Rarefied Quotes & Sayings

Also, the high standard held up to the public mind by the College of which which gave its peculiar sanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction obtained by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery from having an excellent time of it; for since professional practice chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred that it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees. — George Eliot

(On the temperature of water in wells) The reason why the water in wells becomes colder in summer is that the earth is then rarefied by the heat, and releases into the air all the heat-particles it happens to have. So, the more the earth is drained of heat, the colder becomes the moisture that is concealed in the ground. On the other hand, when all the earth condenses and contracts and congeals with the cold, then, of course, as it contracts, it squeezes out into the wells whatever heat it holds. — Lucretius

For all the splendours of the world's greatest galleries, visitors are likely to be kept at arm's length, spectators of a world that can seem too rarefied to let them in. — Jim Crace

The Kochs were unusually single-minded, but they were not alone. They were among a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and voted. Their efforts began in earnest in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to the Kochs, this group included Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes; Harry and Lynde Bradley, midwesterners enriched by defense contracts; John M. Olin, a chemical and munitions company titan; the Coors brewing family of Colorado; and the DeVos family if Michigan, founders of the Amway marketing empire. Each was different, but together they formed a new generation of philanthropist, bent on using billions if dollars from their private foundations to alter the direction of American politics. — Jane Mayer

The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface. She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might get burned off, and pure creativity and humour remain. — Elizabeth Hay

When you're on a long running series, you reach a very rarefied, high oxygen area and after a while to keep a show on the air they have to make some very drastic changes. — Joan Van Ark

Love, the great, the strong, the conquering god
Love that subdues a world, and rides roughshod over principle, virtue, tradition, over home, kindred, and religion
what cares he for the easy conquest of the pathetic being, who appeals to his sympathy?
Love means equality
the same height of heroism or of sin. When Love stoops to pity, he has ceased to soar in the boundless space, that rarefied atmosphere wherein man feels himself made at last truly in the image of God. — Emmuska Orczy

I am not part of that earlier Australian generation who set off on a deliberate search for fame and fortune in distant lands. My generation was the first that didn't need to. By the 1980's when I left home, our culture had grown deep enough and wide enough to encompass all but the most rarefied of ambitions. — Geraldine Brooks

As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied. — Simon Schama

When people have different ideas about which of these four modes of interacting applies to a current relationship, the result can range from blank incomprehension to acute discomfort or outright hostility. Think abut a dinner guest offering to pay the host for her meal, a person barking an order to a friend, or an employee helping himself to a shrimp off the boss' plate. Misunderstandings in which one person thinks of a transaction in terms of Equality Matching and another thinks in terms of Market Pricing are even more pervasive and can be even more dangerous. They tap into very different psychologies, one of them intuitive and universal, the other rarefied and learned, and clashes between them have been common in economic history. — Steven Pinker

There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either. — Randall Jarrell

Because the eye gazes but can catch no glimpse of it, It is called elusive. Because the ear listens but cannot hear it, It is called the rarefied. Because the hand feels for it but cannot find it, It is called the infinitesimal. ... These are called the shapeless shapes, Forms without form, Vague semblances. Go towards them, and you can see no front; Go after them, and you see no rear. — C. G. Jung

When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled. — Dorianne Laux

I wouldn't have known when I was a teenager that when I was coming up to being a sixty-year-old woman that I'd be making music, I'd be recording music, talking about music, and incorporating my views on the world into the music-making. So it's a very rarefied place to be, and I'm very grateful for that. — Annie Lennox

The more rarefied a life you live, the easier it is to think that those who don't share it could be demonised. To find the common humanity becomes more of a struggle the more you surround yourself with nice things. — Rory Kinnear

However, deep down, Brenda suspected that it was the stolen nature of those two hours that transformed them. She was supposed to be somewhere else ... She had set aside those two hours - three, if you counted the driving - to be of service to her sister. The fact that Vicki had unexpectedly granted her leave gave those two hours a rarefied quality. What Brenda had thought was, I'd better not waste them. And, like magic, the words had come. The pages had filled. — Elin Hilderbrand

The area of teenage life is not necessarily rarefied; we've all gone through that period. It's not as rarefied as a western or a space adventure or a gangster film, but it has its own dynamic. — Gus Van Sant

Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people. — Kathryn Bigelow

Those who are saying it's possible [to balance family and business] are often in a little bit of a rarefied place where they also have the money to do that. It's not quite such an easy stance to take when you don't have the same resources. I like to remind people that these are rich Manhattanites and to keep an eye on the fact that, especially with social media and these articles and these blogs, that that is not the reality for most women, unfortunately. — Mindy Kaling

. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness - without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live - is no longer a rarefied project. Just as machinery has embodied ideas of good, so the technology of destruction has also acquired a metaphysical character. The practical questions have thus become the ultimate questions as well. Annihilation is no longer a metaphor. Good and Evil are real. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter. It is not reserved for gods, kings, poets, priests, shrines, but belongs to mankind and to all of existence. — Saul Bellow

When people asked to buy my work I always said no. I'd had this rather rarefied idea that I didn't want money going through my head while I was making work. But after the car crash I realized that none of my work was owned by anyone. After that, I grew up a bit. — Cornelia Parker

She loved him, but that wasn't good enough. The word "love" was required to cover such a range of emotions that it almost meant nothing at all. Since the love we distill for each beloved conforms to such a specific, rarefied recipe, with varying soupcons of resentment, pity, or lust, and sometimes even pinches of dislike, you really needed as many different words for the feeling as there were people whom you cared for in your life. — Lionel Shriver

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact. — David Halberstam

Heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. — Kurt Vonnegut

The brain wasn't engineered to deal with that rarefied level of dumbness. — Tim Dorsey

Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it? — Arthur Conan Doyle

It is often thought that spirits in the after-world do not breathe as we might do - and that in being dead, one does not require inhaling and exhaling anything.
Well, they do exchange ethers, and the body of a soul does in fact breathe, and talk and sing - though not with oxygen, but a rarefied vitality. And just as a newborn, the very first impulse that comes when one crosses over to the other side, past the veils of death, is to inhale deeply - and then relax. — Gabriel Brunsdon

What the poor, the weak, and the inarticulate desperately require is power, organization, and a sense of identity and purpose, not rarefied advice of political scientists. — Paul Wellstone

Classical music has become rarefied, like a maiden aunt that nobody wants to talk to. — Charles Hazlewood

So the recordings were these immersive landscapes, and yet, unlike the performances that almost no one would see, I had a sense that these could live forever. I was just starting to get my head around the democratic aspect of art; I didn't want to make rarefied things that were either alienatingly obscure or elite and art-worldy, so a recording that anyone could buy was a great medium. — Miranda July

Things were changing; I was changing. All swelling limbs and sweating brain, suddenly I had more body than I knew what to do with. Arms and legs became the prey of low desktops and narrow corridors, were ambushed by sharp corners. Mr Baxter ignored my plight. Bodies were inimical to mathematics, or so we were led to believe. Bad hair, acrid breath, lumpy skin, all vanished for an hour every Tuesday and Thursday. Young minds in the buff soared into the sphere of pure reason. Pages turned to parallelograms; cities, circumferences; recipes, ratios. Shorn of our bearings, we groped our way around in this rarefied air. — Daniel Tammet

Every few years, in the world of sport, someone ascends to the most rarefied of all levels - the one at which it becomes news not when they win, but when they lose. It must have been like that in the early Fifties, when a tubby Italian called Alberto Ascari was stitching together nine Grand Prix wins in a row, a record not even Fangio, Clark or Senna could match. Or when the great Real Madrid side of Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas won the first five European Cup finals, between 1956 and 1960. Or when Martina Navratilova dominated Wimbledon's Centre Court, winning nine ladies' singles titles in thirteen years. The current Australian cricket team is in just such a run at present, having just completed nine consecutive victories, putting them four wins away from establishing an all-time record. And then there is Tiger Woods. — Richard Williams

The music brought us what it seemed / We had long desired, but in a form / so rarefied there was no emptiness of sensation — John Ashbery

Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades ... It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop ... — Robert Indiana

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes - "with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other," says Billy Pilgrim. — Kurt Vonnegut

Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics. — Terence McKenna

I think a lot of people get intimidated by the language of music, but everyone owns music. I think there's nothing standing in between a composer and her audience. I think a lot of people feel that way because they feel it's rarefied, but it's really not. You should feel the impact of it without being able to name it because it's ultimately a primal thing. — Jeanine Tesori

But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313) — Malcolm Gladwell

I always wanted the films to play in malls, and I wanted as many people as possible to see them. I never want them to be marginalized in the kind of rarefied, elitist world. I always have hopes that the films will permeate culture in a big way. A lot of times, I'm wrong, but it's always the hope. — Harmony Korine

To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other. — Florence King

You're born, you take shit

get out in the world, you take more shit

climb a little higher, take less shit.

till one day you're in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like.

