Quotes & Sayings About Materials

Good buildings make and are made by their settings, and they are appropriately different in different locations. Climate, culture, topography and materials have helped create regional architectural languages that seem curiously right for their locations and for all times. — Jaquelin T. Robertson

The bank wanted me to sell those customers that debt, because the system needs you to buy that new car, that holiday to Barbados, that latest iPhone or that new extension you've always been dreaming off. The banks are happy to let you do it with their high interest credit products, and they want me to be the guy that sells the idea to you. I was serving the machine that was enslaving me. — K.A. Hill

Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave
/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,
/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross. — John Milton

Anytime you open a business, you have to be effective in promoting whether it's a franchise or not. You'll need to learn to be a Web marketer extraordinaire. There's plenty of material out there. — Dave Ramsey

We're all like little ants who scurry around with the materials that are at hand right now. Each generation finds new materials. Its just evolution, isn't it? — Beth Orton

We practice conscious forgetting by refusing to summon up the fiery material, we refuse to recollect. To forget is an active, not a passive endeavor. It means to not haul up certain materials, or turn them over and over, to not work oneself up by repetitive thought, picture, or emotion. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator. — Novalis

I decided to set out to prove that you could make a reasonable living building for the poor using recycled materials and only hiring unskilled labor. — Dan Phillips

The physical fabric of the world had to be such as to enable that ten billion year preliminary evolution to produce the raw materials of life. Without it there would not have been the chemical materials to allow life to evolve here on earth. — John Polkinghorne

I had been reading children's books all my life and saw them not as minor amusements but as part of the whole literary mainstream; not as "juveniles" or "kiddie lit," one of the most demeaning terms in the scholastic jargon.
My belief was, and is, that the child's book is a unique and valid art form; a means of dealing with things which cannot be dealt with quite as well in any other way. There is, I'm convinced, no inner, qualitative difference between writing for adults and writing for children. The raw materials are the same for both: the human condition and our response to it. — Lloyd Alexander

The keys that unlock the heart are made of funny materials: a disarming phrase that comes out of the blue, nowhere, a certain sexy walk that sends you reeling, the way someone hums when she is alone. My father said it was the way my mother danced with him. — Jonathan Carroll

Interdependence must be transformed into solidarity based upon the principle that the goods of creation are meant for all. That which human industry produces through the processing of raw materials with the contribution of work must serve equally for the good of all. — Pope John Paul II

Contrary to what they tell you ... You are not a limited material being. — Amit Goswami

These kids all just want e-books." When she studied students in Canada and Israel, McNeish discovered something interesting that linked them all: students overwhelmingly prefer paper not out of any sense of nostalgia or a resistance to new technology, but because paper learning materials simply work better. "It's a lot of work to use these e-learning systems. And a lot easier to just learn from a textbook," McNeish said. "These kids are skilled with technology for entertainment, but they are not so skilled at technology for learning. — David Sax

I feel best in soft and natural materials such as cotton and silk. I wear collections from all designers. They all have outstanding cuts and extremely pleasant materials. — Laetitia Casta

Methods like this act as "factories" in that they take raw materials (such as row data, for example, or
configuration information) and use them to produce objects. The term factory is applied to code
designed to generate object instances. — Matt Zandstra

It is not always the most brilliant speculations nor the choice of the most exotic materials that is most profitable. I prefer Monsieur de Reaumur busy exterminating moths by means of an oily fleece; or increasing fowl production by making them hatch without the help of their mothers, than Monsieur Bemouilli absorbed in algebra, or Monsieur Leibniz calculating the various advantages and disadvantages of the possible worlds. — Noel-Antoine Pluche

Design is not the act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials; it is the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life. — Kenya Hara

Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural — Jonah Lehrer

He opened the gun box, lifted out the sections of his own gun, for comparison. They slid together with well-oiled clicks. Laying the two guns side by side, he experienced a momentary lapse of faith. They looked nothing like a pair. His own gun looked fat and polished. It almost breathed as it lay on the slab. Bertie's gun looked like a sketch, or a preliminary model done in cheap materials to get the shape right and then discarded. — Helen Simonson

