Piecemeal Quotes & Sayings

The whole experience of getting an album from an artist you like and listening to it from beginning to end is sort of gone. Now it's piecemeal. — Tom Scholz

Actors always want to know how I come up with interesting and creative takes on characters, characters that aren't like me as I appear in daily life and that aren't like each other. It's simple: I let the lines and images connect with my imagination. I don't worry about consistency; I let myself respond moment by moment, piecemeal, to the character's dialogue and actions. Then I let my responses take me wherever they go, making mistakes and discarding them until choices start repeating themselves on their own no matter how arbitrary they seem at first. Then I know I'm on to something. But I don't try to put the character together. I leave it in pieces. The script and story put the character together so my moment by moment performance seems like a creative take on the whole character. — Harold Guskin

Strategic air assault is wasted if it is dissipated piecemeal in sporadic attacks between which the enemy has an opportunity to readjust defenses or recuperate. — Henry H. Arnold

(T)he real world worked differently than stories. In a novel you always knew the moment when something Happened, when someone Changed. But real life was full of gradual, piecemeal, continuous transformation. It was full of accidents and undefinables, and things that just happened on their own. — Scott Westerfeld

What a folly to dread the thought of throwing away life at once, and yet have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal. — John Howe

Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction, — Pope Francis

Few rash of any modern nation have a proper sense of an aesthetical whole; they praise and blame by parts; they are charmed by passages. And who has greater reason to rejoice in this than actors, since the stage is ever but a patched and piecemeal matter? — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Pictures are much harder to do than the theater ... You're at the mercy of the camera angles and the piecemeal technique. — Sydney Greenstreet

Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises. — Pope Benedict XVI

After years of piecemeal reform the current welfare system is complex and unfair. — Iain Duncan Smith

Film and television are so piecemeal. You do one scene, and then you put it to bed, and then you do a scene that comes before. In a play, you have to go from beginning to end every night, and that's harder, but also more fulfilling in a way. — Finn Wittrock

Let's treat each other well, making more space for every sort of ragamuffin. We needn't mistake unity with uniformity; we can have the first without the second. The breadth of God's family is mercifully wide. Grace has no discernment, apparently. Jesus created a motley crew, plucking us from every context and inaugurating a piecemeal clan that has only ever functioned with mercy. We should be grabbing hands, throwing our heads back, and laughing that God saved us all, because surely this is the messiest family ever and He loves us anyway. Our shared redemption should keep us grateful and kind, because what other response even makes sense? May the world see a thankful, committed family who loves their God, adores their Savior, and can't get enough of one another. This is a story that saves, a story that heals, and the right story to tell. — Jen Hatmaker

The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal. — Wendell Berry

All candidate moves should be identified at once and listed in one's head. This job cannot be done piecemeal, by first examining one move and then look at another. — Alexander Kotov

Death takes us piecemeal, not at a gulp. — Seneca The Younger

The problem with traditional approaches to abstraction and encapsulation is that they aim at complete information hiding. This characteristic anticipates being able to eliminate programming from parts of the software development process, those parts contained within module boundaries. As we've seen, though, the need to program is never eliminated because customization, modification, and maintenance are always required-that is, piecemeal growth. — Richard P. Gabriel

Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal, global and catastrophic character. If anything, partial 'solutions' serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes. — Murray Bookchin

In less than an hour I have to hold class for a group of idiot freshmen. And, on a desk in the living room, is a mountain of midterm examinations with essays I must suffer through, feeling my stomach turn at their paucity of intelligence, their adolescent phraseology. And all that tripe, all those miles of hideous prose, had been would into an eternal skein in his head. And there it sat unraveling into his own writing until he wondered if he could stand the thought of living anymore. I have digested the worst, he thought. Is it any wonder that I exude it piecemeal? ("Mad House") — Richard Matheson

When we see a special reformer we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your own virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life. — D.H. Lawrence

We are on the edge of economic collapse unless we wake up and
forcibly take back control of our government and economy. Over the
past 100 years, the game has been rigged, slowly and piecemeal at
first, always in the name of serving the greater good, preventing the
next bubble or providing greater transparency and security. It is as if
the American people are suffering from battered spouse syndrome; the
politicians, the greedy bankers, and the Fed all lie to us while they
steal our wealth and our liberty. Every time we call them on it, they
promise to never do it again if we'll just give them one more chance.
So we let it slide and then act shocked when they do it to us again.
Maybe we should have our collective head examined. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

