Quotes & Sayings About Novelty

Putting on weight is easy all the way through. But after the first couple of weeks, the novelty wears off very quickly, and your body is groaning and starting to really shout at you, saying, 'Why? Why? Why? Why are you doing this?' — Christian Bale

I don't call myself an 'industrial designer,' because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept. — Eva Zeisel

And the people of Ankh-Morpork are so thirsty for novelty that the whole city is, you might say, hurrying the future along for the sheer joy of watching its progress. — Terry Pratchett

I like to drive nice cars; since I live in New York, and I don't drive there, it's a novelty to be on the road and drive and listen to my music. — Hannibal Buress

Nationalism - in other words, the dividing of the church into bodies - consisting of such and such a nation, is a novelty, not above three centuries old, although many dear children of God are found dwelling in it. — John Nelson Darby

An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric. — William James

It is impossible to approve in Catholic publications of a style inspired by unsound novelty which seems to deride the piety of the faithful and dwells on the introduction of a new order of Christian life, on new directions of the Church, on new aspirations of the modern soul, on a new vocation of the clergy, on a new Christian civilisation. — Pope Pius X

It is always the latest song that an audience applauds the most. — Homer

What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. From, The Book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa

Many pleasant things are better when they belong to someone else ... When things belong to others, we enjoy them twice as much, without the risk of losing them, and with the pleasure of novelty. — Baltasar Gracian

Chance is the only source of true novelty. — Francis Crick

In 2009, novelty toymaker Maxfield & Oberton released Buckyballs, sets of curiously powerful magnetic marbles that became the most popular cubicle toy since the Rubik's Cube, selling more than 2 million units in 15 countries. — David Sax

The enormous influence of novelty
the way in which it quickens observations, sharpens sensations, and exalts sentiment
is not half enough taken note of by us, and is to me a very sorrowful matter. And yet, if we try to obtain perpetual change, change itself will become monotonous. — John Ruskin

Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary. — Erik Naggum

The specialist serves as a striking concrete example of the species, making clear to us the radical nature of the novelty. For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned , for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with an the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line. — Ortega Y Gasset

Culture represents a novelty in the world of nature, and it could have added an effective, unifying edge to the forces of natural selection. — Richard Leakey

Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all creation in the biosphere. — Jacques Monod

The new is a guest in the house of the old. — Marty Rubin

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

The facts with which I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in the general use I shall make of them. If there shall be any novelty, it will be in the mode of presenting the facts, and the inferences and observations following that presentation.
(Cooper Union address, 1860) — Abraham Lincoln

Their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect. — Iris Murdoch

Animals like novelty if they can choose to investigate it; they fear novelty if you shove it in their faces. — Temple Grandin

Novelty, the most potent of all attractions, is also the most perishable. — Andre Maurois

Where there is no novelty, there can be no curiosity. — Aphra Behn

I didn't have time to lose it. I didn't have time to lie down in the corner shop and scream and beat the floor until my hands bled. I didn't have time to miss Jack. Stroma kept on chattering away and getting excited over novelty spaghetti shapes and finding the joy in every little thing, and it occurred to me even then that she was probably looking after me, too. — Jenny Valentine

If refined sense, and exalted sense, be not so useful as common sense, their rarity, their novelty, and the nobleness of their objects, make some compensation, and render them the admiration of mankind. — David Hume

Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. — Francis Bacon

You don't understand. When I was seven, Mum bought me a rabbit, Mister Fluffy. For two weeks, Dad paid more attention to that rabbit than he did to me. He played with it, he took it on walks, he practically tucked it in at night. And that was a rabbit. Imagine what he's going to be like with a baby." "But after those two weeks, once the novelty wore off, he was back to normal, wasn't he?" "I don't think it was because the novelty wore off. I think it was because he stood on Mister Fluffy." "Pardon? — Derek Landy

People don't adopt their ideologies at random, or by soaking up whatever ideas are around them. People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals. — Jonathan Haidt

No mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

We were in love, high on the novelty of marriage. The words husband and wife felt as if they had a shine to them. They were simply more fun to say than all the other words we knew. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often - will it be for always? - how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, 'I never realized my loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again. They — C.S. Lewis

In one lifetime it wouldn't be possible to find another woman with whom he can learn to be so free, whom he can please with such abandon and expertise. By some accident of character, it's familiarity that excites him more than sexual novelty. He supects there's something numbed or deficient or timid in himself ( ... ) [M]ight look like virtue or doggedness, but it's neither of these because he exercises no real choice. This is what he has to have: possession, belonging, repetition. — Ian McEwan

The second time, I had a freakin' vampire at my back." I froze. Oh shit. "No offense, Mr. Moreau," I quickly added.

"None taken, Agent Fraser. During the course of my lengthy life, I have been called many things, but 'freakin' has never been one of them. I'll consider it a novelty. — Lisa Shearin

Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved. — Terence McKenna

In my experience, not just in shooting films but in the commercials I've done, initially, it's very exciting for the community, and its a real novelty. Very quickly, though, they realize there's a buck to be had, and it becomes annoying, and they lose their patience pretty quick. — John Curran

Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown. I have already pointed out the existence among primitive peoples of what anthropologists call "misoneism," a deep and superstitious fear of novelty. The primitives manifest all the reactions of the wild animal against untoward events. But "civilized" man reacts to new ideas in much the same way, erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new. — C. G. Jung

At the south-eastern corner of the physical domain, near to the Centre of the Land, is to be found a gaming hall wherein the Master Angles play at Trilliards, this being what their Awe-full game is rightly called. The intricacies of their play determine the trajectories of lives in the First Borough, such lives being subject to the four eternal forces that the Angles represent. These are Authority, Severity, Mercy and Novelty, as symbolised respectively by Castle, Death's-head, Cross and Phallus. The Arch-Builder Gabriel governs the Castle pocket, Uriel the Death's-head, Mikael the Cross and Raphael the Phallus. — Alan Moore

A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself; but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with. — Aldous Huxley

Seen from inside the bar, the avenue, the stores opposite, the street glimpsed going off at right angles, the trapezoid of sky visible above the lower buildings, are altered by the tinted windows into an elsewhere, oddly peaceful, a desert or the interior of the sea. Sometimes when he has fallen asleep face upward in the sun, his dreams have taken on this quality of supernatural bright darkness. ("Novelty") — John Crowley

The mere change of custom, even though it may be of advantage in some respects, unsettles men by reason of the novelty: therefore, if it brings no advantage, it does much harm by unprofitably disturbing the Church. — Saint Augustine

The universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level. The novelty, the new, more complex order, doesn't emerge from the present in a steady stream, nor at all places at the same rate. It comes, as all things do, in rhythmic waves; there will always be times and places of scarcity and stagnation and retrogression. Still, the long-term direction is clear. The intention of the universe is evolution. — George Leonard

The formal innovations of the great masters always have a certain discreetness about them; such is true perfection; only among the small masters does novelty seek to call attention to itself. — Milan Kundera

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call 'God's birds' because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known? — George Eliot

I'm old, but I'm not good enough to be jaded. — John Feinstein

I think we all live in a world that is so fast-paced, it's threatening and absolutely saturated with change and novelty and insecurity. Therefore, the ritual of cooking and feeding my family and friends, whoever drops in, is what makes me feel that I'm in a universe that is contained. — Nigella Lawson

Novelties please less than they impress. — Charles Dickens

It is the custom on Africa to always produce new and monstrous things.
[Fr., Afrique est coustumiere toujours choses produire nouvelles et monstrueuses.] — Francois Rabelais

It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine. — Francois Jacob

Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such. — Charles Dickens

A culture must be reasonably stable, but it must also change, and it will presumably be strongest if it can avoid excessive respect for tradition and fear of novelty on the one hand and excessively rapid change on the other. — B.F. Skinner

Complexity is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold. It's important to point out that the patterns may never be finished. They're open-ended. In standard science this hit some things that most scientists have a negative reaction to. Science doesn't like perpetual novelty. — W. Brian Arthur