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. — Oscar Wilde

First impression: The Tijuana dump is beautiful. Second impression: It is like a military operation. It is at the top of a small mountain. A convoy of trucks comes to the top of the mountain and dumps the refuse of a developing city. [...]
Other equipment moves mountains of dirt to cover the wastes. At intervals, standpipes are inserted into the filled spaces to allow the biogas of the rotting materials below to escape. The wind blows across these vents, creating an eerie music. When the biogas envelops you, you sense that sinking feeling of doom. — Raymond Coppinger

Knowing the limitations of the native syllabry as a literary medium, the student cannot accept without qualification the usual explanation that the friars destroyed the relics of paganism among their converts, or that the literature was recorded on highly perishable materials which disintegrated before scholars could get a hold of them — Bienvenido L. Lumbera

Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms - if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms. — E. O. Wilson

Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all. — Gerald W. Johnson

Schinkel's aesthetic was not a crudely materialistic "truth to material" affair ... but rather an attempt to inform iron and other industrial materials with an appropriate beauty through the direct collaboration of the artist in the manufacturing process. — Karl Friedrich Schinkel

We know that al Qaeda is seeking radioactive materials and technology to launch a devastating attack, and that hundreds of radioactive sources have been lost or stolen in the U.S. and around the world. — Ed Markey

Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School, improved and energized, as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization. Two reasons sustain this position. In the first place, there is a universality in its operation, which can be affirmed of no other institution whatever ... And, in the second place, the materials upon which it operates are so pliant and ductile as to be susceptible of assuming a greater variety of forms than any other earthly work of the Creator. — Horace Mann

Take your materials from what is around you - if you see a dandelion, write about that; if it's misty, write about the mist. The materials for poetry are all about you in profusion. — Masaoka Shiki

Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature. — Andy Goldsworthy

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to. — Wallace Stegner

In this way a process of evolution was started that led to the development of more and more complicated, self-reproducing organisms. The first primitive forms of life consumed various materials, including hydrogen sulfide, and released oxygen. This gradually changed the atmosphere to the composition that it has today, and allowed the development of higher forms of life such as fish, reptiles, mammals, and ultimately the human race. — Stephen Hawking

I've never discussed my writing with others much, but I don't believe it can do any harm. I don't think that there's any risk that ideas or materials will evaporate. — Aldous Huxley

I strive to find materials that will engage students, expand their capacities as critical readers and thinkers, and feel immediately relevant to their daily lives and future work in court and social service systems. — Dean Spade

I think it's really important to use your hands and get close to materials. To be up close to real things like rain and mud; to have contact with nature. — Robin Day

We have to find alternative ways of producing our raw materials without asking nature to do it for us. — Jochen Zeitz

Despite modifying his writing to suit the audiences, despite writing plays to draw large crowds, despite using other people's materials and copying plotlines from history, Shakespeare remains the preeminent artist of the English language and his reputation has reached such stratospheric heights as to border on idolatry (or Bardolatry as some people call it). Shakespeare was a product of his time and learned from his peers, but his plays transcend his time as all great works do - his genius is his own. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare

Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you. — Randall Munroe

around. You can use the three-hole or five-hole stitch, or make up your own version. Some artists I know have worked with take-out menus, junk mail, fliers left on their car windshield wipers - it is fun to take ephemeral materials — Esther K. Smith

Education must lead us from the irresponsible opinion to true responsible judgment. It must lead us from chance and arbitrariness to rational clarity and intellectual order. Therefore, let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels; one warehouses, another villas; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them something else. — Thomas Carlyle

I have to make a dress out of recycled materials for my kid's preschool 'Project Runway'-like assignment. I'm currently fusing plastic bags. — Busy Philipps

Beauty is in you and is reflected in your eyes. It is not material. — Sophia Loren

Perhaps the heroic element in our natures is exhibited to the best advantage, not in going from success to success, and so on through a series of triumphs, but in gathering, on the very field of defeat itself, the materials for renewed efforts, and in proceeding, with no abatement of heart or energy, to form fresh designs upon the very ruins and ashes of blasted hopes. Yes, it is this indomitable persistence in a purpose, continued alike through defeat and success, that makes, more than aught else, the hero. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Remember my words, I may again return,
I love you, I depart from materials,
I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead. — Walt Whitman

Realism to be effective must be a matter of selection.genius chooses its materials with a view to their beauty and effectiveness; mere talent copies what it thinks is nature, only to find it has been deceived by the external grossness of things. — Julia Marlowe