I brush my hair,
waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard,
for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart
and were screwed together. They will knit.
And the other corpse, the fractured heart,
I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it. — Anne Sexton

We don't really have any that protect the food supply from farm to table. We have a food safety system that's piecemeal, largely divided between two agencies that don't talk to each other very much. Neither agency can enforce regulations from the farm to the table. — Marion Nestle

This world was not created piecemeal. Africa was born no later and no earlier than any other geographical area on this globe. Africans, no more and no less than other men, possess all human attributes, talents and deficiencies, virtues and faults. — Haile Selassie

The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness. — Jane Hirshfield

It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect. — Robert Musil

He could galvanize the dead with his talk. It was a sort of devouring process: when he described a place he ate into it, like a goat at tacking a carpet. If he described a person he ate him alive from head to toe. If it were an event he would devour every detail, like an army of white ants descending upon a forest. He was everywhere at once, in his talk. He attacked from above and below, from the front, rear and flanks. If he couldn't dispose of a thing at once, for lack of a phrase or an image, he would spike it temporarily and move on, coming back to it later and devouring it piecemeal. Or like a juggler,- he would toss it in the air arid, just when you thought he had forgotten it, that it would fall and break, he would deftly put an-arm behind his back and catch it in his palm without even turning his eye. It wasn't just talk he handed out, but language - food and beast language. He always talked against a landscape, like the protagonist of a lost world. — Henry Miller

The imagination is a spiritual apparatus. Unable to invent the world, it does the next best thing, and that is to assemble it piecemeal, ugly and strange, bright and clear, and dumbly discovered. — Jan Peacock

Another threat, less overt but no less basic, confronts liberal democracy. More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific knowhow. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Under such circumstances, the scientific and technological momentum of the country would not be reversed but would actually feed on the situation it exploits.
... Persisting social crisis, the emergence of a charismatic personality, and the exploitation of mass media to obtain public confidence would be the steppingstones in the piecemeal transformation of the United States into a highly controlled society. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

The gospel is not something partial or piecemeal: it takes in the whole life, the whole of history, the whole world. It tells us about creation and the final judgment and everything in between. — David Lloyd-Jones

Most people are oblivious to F.A. Hayek's insight that the critical information needed to run an economy - or even 15 percent of one - doesn't exist in any one place where it is accessible to central planners. Instead, it is scattered piecemeal among millions of people. All those people put together are far wiser and better informed than Congress could ever be. Only markets - private property, free exchange and the price system - can put this knowledge at the disposal of entrepreneurs and consumers, ensuring the system will serve the people and not just the political class. — John Stossel

Time is merely the spread-out and piecemeal view that an individual being has of the Ideas. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Alfred is taken past this broom, and enters this room; which can only be described as 'piecemeal'. It is full of pieces of fish-market paraphernalia, pieces of military-regalia; and pieces of rusted-steel.
It is full of these spiky-hooks, fishmongery-books; and saline-scalers. These bayonet-blades, grenades; and dusty loud-halers. — Joss Sheldon

Better to sink beneath the shock Than moulder piecemeal on the rock! — Lord Byron

I believe benchmarking best practices can open people's eyes as to what is possible, but it can also do more harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing catch-up. As one seasoned Toyota manager commented after hosting over a hundred tours for visiting executives, "They always say 'Oh yes, you have a Kan-Ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also.' They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together." I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another "great person. — Peter M. Senge

An exciting feature of string theory is that the particles emerge from the theory itself: a distinct species of particle arises from each distinct string vibrational pattern. And since the vibrational pattern determines the properties of the corresponding particle, if you understood the theory well enough to delineate all vibrational patterns, you'd be able to explaine all properties of all particles. The potential and the promies, then, is that string theory will transcent quantum field theory by deriving all particle properties mathematically. Not only would this unify everything under the umbrella of vibrating strings, it would establish that future "surprises"-such as the discovery of currently unknown particle species-are built into string theory from the outset and so would be accessible, in principle, to sufficiently industrious calculation. String theory doesn't build piecemeal toward an ever more complete description of nature. It seeks a complete description from the get-go. — Brian Greene

That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it? — Gerard Manley Hopkins

A secret may be sometimes best kept by keeping the secret of its being a secret. It is not many years since a State secret of the greatest importance was printed without being divulged, merely by sending it to the press like any other matter, and trusting to the mechanical habits of the persons employed. They printed it piecemeal in ignorance of what it was about. — Henry Taylor

