulting picture is mostly black and white because rods aren't good at gradations of colour. This was different. It was like an invisible sun came up in the room, and Melanie could see by its light as well as she could see by day. Or like the space below her went from black ocean to dry land over the space of a few minutes. She wondered if this was something only hungries could do. She — M.R. Carey

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. — Emma Goldman

When we can no longer see the different gradations among sins and sinners and sinful nations, we have not succeeded in respecting our own badness; we've cheapened God's goodness. If our own legal system does not treat all infractions in the same way, surely God knows that some sins are more heinous than others. If we can spot the difference, we'll be especially eager to put to death those sins which are most offensive to God. — Kevin DeYoung

The stability of modern governments above the ancient, and the accuracy of modern philosophy, have improved, and probably will still improve, by similar gradations. — David Hume

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. — Frederick Lenz

And just as some people have obvious moral deficits, others must possess moral talent, moral expertise, and even moral genius. As with any human ability, these gradations must be expressed at the level of the brain. Game — Sam Harris

There is no room in this philosophy for a middle ground, or a series of gradations, between the passive and aggressive status. Many, — Benjamin Graham

It is a tragedy, I feel, that people of a different sexual type are caught in a world which shows so little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indifferent to the various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life. — Emma Goldman

All the different classes of beings which taken together make up the universe are, in the ideas of God who knows distinctly their essential gradations, only so many ordinates of a single curve so closely united that it would be impossible to place others between any two of them, since that would imply disorder and imperfection. Thus men are linked with the animals, these with the plants and these with the fossils which in turn merge with those bodies which our senses and our imagination represent to us as absolutely inanimate. — Gottfried Leibniz

Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large. The number of hysterics and compulsives is also large. — Louise Bogan

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. — Charles Caleb Colton

I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving. — Anais Nin

When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don't count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on. — Nicholson Baker

The gradations are infinite and the silliest mistake of all is to define people by their material possessions. It's even worse if people define themselves by money. When — Rita Mae Brown

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree, he writes. But if we look at the whole tree of life, Darwin says, we can find innumerable gradations from extremely simple eyes consisting of hardly more than a nerveless cluster of pigment cells, which are rudimentary light sensors, to the marvels of the human eye, which are more impressive pieces of work than the human telescope. — Jonathan Weiner

Nothing detains the reader's attention more powerfully than deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune; and these might be abundantly afforded by memoirs of the sons of literature. They are entangled by contracts which they know not how to fulfill, and obliged to write on subjects which they do not understand. Every publication is a new period of time, from which some increase or declension of fame is to be reckoned. The gradations of a hero's life are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book. — Samuel Johnson

. . . the authors had developed indices that could be employed to measure the state of a civilization, to determine if society was healthy, in decline, or perhaps even dead. The indicators keyed in on everything from the accumulation of refuse to declines in everyday civility. They looked at how a society treated its most vulnerable citizens; examined a culture's architecture, gauging its scale in relation to humans and the surrounding natural world. One of the primary indicators, however, was a measure of the ability of a society's citizens to listen to each other and truly hear what was being said. It evaluated by gradations the ability of individuals to stand motionless for prolonged periods, receptive to their surroundings. — Robert H. Lieberman

Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts should have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual possessor. Nevertheless, this difficulty, though appearing to our imagination insuperably great, cannot be considered real if we admit the following propositions, namely, - that gradations in the perfection of any organ or instinct, which we may consider, either do now exist or could have existed, each good of its kind, - that all organs and instincts are, in ever so slight a degree, variable, - and, lastly, that there is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of each profitable deviation of structure or instinct. The truth of these propositions cannot, I think, be disputed. — Charles Darwin

About weak points [of the Origin] I agree. The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder. — Charles Darwin

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place. — John Saxon

We allow for many more gradations of personality in life than we do in art. — Julianne Moore

Here's the problem: when every sin is seen as the same, we are less likely to fight any sins at all. Why should I stop sleeping with my girlfriend when there will still be lust in my heart? Why pursue holiness when even one sin in my life means I'm Osama bin Hitler in God's eyes? Again, it seems humble to act as if no sin is worse than another, but we lose the impetus for striving and the ability to hold each other accountable when we tumble down the slip-n-slide of moral equivalence. All of a sudden the elder who battles the temptation to take a second look at the racy section of the Lands End catalog shouldn't dare exercise church discipline ont he young man fornicating with reckless abandon. When we can no longer see the different gradations among sins and sinners and sinful nations, we have not succeeded in respecting our own badness; we've cheapened God's goodness. — Kevin DeYoung

