How To Analyse Quotes & Sayings

We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them. — William James

The Quantified Self movement argues that the self is nothing but mathematical patterns. These patterns are so complex that the human mind has no chance of understanding them. So if you wish to obey the old adage and know thyself, you should not waste your time on philosophy, meditation or psychoanalysis, but rather you should systematically collect biometric data and allow algorithms to analyse them for you and tell you who your are and what you should do. — Yuval Noah Harari

The feedback loop between science, empire and capital has arguably been history's chief engine for the past 500 years. The following chapters analyse its workings. First we'll look at how the twin turbines of science and empire were latched to one another, and then learn how both were hitched up to the money pump of capitalism. — Yuval Noah Harari

In breathing I am an object of the air, the air the subject; but when I make the air an object of thought, of investigation, when I analyse it, I reverse the relation - I make myself the subject, the air an object. — Ludwig Feuerbach

To have output you must have input. It helps to go on a period of creative nourishment, or dolce far niente, clearing the brain. Go to bed with the cat, some flouffy pillows, tea and a book which could not in any sense be called improving. Read for fun for a change: superior Chicklit is good, or children's classics. You are not allowed to try and analyse what the author is doing. After a good sleep, go and do something new, or that you haven't done for a while ... — Lucy Sussex

Many people thought that, given my knowledge of the egg, I should analyse embryonic mutants. — John Sulston

I did my BA in English lit, and hated the restriction - I'd always read more in translation than not; coming from a working-class background, what I knew of as British literature - the writers who made big prize lists and/or were stocked in WH Smith, Doncaster's only bookshop until I was 17 - seemed incredibly, alienatingly middle-class. Then in 2009, just after the financial crash, I graduated with no more specific skill than 'can analyse a bit of poetry'. — Deborah Smith

The thing about darts is that you've got to shout. It's not like cricket where you can talk to Michael Atherton and ask him to analyse the bloody nuances. Darts does not have nuances. You've got to hurl yourself at it. — Sid Waddell

In the humanist world following Erasmus, man is at the centre of the universe. Man becomes largely responsible for his own destiny, behaviour and future. This is the new current of thought which finds its manifestation in the writing of the 1590s and the decades which follow. The euphoria of Elizabeth's global affirmation of authority was undermined in these years by intimations of mortality: in 1590 she was 57 years old. No one could tell how much longer her golden age would last; hence, in part, Spenser's attempts to analyse and encapsulate that glory in an epic of the age. This concern about the death of a monarch who - as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen - was both symbol and totem, underscores the deeper realisation that mortality is central to life. After the Reformation, the certainties of heaven and hell were less clear, more debatable, more uncertain. — Ronald Carter

You can analyse the past, but you need to design the future. That is the difference between suffering the future and enjoying it. — Edward De Bono

We cannot always analyse intimacy; but there is no mistaking it: we know the person quite differently. You do not learn intimacy, or reap the fruit of someone else's. You grow into it. In the Gospels one really can grow into this intimacy with Our Lord, precisely because the evangelists do not obtrude their own personalities. Anyhow, know Him we must. — Frank Sheed

When I watch a film, I watch only as an audience and only later I might analyse it. — Nandita Das

The most cursory examination of even the most progressive organs of information reveals a curious inability to recognize women as newsmakers, unless they are young or married to a head of state or naked or pregnant by some triumph of technology or perpetrators or victims of some hideous crime or any combiniation of the above. Women's issues are often disguised as people issues, unless they are relegated to the women's pages which amazingly still suvive. Senior figures are all male; even the few women who are deemed worthy of obituaries are shown in images from their youth, as if the last fourty years of their lives have been without achievement of any kind. If you analyse the by-lines in your morning paper, you will see that the senior editorial staff are all older men, supported by a rabble of junior females, the infinitely replacesable 'hackettes'. — Germaine Greer

It also reflects a tendency in our society to focus on negatives. Doctors, for instance, study illness, not health. Business leaders analyse failure, not success. Economists study cost, not value. Philosophers mostly debate original sin, not original blessing. — Robert Holden

I tend to over-analyse things. I'm not the type of person to flip a coin and let things happen. — Emily Browning

I wanted to analyse and understand how the Chinese people could have their lives so crushed by fear. — Ma Jian

