Refining Quotes & Sayings

The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The hall of the association in Orchard street was fitted out with muscle- making inventions. With the fibres thus builded up the members were wont to engage the police and rival social and athletic organisations in joyous combat. Between these more serious occupations the Saturday night hop with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining influence and as an efficient screen. — O. Henry

Like any of life's refining fires, cancer is a potentially profound learning experience. So what did I learn? I learned that profound learning experiences are vastly overrated. — Joni Rodgers

He'd obviously spent his college years refining the art of adolescence... — Jenifer LeClair

A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such longing into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality ... Love of the beautiful may be the last and finest sacrifice to radical egalitarianism. — Allan Bloom

Suffering related to circumstances beyond my control, suffering related to consequences of my besetting sin, and suffering caused by others who refused to see their own sin. In all these instances, the Lord has been at work, refining my focus upon personal holiness, amplifying my ministry through very humbling experiences, and reminding me repeatedly to extend grace not just to the gracious but to those who lack a grace I took too long to come to myself. — James MacDonald

On the pediment of the town hall, Death turns his sunglasses to mark the hours. No one takes any notice. it is eternal, this present. The world will gain little by continuing to evolve. This civilisation has reached its peak. A few details may need to be sorted out. some drugs could do with refining. — Patrick Deville

Life is about refinement, not perfection. And you still have refining to do. — Dan Millman

Whilst your memory is as sharp as the most reliable computer, it is always wiser to write things down. Pre-meditation helps the refining process, taking out the undesirable elements from a dream or vision, even mounting the courage to face and overcome challenges before they appear in reality. — Archibald Marwizi

Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We've spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war. — Iain M. Banks

The central industry of modern civilisation, tending, because of its control over materials, to spread into and ultimately incorporate older industries such as mining, smelting, oil- refining, textiles, rubber, building, and even agriculture in respect to fertilizers and food processing. — John Desmond Bernal

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end. — Chaim Potok

Intellectual elegance [is] a mind that is continually refining itself with education and knowledge. Intellectual elegance is the opposite of intellectual vulgarity. — Massimo Vignelli

At least twice a week, I pause in the rush of work and have a meeting with myself. (If I were part of a team, I'd call a team meeting.) I ask myself, again, of the project: "What is this damn thing about?" Keep refining your understanding of the theme; keep narrowing it down. — Steven Pressfield

Song Sung Blue took a lot of compressing and refining, and it has one of my favorite lyrics. — Neil Diamond

Perfect refining is for another world, — Richard Sibbes

In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo 's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern — Eric Hoffer

We believe in the Three Rs - reducing the consumption of meat and other animal-based foods; refining the diet by eating products only from methods of production, transport, and slaughter that minimize pain and distress; and replacing meat and other animal-based foods in the diet with plant-based foods. — Wayne Pacelle

Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living. — John Dewey

Now we are less interested in equipping and refining thought, more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield measurable enhancements of material well-being - for those who create and master them, at least. Now — Marilynne Robinson

Qigong is the art and science of refining and cultivating internal energy. — Ken Cohen

We fail to see the purifying and refining effect wrought by the flames of adversity. These flames are not meant to consume but only to purify us. Disguised as adversity, blessings are showered upon us. — A. Theodore Tuttle

A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree
the poco piu and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more. — Anna Brownell Jameson

So, while I gave up the notions of publishing at that time, I never stopped editing and refining that book. A few years later, in 1987, I thought I had it ready to go out again. — R.A. Salvatore

Everything in life worth achieving requires practice. In fact, life itself is nothing more than one long practice session, an endless effort of refining our motions. When the proper mechanics of practice are understood, the task of learning something new becomes a stress-free experience of joy and calmness, a process which settles all areas in your life and promotes proper perspective on all of life's difficulties. — Thomas M. Sterner

DID STAND-UP COMEDY for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success. — Steve Martin

Let the refining and improving of your own life keep you so busy that you have little time to criticize others. — H. Jackson Brown Jr.

The unsupervised learning is the way most people will learn in the future. You have this model of how the world works in your head and you're refining it to predict what you think is going to happen in the future. — Mark Zuckerberg

Difference making, by its very nature, is the art of taking something good and making it better. It's an act of fine-tuning, improving, and refining, not starting from zero. — David Sturt

Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time. — Charles Francis Richter

open coding; development of concepts; grouping concepts into categories; formation of a theory. In the open coding stage, we analyze the text and identify any interesting phenomena in the data. Normally each unique phenomenon is given a distinctive name or code. The procedure and methods for identifying coding items are discussed in section 11.5.2. In the second stage, collections of codes that describe similar contents are grouped together to form higher level "concepts." In the third stage, broader groups of similar concepts are identified to form "categories" and there is a detailed interpretation of each category. In this process, we are constantly searching for and refining the conceptual construct that may explain the relationship between the concepts and categories (Glaser, 1978). In the last stage, theory formulation, we aim at creating inferential and predictive statements about the phenomena recorded in the data. — Jonathan Lazar