New York became the first state to ban talking on hand-held cell phones while driving. First-time violators could receive a fine of $100, with an additional mandatory six-month jail sentence if your ringer plays a Latin-themed novelty song. — Jon Stewart

Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question "What on earth is he up to now?" will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks. — C.S. Lewis

Music, in the best sense, does not require novelty; nay, the older it is, and the more we are accustomed to it, the greater its effect. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Novelty is to love like bloom to fruit; it gives a luster which is easily effaced, but never returns. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past. — Carlos Fuentes

I need rituals that encourage me to embrace what is repetitive, ancient, and quiet. But what I crave is novelty and stimulation. — Tish Harrison Warren

The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. Skeptics and believers are alike. At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted; fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure. — Alfred North Whitehead

I love only extreme novelty or the things of the past. — Berthe Morisot

It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago-she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time. — Mark Twain

See owner for mounting instructions. - NOVELTY UNDERWEAR — Darynda Jones

All I'm saying is that I understand if the novelty's worn off and you want to get off the carousel ride now before it kills you. — Jennifer Estep

We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness. — William James

Man naturally yearns for novelty. — Pliny The Elder

The personality trait most associated with an interest in the arts is called openness, the tendency to seek out novelty in intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional pursuits. — Adam Grant

What he felt during his Spanish encounter with left-wing anti-Christianity was similar to his reactions to the anti-Christianity of the right. The "novelty and shock of the Nazis", Auden wrote, and the blitheness with which Hitler's acolytes dismissed Christianity "on the grounds that to love one's neighbor as oneself was a command fit only for effeminate weaklings", pushed him inexorably toward unavoidable questions. "If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?" The answer to this question, he wrote later, was part of what "brought me back to the church. — Ross Douthat

What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe. — Terence McKenna

As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side. — Terence McKenna

A lot of guys get slammed pretty hard. I do think there's a tendency with women performers to just sort of write them off. The "Flavor of the Month" kind of thing. Or as a novelty, because I do think women in bands are still considered a novelty, or a little confection. — Nina Gordon

I also remember, having been fucked up every day for years, that the world seemed like such a novelty to me during my first few years sober. Like, I remember going through each of the seasons and the magic of rediscovering what it felt like to be in the world: going to a pumpkin patch on Halloween, getting a tree for Christmas, I felt excited by reality in a way that I never had before. I actually wanted to be alive. — Melissa Broder

Let us be quite clear that the ideal is a paradox. Most of us, having grown up among the ruins of the chivalrous tradition, were taught in our youth that a bully is always a coward. Our first week at school refuted this lie, along with its corollary that a truly brave man is always gentle. It is a pernicious lie because it misses the real novelty and originality of the medieval demand upon human nature. Worse still, it represents as a natural fact something which is really a human ideal, nowhere fully attained, and nowhere attained at all without arduous discipline. It is refuted by history and Experience. Homer's Achilles knows nothing of the demand that the brave should also be the modest and the merciful. He kills men as they cry for quarter or takes them prisoner to kill them at leisure. — C.S. Lewis

Film is more of novelty, because I've done so much theater over many years. I'm in love with making movies. Also, I find it easier to remember three minutes of dialogue than three hours. — Woody Allen

Therefore, when I considered this carefully, the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view, nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun. — Nicolaus Copernicus

What is it we value? Innovation. Originality. Novelty. But most importantly ... timeliness. I fear you may be too late, my confused, unfortunate, friend. — Brandon Sanderson

Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that. Ideally, though, we're lucky, and we find our soul mate and enjoy that life-changing mother lode of happiness. But a soul mate is a very hard thing to find. — Aziz Ansari

Those accustomed to failure fear the novelty of success. Those taught the lessons of subordination are oft timid in the school of self-service. — M T Anderson

Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk-the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set. But whereas the first tendency requires little encouragement or support from outside to motivate behaviour, the second can wilt if not cultivated. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