We dole out lip-service to the importance of education - lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The clever way death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out. Generations never fall with one blow - that would be too sad and too obvious. Death prefers to do it piecemeal. The meadow is attacked from several sides at the same time. One of us goes one day; another some time afterwards; you have to stand back and look around you to take in what's missing, to grasp the vast slaughter of your generation ... — Alphonse Daudet

Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way; the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents. — Wendell Berry

For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal. — Thomas Jefferson

There are some people, be they black or white, who don't want others to rise above them. They want to be the source of all knowledge and share it piecemeal to others less endowed. That is what's wrong with all these carpenters and men who have a certain knowledge. It is the same with rich people. — Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

The praying which makes a prayerful ministry is not a little praying put in as we put flavor to give it a pleasant smack, but the praying must be in the body, and form the blood and bones. Prayer is no petty duty, put into a corner; no piecemeal performance made out of the fragments of time which have been snatched from business and other engagements of life; but it means that the best of our time, the heart of our time and strength must be given. — E. M. Bounds

To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow work. It can be accomplished only piecemeal, a step at a time. — John Dewey

It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease. The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil. — Wendell Berry

I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend doesn't exist, except it is all I am, all the time. — Jodi Picoult

Virginia 's tax system needs to be fixed. The time to act is now. Do not send me any more studies. Do not send me another piecemeal approach that confuses tinkering with real reform. — Mark Warner

[W]hether it is debates over men sharing housework and child-rearing, the 'crisis' of marriage and behind that the broader crisis of male-female relationships in adjusting to social change, or the increased sympathy for (or at least tolerance of) lesbian and gay demands for equal legal rights, all these developments in heterosexuality are usually approached and conceptualised in piecemeal form and rarely provoke any debate about the changing nature of heterosexuality itself. — Richard Dunphy

In schools the main problem is not the absence of innovations but the presence of too many disconnected ... piecemeal, superficially adorned projects ... We are over our heads. — Michael Fullan

In a novel you always knew the moment when something Happened, when someone Changed. But real life was full of gradual, piecemeal, continuous transformation. It was full of accidents and undefineables, and things that just happened on their own. The only certainty was 'It's complicated,' whether or not unicorns tolerated your touch. — Scott Westerfeld

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. — Annie Dillard

Liberalism is really piecemeal socialism, and socialism always attacks three basic social institutions: religion, the family, and private property. Religion, because it offers a rival authority to the state; the family, because it means a rival loyalty to the state; and property, because it means material independence of the state. — Joseph Sobran

I knew too well the nature of life's distractions and enticements-how the piecemeal progress of our hopes and ambitions commands our undivided attention, reshaping the ethereal into the tangible, and commitments into compromises. — Amor Towles

No piecemeal solution is going to prevent the collapse of whole societies and ecosystems ... a radical re-thinking of our values, priorities and political systems is urgent. — Maude Barlow

It opposes the dogmatic application to all cases of what is adequate only for piecemeal aggregates. The question is whether an approach in piecemeal terms, through blind connections, is or is not adequate to interpret actual thought processes and the role of the past experience as well. Past experience has to be considered thoroughly, but it is ambiguous in itself; so long as it is taken in piecemeal, blind terms it is not the magic key to solve all problems. — Max Wertheimer

This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity. — Marcel Proust

We now realize that we're not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where everything is linked together. — Sam Keen

Battles are won one by one and enemy battalions are destroyed one at a time. Factories are built one at a time. Farmers cultivate one plot after another. We serve ourselves the total amount of food we can consume, but we eat it spoonful by spoonful; to eat it in one go would be impossible.This is known as the piecemeal solution. — Neel Mukherjee

Ford Motor Company's sluggish and piecemeal approach to its automotive responsibilities betrays motorists' safety. — Ralph Nader

Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology. — Karl Popper

We are in the ordinary position of scientists of having to be content with piecemeal improvements: we can make several things clearer, but we cannot make anything clear. — Frank P. Ramsey

Winds shook me apart piecemeal, flung a bone here, a bone there. My eyes became snow, my hair turned to ice; I heard it chime against my shoulders like wind-blown glass. If I spoke, words would fall from me like snow, pour out of me like black wind. — Patricia A. McKillip