For it is not cell nuclei, not even individual chromosomes, but certain parts of certain chromosomes from certain cells that must be isolated and collected in enormous quantities for analysis; that would be the precondition for placing the chemist in such a position as would allow him to analyse [the hereditary material] more minutely than [can] the morphologists ... For the morphology of the nucleus has reference at the very least to the gearing of the clock, but at best the chemistry of the nucleus refers only to the metal from which the gears are formed. — Theodor Boveri

If the only tool we use to analyse what's valuable is a price tag, then those things that don't have price tags begin to look like they have no value. — Al Gore

We all have an unscientific weakness for being always in the right, and this weakness seems to be particularly common among professional and amateur politicians. But the only way to apply something like scientific method in politics is to proceed on the assumption that there can be no political move which has no drawbacks, no undesirable consequences. To look out for these mistakes, to find them, to bring them into the open, to analyse them, and to learn from them, this is what a scientific politician as well as a political scientist must do. Scientific method in politics means that the great art of convincing ourselves that we have not made any mistakes, of ignoring them, of hiding them, and of blaming others from them, is replaced by the greater art of accepting the responsibility for them, of trying to learn from them, and of applying this knowledge so that we may avoid them in future. — Karl Popper

The emotion he felt towards her was as mysterious as it was irrational. He needed to understand it, to define its nature, to analyse what he knew was beyond analysis. But some things now he did know, and perhaps they were all he needed to know. He wished her only good. He would put her good before his own. He could no longer be separate himself from her. He would die for her life. — P.D. James

We can no more analyse such peace in the soul than we can conceive in our heads the whole enormous and dizzy equilibrium by which, out of suns roaring like infernos and heavens toppling like precipices, He has hanged the world upon nothing. — G.K. Chesterton

You know, class is like magic. There's nothing there you can point to, it evaporates if you try to analyse it, but it's real and it affects how people behave and makes things happen. — Jo Walton

What would the masters do?
when people arn't successful, they sometimes wonder, why not? they get answers, then they wonder why those answers don't seem to meet their needs. they get the wrong answers, and they get upset about it. perhaps they're really getting the right answers, but answering the wrong questions.
too many people ask nothing but "Why" questions.
they analyze and analyse problems - but no solution. "you can analyse a glass of water and you're left with a lot of chemical components, but nothing you can drink".
"Why?" questions can drive us crazy. "What?" questions drive us sane.
What questions lead us to practical solutions. — Peter McWilliams

It's a very special generation, because during our careers the computer entered chess. So we know how to play without computers, which is also important. We can analyse without computers. I am not saying that younger players cannot do this, but we are more in the habit of doing this. That's important to improve your chess understanding. — Vassily Ivanchuk

Am unhappy, - very unhappy, for other things." "What other things? Can you tell me some of them?" How much I wished to reply fully to this question! How difficult it was to frame any answer! Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words. Fearful, however, of losing this first and only opportunity of relieving my grief by imparting it, I, after a disturbed pause, contrived to frame a meagre, though, as far as it went, true response. — Charlotte Bronte

Listening to music for me is like homework. Music will give me enjoyment, but as soon as it's giving me that enjoyment, I want to analyse it, and then it becomes work. Why does it sound like that? How? ... then I dissect it. — Steve Winwood

It is not possible to become a great player without having learned how to analyse deeply and accurately. — Mark Dvoretsky

What is the point of teaching how to analyse a poem or a piece of Shakespeare but not to analyse the Internet? — Beeban Kidron

You sound skeptical," kohler said. "I thought you were a religious symbologist. Do you not believe in miracles?"
"I'm undecided on miracles," Langdon said. Particularly those that take place in science labs.
"Perhaps miracle is the wrong word. I was simply trying to speak your language"
"My language?" Langdon was suddenly uncomfortable. "Not to disappoint you, sir, but study religious symbology-I'm a academic, not a priest."
Kohler slowed suddenly and turned, his gaze softening a bit. "Of course. How simple of me. One does not need to have cancer to analyse it's symptoms. — Dan Brown

Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse mechanisms of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to the study of the phenomena of memory. — Marcel Proust

We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image - as opposed to a symbol - is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it. — Andrei Tarkovsky

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

The problem with Matisse is that I can't ever figure out when he's done a good painting or a bad painting because I don't know how to analyse him. I just know that I like the way he put it on and I like his airs and forms. — Susan Rothenberg