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. — Lord Chesterfield

After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's ... — Philip Pullman

Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so extraordinary a series of gradations as this [step by step, from humans to apes to monkeys to lemurs] - leading us insensibly from the crown and summit of the animal creation down to creatures, from which there is but a step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and least intelligent of the placental Mammalia. It is as if nature herself had forseen the arrogance of man, and with Roman severity had provided that his intellect, by its very triumphs, should call into prominence the slaves, admonishing the conqueror that he is but dust. — Thomas Huxley

My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration. — Ezra Pound

Truth has no gradations; nothing which admits of increase can be so much what it is, as truth is truth. There may be a strange thing, and a thing more strange. But if a proposition be true, there can be none more true. — Samuel Johnson

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. — Alexander Hamilton

If we accept that opposites (or gradations of circumstances, or differences in ways of being) are all part of the same hologram of life (just as we need different shades and colours to make up a picture), then we can see that we need all those aspects to make up our world. — Julia Woodman

Really successful designs can be created without software produced "special effects." Identities do not NEED bevels, gradations, 3-D imagery, Web 2.Oh-Oh and other oh so "special" treatments to be great design solutions for clients. — Jeff Fisher

As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man. — Thomas Huxley

The ethics of reverence for life makes no distinction between higher and lower, more precious and less precious lives. It has good reasons for this omission. For what are we doing, when we establish hard and fast gradations in value between living organisms, but judging them in relation to ourselves, by whether they seem to stand closer to us or farther from us. This is a wholly subjective standard. How can we know what importance other living organisms have in themselves and in terms of the universe? — Albert Schweitzer

There are nineteen words in Yiddish that convey gradations of disparagement, from a mild, fluttery helplessness to a state of downright, irreconcilable brutishness. All of them can be usefully employed to pinpoint the kind of individuals I write about. — S.J Perelman

He had forgotten how convincing the world could look, how sure of itself: its outlines and edges; it's gradations, recessions, protrusions; it's startling and vulgar colors. — Gregory Maguire

The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electrical, and genetic, every aspect of human memory - the way it's formed, maintained, connected, recalled - has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits - ones and zeros - that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between. — Nicholas Carr

Aren't there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth? — Anne Rice

The man possessed of a dollar, feels himself to be not merely one hundred cents richer, but also one hundred cents better, than the man who is penniless; so on through all the gradations of earthly possessions - the estimate of our own moral and political importance swelling always in a ratio exactly proportionate to the growth of our purse. — Frances Wright

Normal humanity has only the courage to react to the usual gradations that range from the beautiful to the ugly, which in the long run are nothing but nuances of the same thing. The monster, on the other hand, Don Jeronimo contended with feeling, in order to exalt them with his mystique, belongs to a different, privileged species, with its own rights and particular canons that exclude the concepts of beauty and ugliness as tenuous categories, because, in essence, monstrosity is the culmination of both qualities synthesized and exacerbated to the sublime. — Jose Donoso

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. — Robert Genn

And eventually the dark peeled back layer by layer, and with imperceptible gradations the sky feathered to a delicate pale blue. — Ransom Riggs

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me. — Anne Carson

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. — Charles Darwin

Every glass thermometer has subtle variations in the size and shape of the bulb at the bottom and the capillary tube inside, as well as variations in the width of gradations on the side. The compounded effect of these uncertainties is that each thermometer reads temperature slightly differently. — Sam Kean

The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and "burkas", are all gradations of mental slavery. (...) The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. (...)
I felt anger that this subjugation is silently tolerated (...) by so many Western societies where the equality of sexes is legally enshrined. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

It is inevitable, therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and ethics will be objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of "better" we might wish to adopt), and gradations here will translate into very real differences in human happiness. — Sam Harris

I understood that the reason we have to accept other people is simply because God receives us just the way we are. Yes, all of us to the last person ...
I had never thought it should be that way. Had I been doing it, I would have arranged gradations of acceptability according to how bad or how good we were
or how hard we have tried. But ... the Power who broods over our aching world has quite a different idea: He persists in receiving us and loving us all even when we reject Him and refuse to have anything to do with Him, even when we strut our little intellects and insist that He does not exist. — Catherine Marshall

Colors do not exist separately and independently within nature; they are constantly shifting in response to subtle gradations of light. It is language that, magnificently, gives them clear shape. — Kenya Hara

I trust that absolutes have gradations. — Jane Austen

I'm doing now with cornets exactly what I used to do with trilobites: measuring, analyzing and cataloging the myriad gradations of their forms. — Niles Eldredge

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta.
But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless. — Alison Bechdel