So, look at the world around you, and if you notice things that don't seem right - injustices, inefficiencies, or just oddities - investigate them further. Think about why and how those things might happen and what you could do to change them for the better. Test your ideas by trying new things, making more observations, refining your models, and repeating the process. And when you find something that works to explain or improve your situation, tell everyone about it, so we can all benefit. — Chad Orzel

How could there be refining fires without our enduring some heat? — Neal A. Maxwell

Perhaps because of the special nature of the TIA, or perhaps because of the limitless human capacity for technical fascination, programmers have continued to hack at and develop original VCS games. There is a thriving hobbyist community that has picked up the Atari VCS, using and refining emulators, writing disassemblers and development tools, and even manufacturing cartridges and selling them, complete with boxes and manuals. This "homebrew" scene could be seen, strictly speaking, as continuing the commercial life of the Atari VCS, but the community is not very corporate. It operates on the scale of zines and unsigned bands, with most recent ROMs offered for free online - even if they are also sold in limited releases of a few hundred copies in cartridge form. — Nick Montfort

I'm not an academic; I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a writer, communicating ideas to the public. There is a model of how the past is, and a lot of academic archaeology is about refining the model. It's not about changing the model radically. I'm not aware of any current which is about radically changing the model. It's just me, really. — Graham Hancock

For at sixteen I had imagined that Blake, like the other romantics, was glorifying passion, natural energy, for their own sake. Far from it! What he was glorifying was the transfiguration of man's natural love, his natural powers, in the refining fires of mystical experience: and that, in itself, implied an arduous and total purification, by faith and love and desire, from all the petty materialistic and commonplace and earthly ideals of his rationalistic friends. — Thomas Merton

My novels tend to take a long time to become exactly what they're going to be. They're fluid messes until I've done a ton of editing and refining and rewriting. When I write novels, I always make related scrapbooks to help me organize and test my intentions. — Dennis Cooper

My message to the serious programmer is this: spend a part of your working day examining and refining your own methods. Even though programmers are always struggling to meet some future or past deadline, methodological abstraction is a wise long term investment. — Robert W. Floyd

The Obama campaign is one of the greatest examples of what is possible in the brave new world of 21st Century marketing. They did a masterful job of connecting with minds, personalizing messages, refining old and new media, sending clear messages, and providing the feedback that enabled them to respond to the messages they heard. — Anne M. Mulcahy

Developing fewer features allows you to conserve development resources and spend more time refining those features that users really need. Fewer features mean fewer things to confuse users, less risk of user errors, less description and documentation, and therefore simpler Help content. Removing any one feature automatically increases the usability of the remaining ones. — Jakob Nielsen

It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired. — James Dickey

We talk about defining moments, but I think nothing can define you. They're all refining moments. You're constantly refining yourself and refining your life. — Sheryl Crow

When we consider the close connection between science and industrial development on the one hand, and between literary and aesthetic cultivation and an aristocratic social organization on the other, we get light on the opposition between technical scientific studies and refining literary studies. We have before us the need of overcoming this separation in education if society is to be truly democratic. — John Dewey

Learning is a process of refining errors to the point where they no longer prevent our desired goal. — Dan Millman

Look around you. Everything changes. Everything on this earth is in a continuous state of evolving, refining, improving, adapting, enhancing ... changing. You were not put on this earth to remain stagnant. — Steve Maraboli

Sometimes, "never let them see you sweat," is truly bad advice. The work of an individual who cares often exposes the grit and determination and effort that it takes to be present.
Perfecting your talk, refining your essay and polishing your service until all elements of you disappear might be obvious tactics, but they remove the thing we were looking for: you. — Seth Godin

The experience of the ages that are past, the hopes of the ages that are yet to come, unite their voices in an appeal to us; they implore us to think more of the character of our people than of its vast numbers; to look upon our vast natural resources, not as tempters to ostentation and pride, but as means to be converted, by the refining alchemy of education, into mental and spiritual treasures-and thus give to the world the example of a nation whose wisdom increases with its prosperity, and whose virtues are equal to its power. — Horace Mann

I'd say "what are the odds?", but I don't believe in odds anymore. I believe in a universe with a very specific and occasionally cruel sense of humor. But its cruelty is refining, if you survive it.
(Upon learning a housemate was related to Guy Fawkes) — Adrian Lamo

moral character gets formed through hardship, through overcoming obstacles, through enduring despite difficulties. Courage, for example, would be impossible in a world without pain. The apostle Paul testified to this refining quality of suffering when he wrote that 'suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.'13 — Lee Strobel

We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring art, literature, and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of civilization. — Ambrose Bierce