The underlying reason why this transition was piecemeal is that food production systems evolved as a result of the accumulation of many separate decisions about allocating time and effort. Foraging humans, like foraging animals, have only finite time and energy, which they can spend in various ways. We can picture an incipient farmer waking up and asking: Shall I spend today hoeing my garden (predictably yielding a lot of vegetables several months from now), gathering shellfish (predictably yielding a little meat today), or hunting deer (yielding possibly a lot of meat today, but more likely nothing)? Human and animal foragers are constantly prioritizing and making effort-allocation decisions, even if only unconsciously. They concentrate first on favorite foods, or ones that yield the highest payoff. If these are unavailable, they shift to less and less preferred foods. — Jared Diamond

I think it was the perfect gestation time for this particular piece [ Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far) in Song]. One of the songs that I considered talking about was "Manhattan," because it was chronicling the end of a long relationship that was part of the reason why I moved from Los Angeles to New York, which was such a life-changing decision. I don't regret that it's not in there, but that's one that I considered diving into, and I have little piecemeal snippets of writing about that floating around — Sara Bareilles

When you make a movie, you do it so piecemeal. You're doing it, not only scene by scene, out of order, but shot by shot, line by line. And there's this idea that the director has the whole thing in his or her head and they're going to somehow weave it all together in the end. — Jason Reitman

Author Dave Crenshaw put it just right when he wrote, "The people we live with and work with on a daily basis deserve our full attention. When we give people segmented attention, piecemeal time, switching back and forth, the switching cost is higher than just the time involved. We end up damaging relationships." Every — Gary Keller

I would say my favorite was just the beginning of the movie like doing all the rehearsal stuff. It's been amazing to see the rest of it happen but it happens so piecemeal. And Edgar sort of has the whole movie edited in his head already, so we're just sort of matching to what he has. — Alison Pill

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly. — Roger Ebert

Trilateralists look forward to a pseudo postnational age in which social, economic, and political values originating in the trilatleral regions are transformed into universal values. Expanding networks of like-minded governmental officials, businessmen, and technocrats - elite products of Western civilization - are to carry out national and international policy formation. Functionally specific institutions with 'more technical focus, and lesser public awareness' [italics mine] are best suited for addressing international issues in the trilateral model. Trilateralists call this decision making process 'piecemeal functionalism.' No comprehensive blueprints would be proposed and debated, but bit and bit the overall trilateral design would take shape. Its 'functional' components are to be adopted in more or less piecemeal fashion, lessening the chance people will grasp the overall scheme and organize resistance. — Holly Sklar

Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience. — Alan W. Watts

A truly scientific philosophy will be more humble, more piecemeal, more arduous, offering less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without the tyrannous imposition of our human and temporary demands. — Bertrand Russell

Adolescents, for all their self-involvement, are emerging from the self-centeredness of childhood. Their perception of other people has more depth. They are better equipped at appreciating others' reasons for action, or the basis of others' emotions. But this maturity functions in a piecemeal fashion. They show more understanding of their friends, but not of their teachers. — Terri E Apter

The people we live with and work with on a daily basis deserve our full attention. When we give people segmented attention, piecemeal time, switching back and forth, the switching cost is higher than just the time involved. We end up damaging relationships. — Gary W. Keller

A Hand-Mirror Hold it up sternly - see this it sends back, (who is it? is it you?) Outside fair costume, within ashes and filth, No more a flashing eye, no more a sonorous voice or springy step, Now some slave's eye, voice, hands, step, A drunkard's breath, unwholesome eater's face, venerealee's flesh, Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and cankerous, Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination, Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams, Words babble, hearing and touch callous, No brain, no heart left, no magnetism of sex; Such from one look in this looking-glass ere you go hence, Such a result so soon - and from such a beginning! — Walt Whitman

The piecemeal criticism which, like the fly, scans only the edge of a plinth in the great edifice upon which it crawls, disappears under a criticism that is all-comprehending and all-surveying. — William Greenough Thayer Shedd

Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right. — David Christian

The Oneida Perfectionists, along with some of the others, believed that feminism, and abolitionism, and other causes that they pursued in their own way without participating with other people outside of their communities, were all piecemeal reforms. That's what makes a utopian a utopian, this idea that they were going to create a whole new world from scratch. — Christine Jennings

Our efforts for inclusive growth are holistic and not piecemeal; well planned and not knee jerk reactions; not for small changes but for quantum leap; making people the partners in growth not just beneficiaries; addressing the local needs by using global ideas and technology. And this is why our efforts in e-governance have been applauded the world over. — Narendra Modi