Welcome to the layer cake, son. — J.J. Connolly

To be 23 and riding the crest of a song sweeping the world country by country is to live an altered and wholly rarefied existence. — Dan Hill

His mind was of a most phlegmatic sort, cool in its private applications, quick, and excessively rational; he possessed a fault common to those of high intelligence, however, which was that he tended to regard the gift of his intellect as a license of a kind, by whose rarefied authority he was protected, in all circumstances, from ever behaving ill. He considered his moral obligations to be of an altogether different class than those of lesser men, and so rarely felt shame or compunction, except in very general terms. — Eleanor Catton

I believe our concept of romantic love is irrational, impossible to fulfill and the cause of many broken homes. No human being can maintain that rarefied atmosphere of 'true love'. — Rita Mae Brown

'Elitist' doesn't need to mean wealthy and conservative; it can also mean specialised and rarefied, and that's no bad thing. — Mark Morris

If, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it can be very helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible things that have not happened to you, or to think of how many people would consider their prayers answered if they could only live as you are now. The mere fact that you have the leisure to read this book puts you in very rarefied company. Many people on earth at this moment can't even imagine the freedom that you currently take for granted. — Sam Harris

All knowledge that takes special training to acquire is the province of the Magician energy. Whether you are an apprentice training to become a master electrician and unraveling the mysteries of high voltage; or a medical student, grinding away night and day, studying the secrets of the human body and using available technologies to help your patients; or a would-be stockbroker or a student of high finance; or a trainee in one of the psychoanalytic schools, you are in exactly the same position as the apprentice shaman or witch doctor in tribal societies. You are spending large amounts of time, energy, and money in order to be initiated into rarefied realms of secret power. You are undergoing an ordeal testing your capacities to become a master of this power. And, as is true in all initiations, there is no guarantee of success. [Magician energy] — Robert Moore

I seemed to perceive that my problem - that what I had to do to prepare myself for getting into contact with her, was just to get back into contact with life. I had been kept for twelve years in a rarefied atmosphere; what I then had to do was a little fighting with real life, some wrestling with men of business, some travelling amongst larger cities, something harsh, something masculine. — Ford Madox Ford

Alternate currents, especially of high frequencies, pass with astonishing freedom through even slightly rarefied gases. The upper strata of the air are rarefied. To reach a number of miles out into space requires the overcoming of difficulties of a merely mechanical nature. — Nikola Tesla

My norm for watching scary movies, what I love about it, is when they work and they scare me, which is not that often I'm afraid. The more you know the genre, your taste becomes a little more rarefied and you take a very particular route to the type of movies you like in the genre. But I still get scared. — Katie Holmes

You are aware of only one unrest;
Oh, never learn to know the other!
Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to forsake its brother.
Unto the world in grossly loving zest,
With clinging tendrils, one adheres;
The other rises forcibly in quest
Of rarefied ancestral spheres.
If there be spirits in the air
That hold their sway between the earth and sky,
Descend out of the golden vapors there
And sweep me into iridescent life.
Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands
To carry me to distant lands,
I should not trade it for the choicest gown,
Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superstition than in air rarefied to nothing by the air-pump of unbelief-in which the panting breast expires, vainly and convulsively gasping for breath. — Jean Paul

The entire contradictory package of Christianity was present in the Eucharist. A sign of unconditional acceptance and forgiveness, it was doled out and rationed to insiders; a sign of unity, it divided people; a sign of the most common and ordinary human reality, it was rarefied and theorized nearly to death. — Sara Miles

And then Serafina understood something for which the witches had no word: it was the idea of pilgrimage. She understood why these beings would wait for thousands of years and travel vast distances in order to be close to something important, and how they would feel differently for the rest of time, having been briefly in its presence. That was how these creatures looked now, these beautiful pilgrims of rarefied light, standing around the girl with the dirty-face and the tartan skirt and the boy with the wounded hand who was frowning in his sleep. — Philip Pullman

He began to suffocate slowly in the more and more rarefied atmosphere of remoteness and solitude. For now it was his wish no longer, nor his aim, to be alone and independent, but rather his lot and his sentence. The magic wish had been fulfilled and could not be cancelled, and it was no good now to open his arms with longing and goodwill to welcome the bonds of society. — Hermann Hesse

From the safety and comfort of rarefied zip codes, open-border theorists tutor the little people in the positive economic effects on productivity and economic growth of high population density. But regular folks don't have to travel to Cairo or Karachi to discover that this urban theory is an urban myth. — Ilana Mercer

Our intellectual odysseys take us out of and beyond this world but where they take us we cannot live for long - the air is too rarefied and we have nothing solid upon which to stand. What those odysseys into the strange and new can do is to make our ordinary, workaday world strange and new to us again, removing from it the crust of familiarity created by custom and habit. — D.E. Wittkower