Over analyse, paralyse, you mustn't over analyse ... Do you wake up at four in the morning and wonder who should be playing left-back? Four? I would love to sleep that long. If you want a really long career you have to find a way of switching off. I do it when I'm out walking my dog, Alex Ferguson got into horses, others get into wine. Some players like going shopping, which is not my scene. A lot of them turn to golf. I tried it, didn't like it. I have to walk. If I couldn't I'd be in a padded cell by now. — Roy Keane

Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words. — Charlotte Bronte

How can you analyse what is funny? What's funny to one isn't funny to another ... What's funny to you is a personal thing. — Les Dawson

It was said that his decision to have his papers burnt was a defence against biographers. He had read a life of one of the archbishops of Dublin, Dr William Walsh, and thought it a travesty of the man he had known. No one would do that to him; no one would analyse the mind and heart of Daniel Mannix. It would be bad enough if they got it wrong. And for him, it might have been almost as bad if they got it right. — Brenda Niall

If we analyse the supernova data by assuming the Copernican principle is correct and get out something unphysical, I think we should start questioning the Copernican principle ... . Whatever our theoretical predilections, they will in the end have to give way to the observational evidence. — George F. R. Ellis

I analyse in my own way, in very simple, no-jargon language. If somebody is talking in very complicated way, I never like that. — Gautam Adani

Lacking an analytical approach, many of our comrades do not want to go deeply into complex matters, to analyse and study them over and over again, but like to draw simple conclusions which are either absolutely affirmative or absolutely negative. . . . From now on we should remedy this state of affairs. — Mao Zedong

It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. India - a hundred Indias - whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented, they felt young again because reminded that youth must fly. — E. M. Forster

Acting is invigorating. But I don't analyse it too much. It's like a dog smelling where it's going to do its toilet in the morning. — Liam Neeson

We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology. — Jean Baudrillard

And as for the vague something
was it a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a desponding expression?
that opened upon a careful observer, now and then, in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially disclosed; that something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver, and seen it gape: that something, I, at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves. Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare
to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their nature. — Charlotte Bronte

Its true that we learn a lot from science about how we function but there's a danger in thinking knowledge of how we function is the full account of what we are. If you're a chemist who is really interested in the optical properties of certain pigments you could analyse the Mona Lisa and describe it completely but you would never have mentioned the face, which is the meaning of this thing. In that way a neuroscientist can put together an enormously impressively picture of the brain but he would not have described what goes on when we react to another person. — Roger Scruton

I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyse the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all. — Barbara Pym

Independence is the luxury of all those people who are too confident, and busy, and popular, and attractive to be just plain old lonely. And make no mistake, lonely is absolutely the worst thing to be. Tell someone that you've got a drink problem, or an eating disorder, or your dad died when you were a kid even, and you can almost see their eyes light up with the sheer fascinating drama and pathos of it all, because you've got an issue, something for them to get involved in, to talk about and analyse and discuss and maybe even cure. But tell someone you're lonely and of course they'll seem sympathetic, but look very carefully and you'll see one hand snaking behind their back, groping for the door handle, ready to make a run for it, as if loneliness itself were contagious. Because being lonely is just so banal, so shaming, so plain and dull and ugly. — David Nicholls

Man is now a new animal, a new and different animal; he can jump a hundred miles, see through brick walls, bombard atoms, analyse the stars, set about his business with the strength of a million horses. And so forth and so on. Yes. Yes. But all the same he goes on behaving like the weak little needy ape he used to be. He grabs, snarls, quarrels, fears, stampedes, and plays in his immense powder magazine until he seems likely to blow up the whole damned show. — H.G.Wells

You can analyse the past, but you have to design the future — Edward De Bono

Analyse it; chance of getting succeed are always greater than failure — Harishankar Kaushik

I like to pick things apart, analyse them and put them back in a better order than they had been in before — Jessica Thompson

Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself. — Jonathan Galassi

How well you eat and rest helps you analyse your energy reserves. — Saina Nehwal

I'm a writer, not an activist. My job is to analyse things, to think them through and examine them. — Ariel Levy

I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel. — H.P. Lovecraft

My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect
simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. But I don't want to interrupt you. Go on with your story. — Oscar Wilde

We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human. — Virginia Woolf

I never overtly analyse my own movies, I don't think that's my job to do that. I just muddle through and do what I think is best for the movie. — Peter Jackson