The western model of growth that India and China wish to emulate is intrinsically toxic. It uses huge resources - energy and materials - and generates enormous waste ... it remains many steps behind the problems it creates. India and China have no choice but to reinvent the development trajectory — Sunita Narain

There can be no doubt but that he who has the most materials has the greatest means of invention ... — Joshua Reynolds

A likely source for terrorists seeking to buy or steal nuclear materials is the former Soviet Union. — Lee H. Hamilton

To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world. — Gwendolyn Brooks

The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We 'cannot afford' to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying topography, or to farm without catastrophic soil erosion. A production-oriented economy can indeed live in this way, but only so long as production lasts. — Wendell Berry

On Planet of the Apes, I had a very knowledgeable team who knew good materials, but I had one main source person who worked online and on the street continually looking for the proper materials. — Colleen Atwood

We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem — William McDonough

I assume the senses crave sources of maximum information, that the eye benefits by exercise, stretch, and expansion towards materials of complexity and substance, ... conditions which alert the total sensibility - cast it almost in stress - extend insight and response, the basic responsive range of empathetic-kinesthetic vitality. — Carolee Schneemann

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form. — Stephen Nachmanovitch

Archaeological materials are not mute. They speak their own language. And they need to be used for the great source they are to help unravel the spirituality of those of our ancestors who predate the Indo-Europeans by many thousands of years. — Marija Gimbutas

Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less! — Nathan Myhrvold

Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. — John Quincy Adams

Surprise, unpredictability: these are the main materials of creativity. — Gueorgui Pinkhassov

Words are our raw materials, how we string them them together our art. — Michael W. Smart

It's not necessarily how many minutes you're on screen, it's the material you have. It's more important what it is you have to do than the amount of time you're there. — Christopher Walken

America's workers face a battle for their jobs. They are the finest workers in the world. American workers grow, harvest, and mine some of the world's highest quality and most plentiful raw materials. — Kit Bond

Chicken fat, beef fat, fish fat, fried foods - these are the foods that fuel our fat genes by giving them raw materials for building body fat. — Neal Barnard

I hope to direct a few more films before I leave the planet, so I hope I can find the material. — Ed Harris

Paper money is like dram-drinking, it relieves for a moment by deceitful sensation, but gradually diminishes the natural heat, and leaves the body worse than it found it. Were not this the case, and could money be made of paper at pleasure, every sovereign in Europe would be as rich as he pleased. But the truth is, that it is a bubble and the attempt vanity. Nature has provided the proper materials for money: gold and silver, and any attempt of ours to rival her is ridiculous ... — Thomas Paine

Since Europe is dependent on imports of energy and most of its raw materials, it can be subdued, if not quite conquered, without all those nuclear weapons the Soviets have aimed at it simply through the shipping routes and raw materials they control. — Barbara Amiel

It may well be easier to remember a list if one sings it (or dances to it). However, these uses of the 'materials' of an intelligence are essentially trivial. What is not trivial is the capacity to think musically. — Howard Gardner

The thing about the raw materials of the life of the spirit is that they are always changing. What you see in the past is dependent on what you are able to see now. I've — Krista Tippett

The actual materials are important ... A book at the nightstand is important-a light you can get at-or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern. — Allen Ginsberg

A creative invitation is a combination of materials and context that intrigue children with a suggestion of play. — Rachelle Doorley

I've always been selective about materials I choose anyways. The incoming calls haven't been projects that I necessarily want to do. Now I can always be called "Emmy winner Regina King." — Regina King

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells. — Norman Mailer

Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold. — Anais Nin

The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them. — William James

I included receipts, faxes, newspaper clippings, all sorts of things. I've read novels composed entirely of emails or letters, but not assembled across this kind of mix of materials. I wanted to create the feeling of a detective going through a box of clues. — Brian Pinkerton

We must be as familiar with the functions of our building as with our materials. We must learn what a building can be, what it should be, and also what it must not be ... — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

What experience cannot teach you now, mentors and books can foretell! To take the lead in whatever you do, be willing to learn and educate yourself regularly! — Israelmore Ayivor

When Xena finished I just really wanted to work with Shakespeare's material. — Renee O'Connor

Pretty much everything that I pick, when it comes to choosing roles, is just based on things and materials that grabs me. It's pretty much the subject matter that I gravitate towards. — Brittany Snow