If one had to single out the most revolutionary novelty furnished by Qumran, its contribution to our understanding of the genesis of Jewish literary compositions could justifiably be our primary choice. — Geza Vermes

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets. — Anthony Burgess

The principle that certain sins should not receive the Church's testimony of forgiveness was probably no novelty at all, but had been applied in various churches; perhaps, however, with no strict consistency. — Robert Rainy

Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system. — Alfred North Whitehead

What was striking about Ms. Wilson, and was also true of the other outsiders who volunteered their time that day, was that she spoke to us prisoners with great respect, as if our lives ahead had hope and meaning and possibility. After all these months at Danbury, this was a shocking novelty. — Piper Kerman

hear you're going to be on crutches for quite a while." "Yes, well - " "Abigail has already said she's moving back home to help you." "Oh," said Madeline. "Oh." She fingered the pink petals of the flowers. "Well, I'll talk to her about it. I'll be perfectly fine. She doesn't need to look after me." "No, but I think she wants to move back home," said Nathan. "She's looking for an excuse." Madeline and Ed looked at each other. Ed shrugged. "I always thought the novelty would wear off," said Nathan. "She missed her mum. We're not her real life." "Right." "So. I should get going," said Ed. "Could you stay for a moment, mate? — Liane Moriarty

Now as a musician, if you have it within you, you can create your own reality. Believe me, it's a novelty. — Chris Robinson

They walked on in silence. Katie's heart was beating with a rapidity that forbade speech. Nothing like this very direct young man had ever happened to her before. She had grown so accustomed to regarding herself as something too insignificant and unattractive for the notice of the lordly male that she was overwhelmed. She had a vague feeling that there was a mistake somewhere. It surely could not be she who was proving so alluring to this fairy prince. The novelty of the situation frightened her. — P.G. Wodehouse

For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance. — Alfred North Whitehead

Do you write every day?'
'Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don't work very hard, really. Really I'm on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too. It comes to the same thing.' He'd said all this before, to others; he wondered if he'd said it to her. 'It's like weekend homework. Remember? There wasn't ever a time you absolutely had to do it - there was always Saturday, then Sunday - but then there wasn't ever a time when it wasn't there to do, too.'
'How awful.' ("Novelty") — John Crowley

In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The guiding principle of Martin's personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years he'd sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference. — Jonathan Franzen

There are those too who toss around like insomniacs, and keep changing their position until they find rest through sheer weariness. They keep altering the condition of their lives, and eventually stick to that one in which they are trapped not by weariness with further change but by old age which is too sluggish for novelty. — Anonymous

I was in and out of comas until I was nine and I would lose entire days and weeks. The novelty of being able to really do stuff hasn't worn off - I still feel like I'm making up for lost time. — Jim Davis

My phone buzzes, and I shut off YouTube so I can access my messages.

Logan: Just found the perfect xmas present for you in Boston.

A photo promptly appears, summoning a loud groan from my throat. The asshole sent me a pic of a novelty My Little Pony dildo. Damn thing is bright pink, with rainbow sparkles on the handle.

Logan: And it's rechargeable! U don't have to buy batteries. THAT'S handy!

Me: Hardy-har-har. You = comedian.

Then I message Grace: Tell your BF to stop being mean to me.

She texts back a smiley face. Traitor. — Elle Kennedy

Accustomed to trace the operation of general causes, and the exemplification of general laws, in circumstances where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, [the scientist and natural philosopher] walks in the midst of wonders. — John Herschel

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt. — Henry Adams

As soon as we are shown the existence of something old in a new thing, we are pacified. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Especially when you live in the Southern US of A. Winter is a novelty season, a niche job. Winter wonderland? Forget about it! You were more likely to spend it in the wading pool. One horse open sleigh? Forget about it! Unless that sleigh was a trashcan lid and that horse was a 4-wheeler. — J.V. Roberts

Gamers both demand and deserve novelty. They need something new. As a game developer, one of my rules is there will be at least one thing in every game that I worked on that no one on the planet has seen before. — Warren Spector

Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias - boredom. — Arthur C. Clarke