Referent Quotes & Sayings

When I'm channel surfing, and 'Silence of the Lambs' comes on, I have trouble turning it off. I wouldn't say that about 'Beautiful Mind.' It's a good movie, but I'm much more in awe of what Jonathan Demme did with 'Silence of the Lambs.' — Toby Emmerich

I always believed that photography was subjective, interpretive and certainly did not represent the truth, but I did think that its status as a societal and historical referent needed to be both safeguarded and illuminated ... now photojournalism is devolving into yet another medium perceived as intending to shock, titillate, sell, distort. — Fred Ritchin

No life can be compared to another Life unless both refer to Death! Even if a Life is different from another Life, it exists, as Life, only by referring to Death, because all other Lives it would refer to finally lead to the last referent which is a Life having as reference: Death! This is why I said the all the shine of Life consists of Death, as the shine of Death consists of Life. — Sorin Cerin

Self-percepts foster actions that generate information, as well as serve as a filtering mechanism for self-referent information in the self-maintaining process — Albert Bandura

The critical image ... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure. — Judith Butler

It's necessary for Israelis and Palestinians to make the compromises that are required to get the direct talks back on track. — William Hague

I want to take their money and let them build their ship and get off my land. That's all I want."
"Good to know," said a voice above her head.
Elliot and Dee looked up, and there, shadowed against the light from the swinging sun-lamps, stood Kai. — Diana Peterfreund

If a farmer does abandon his or her "tame" fields completely to nature, mistakes and destruction are inevitable. — Masanobu Fukuoka

Thus, Symbolism and Decadence are not a separate new school which arose in France and spread throughout all of Europe: they represent the end and culmination of a certain other school whose links were very extensive and whose roots go back to the beginning of the modern age. Symbolism, easily deduced from Maupassant, can also be deduced from Zola, Flaubert, and Balzac, from Ultra-realism as the antithesis of the previous Ultra-idealism Romanticism and "renascent" Classicism. It is precisely this element of ultra - the result of ultra manifested in life itself, in its mores, ideas, proclivities, and aspirations - that has wormed into literature and remained there ever since, expressing itself, finally, in such a hideous phenomenon as Decadence and Symbolism. The ultra without its referent, exaggeration without the exaggerated object, preciosity of form conjoined with total disappearance of content, and "poetry" devoid of rhyme, meter, and sense - that is what constitutes Decadence. — Vasily Rozanov

With no fact as a referent, what is normative is purely a matter of preference. — Ravi Zacharias

Despair was a private weakness she could not afford to indulge. — Robin McKinley

I'm a guy who never wanted to hold a steady job, because I was worried about the monotony. — Noah Wyle

'American Sniper' is a film that erases history, spectacularizes violence, and reduces war and its aftermath to cheap entertainment, with an underexplained referent to the mental problems many vets live with when they return home from the war. — Henry Giroux

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly. — Roland Barthes

The real subject of On Being Blue is language itself, which he sees as glorious to the exact degree that it is also inadequate, unable to sustain an immediate relation between a word on the one hand and its arbitrary and yet indissoluble referent on the other. All words are figurative; no blue is ever just blue. — William H Gass

In modernism, as I will try to show later on, some residual zones of "nature" or "being" of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that "referent." Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. — Fredric Jameson

To live in a world of photographs is to live in a world of substitutes ... or so it seems, whose actual referent is always the other, the described, the reality of a world once removed. I prefer, on the other hand, to look at the photographs as something real and of my world, a strange and powerful thing ... part of a language, a system of communication, an economy of signs. — Sarah Charlesworth

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it. — Tom Stoppard

A "game" that will give everyone the consoling impression of making contact, together, with the ultimate transcendent referent. — David Foster Wallace

My mom once said, "You are fiercely protective of your inventions because you are your fans." She helped me understand my own feelings. When someone has pulled the wool over my eyes, I feel that they have pulled the wool over the eyes of millions of fans around the world. She helped me to forgive. You can't force people to have the same world consciousness and awareness as you do. — Lady Gaga

So if you can make it through, you know you've got something good, you can handle anything. We've been blessed to grow but at the same time, the hard part is having to wear every single hat. It's exhausting, but it's entirely worth it because on the flip side, the best part about being a touring musician is being a touring musician. — Lizzo

It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus. — Roland Barthes

During the 2000 bubble, many companies rushed to go public before they had any revenue. — Bill Maris

There's nowhere like Detroit; it's a modern necropolis: all these art deco masterpieces crumbling away. — Malik Bendjelloul

A dying scream makes no sound,
Calling out to all that have ever known
Here am I, lost and found
Calling out to all — Oasis

I think the only real referent for anybody writing drama is probably Hamlet. You have the most extreme tragic drama, this sort of blood-boltered thing, but it's also very funny, which is simply a matter of the playwright being alive and observant and entertaining, and understanding not only the world but what will play. — William Monahan

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. — Roland Barthes

All of spiritual practice is a matter of relationship: to ourselves, to others, to life's situations. — Jack Kornfield

In the self-appraisal of efficacy, there are many sources of information that must be processed and weighed through self-referent thought — Albert Bandura

Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness. — E.L. Doctorow

Such self-referent misgivings creates stress and undermine effective use of the competencies people possess by diverting attention from how best to proceed to concern over personal failings and possible mishaps — Albert Bandura

Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself. — Jean Baudrillard

As we said, Zen masters talk about Emptiness all the time! But they have a practice and a methodology (zazen) which allows them to discover the transcendental referent via their own developmental signified, and thus their words (the signifiers) remain grounded in experiential, reproducible, fallibilist criteria. — Ken Wilber

Reality cannot be captured by language - not even the language of mathematics - since all language, by its very nature, is man-made, self-referent ambiguity. — Dee Hock

Who pays for the orgy? — Ayn Rand

That was the beginning of the Cuban missile crisis - a confrontation between the two giant atomic nations, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., which brought the world to the abyss of nuclear destruction and the end of mankind. From — Robert F. Kennedy

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent. — Roman Jakobson

We made this! It's so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess. — Richard Powers

In many patriarchies, language, as well as cultural tradition, reserve the human condition for the male. With the Indo-European languages this is a nearly inescapable habit of mind, for despite all the customary pretense that 'man' and 'humanity' are terms which apply equally to both sexes, the fact is hardly obscured that in practice, general application favors the male far more often than the female as referent, or even sole referent, for such designations. — Kate Millett