The sources of our knowledge of the kabalistic doctrines are the books of Yetzirah and Zohar, the former drawn up in the second century, and the latter a little later; but they contain materials much older than themselves ... In them, as in the teachings of Zoroaster, everything that exists emanates from a source of infinite Light. — Albert Pike

The chemists work with inaccurate and poor measuring services, but they employ very good materials. The physicists, on the other hand, use excellent methods and accurate instruments, but they apply these to very inferior materials. The physical chemists combine both these characteristics in that they apply imprecise methods to impure materials. — Wolfgang Ostwald

My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing ... — Michelangelo Antonioni

The artist creates the material that we look back upon as part of history. — Roy DeCarava

Robots can now milk cows. Oil prices have fallen globally, meaning both the petro-states and those indirectly propped up by them are weakened. At the same time, slower growth in China has lately shrunk its voracious appetite for African, Australian, and Latin American commodities. China accounted for more than a third of global growth in recent years, and its growth engine multiplied the growth of many of the countries that exported raw materials to Beijing. That has slowed. China's total debt has grown from roughly 150 percent of its GDP in 2007 to around 240 percent today - a massive increase in one decade that is dampening its growth and its imports and shrinking China's wallet for foreign aid and investment in African and Latin American commodity-exporting countries. In — Thomas L. Friedman

There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are. — Jonathan Kozol

Let us ask ... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc ... we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects. — Michel Foucault

Not the wretchedest man or woman but has a deep secretive mythology with which to wrestle with the material world and to overcome it and pass beyond it. Not the wretchedest human being but has his share in the creative energy that builds the world. We are all creators. We all create a mythological world of our own out of certain shapeless materials. — John Cowper Powys

Data are becoming the new raw material of business. — Craig Mundie

By making all my materials freely available through 'Giving 2.0' ProjectU, I am on a mission to extend philanthropy education to colleges globally and far beyond campus walls. — Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

For all fragrances I create, I ask each of my suppliers to deliver and provide the best raw materials. It is my personal quest for excellence and quality to create luxury perfumes ... — Francis Kurkdjian

The space industry is developing and delivering benefits that tie into our immediate needs and priorities here on Earth-for example, medical and materials research, and satellite communications. — Marc Garneau

The Cubists' belief in progress was by no means complacent. They saw the new products, the new inventions, the new forms of energy, as weapons with which to demolish the old order. Yet at the same time their interest was profound and not simply declamatory. In this they differed fundamentally from the Futurists. The Futurists saw the machine as a savage god with which they identified themselves. Ideologically they were precursors of fascism: artistically they produced a vulgar form of animated naturalism, which was itself only a gloss on what had already been done in films. 35 Carlo Carra. The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli. 1911 The Cubists felt their way, picture by picture, towards a new synthesis which, in terms of painting, was the philosophical equivalent of the revolution that was taking place in scientific thinking: a revolution which was also dependent on the new materials and the new means of production. — John Berger

The existence of homosexuality, not as a circumstantial matter of passing sexual whim, but as a shared condition and identity, raises the intriguing possibility of homosexual culture, or at least of a minority subculture with sexual identity as its base. At the very least, by sympathetic identification with cultural texts which appeared to be affirmative, homosexual people saw a way to shore up their self-respect in the face of constant moral attack, and they found materials with which to justify themselves not only to each other but also to those who found their very existence, let alone their behaviour, unjustifiable. — Gregory Woods

I think we choose who we are and what we do about life events. Paige, isn't that what you've been doing since Kevin threw you out of the company? You've been stepping out in faith, trusting God to help you make your own life. Working at life is what matters most. What we do for a living is a component. Where we come from, who's in our lives, our families, our pets, and the people we decide we want to grow old with are all about life, but we make our own choices and build from the materials we've been given. — Lynette Endicott

What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fear is the raw material from which courage is manufactured. Without it, we wouldn't even know what it means to be brave. — Martha Beck

Anger and hatred are the materials from which hell is made. — Nhat Hanh

He [Thomas Edison] considered [money] as a raw material, like metal, to be used rather than amassed, and so he kept plowing his funds into new projects. Several times he was all but bankrupt. But he refused to let dollar signs govern his actions. — Charles Edison

Within the last three years the amount of classified materials has doubled to 15.6 million decisions to classify documents. — Hodding Carter