I cannot pretend he escaped unscathed. The extended period of low blood pressure damaged an optic nerve and left him essentially blind in one eye. He didn't get off the respirator for days. He was out of work for months. I was crushed by what I had put him through. Though I apologized to him and carried on with my daily routine, it took me a long time to feel right again in surgery. I can't do an adrenalectomy without thinking of his case, and I suspect that is good. I have even tried refining the operative technique — Atul Gawande

God hates the LUKEWARM GOSPEL OF HALF-TRUTHS that is now spreading over the Globe. This gospel says, 'Just believe in Jesus and you'll be Saved. There's nothing more to it.' It ignores the Whole Counsel of God, which speaks of Repenting from former Sins, of Taking up your Cross, of being conformed to the Image of Christ by the refining work of the Holy Spirit. It is totally silent about the Reality of Hell and an After-Death Judgment. — David Wilkerson

We all say data is the next white oil. [Owning the oil field is not as important as owning the refinery because what will make the big money is in refining the oil. Same goes with data, and making sure you extract the real value out of the data.] — Maurice Levy

It may be difficult to understand why a test comes our way, but we must never forget that the test is accomplishing refining and purification. — Billy Graham

In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we're meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing bad about this. This wasn't suffering, it was erosion.It was just another, a basic, an important step in the refining process. — Chuck Palahniuk

Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Will (without any metaphysical refining) is, That by which the mind chooses any thing. The faculty of the Will, is that power, or principle of mind, by which it is capable of choosing: an act of the Will is the same as an act of choosing or choice. — Jonathan Edwards

We embark unhesitatingly on the path, in a direction that is absolutely right and urgent, supported by everyone, in the knowledge that this path is but a learning process ... We have to keep on learning, creating, applying, by-passing, touching upon, refining and clarifying a number of notions and details that need to be improvised and applied and which, thank God, we cannot foresee. The only rigidity lies in our will, our conviction that we are on the right road and that our initiatives are most pressing. — Yehudi Menuhin

It's important to get in the habit of growing as a human being, developing and refining leadership and management skills and entrepreneurial instincts and changing to accommodate the times. — Ivanka Trump

Nearly every business collects metrics on inventory, sales, and workplace process. Health care has been slow to measure these kinds of outcomes. Increasingly, general medicine, via either managed care or large practice settings, is improving by collecting data through electronic records and refining practice based on what works. — Thomas R. Insel

Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first. — Wayne Cordeiro

Life is a refining process. Our response to it determines whether we'll be ground down or polished up. On a piano, one person sits down and plays sonatas, while another merely bangs away at "Chopsticks." The piano is not responsible. It's how you touch the keys that makes the difference. It's how you play what life gives you that determines your joy and shine. — Barbara Johnson

Discipline is the refining fire by which talent becomes ability. — Roy L. Smith

I'm really looking to reach any woman who's interested in refining and embracing her personal style. — Nina Garcia

On woman Nature did bestow two eyes, Like Hemian's bright lamps, in matchless beauty shining, Whose beams do soonest captivate the wise And wary heads, made rare by art's refining. — Robert Greene

I'd also like to do a play. I've never done theater, and constantly changing and refining a performance is something I'd like to do, even though it may sound like work to some people - and it probably is work. — Nastassja Kinski

It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose - well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes - make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. — Aldous Huxley

You create a blueprint of your best performance, and you're happiest the night you surpass that blueprint. That won't happen that often, but it will happen. It's like sculpting: you keep refining. When you have a piece that is yours, that is just you, that becomes obsessive; you think about it all the time. — Kenneth Cranham

What oil companies don't want you to know is that refineries use a huge amount of electricity in refining gasoline. And that's usually not even figured into reports about gas cars' overall energy use. — Chris Paine

DARE you see a soul at the white heat?
Then crouch within the door.
Red is the fire's common tint;
But when the vivid ore
Has sated flame's conditions, 5
Its quivering substance plays
Without a color but the light
Of unanointed blaze.
Least village boasts its blacksmith,
Whose anvil's even din 10
Stands symbol for the finer forge
That soundless tugs within,
Refining these impatient ores
With hammer and with blaze,
Until the designated light 15
Repudiate the forge. — Emily Dickinson

She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky. — Millard Kaufman

The principal object of your reading should be for the acquisition of useful knowledge , and the strengthening, refining, and ennobling of your character. — Grenville Kleiser

Whatever the soul chooses to love, it will resemble. And therefore what we choose to love is important: Love is the force behind every level of existence. There is some good in every attraction, but there is a process of refining attraction, of choosing what to love, so that we are energized by a wider, purer love — Kabir Helminski

Love was like walking on the moon. A springy step in your heel like you had a heart for cushioning to step on until it burst and the blood floating in red pods among the glowing craters to be boiled into a refining mist in the naked, eternal sunlight. — Carl-John X. Veraja

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

Are you conscious of a growing failure of your bodily powers? Do you expect to suffer long nights of languishing and days of pain? O be not sad! That bed may become a throne to you. You little know how every pang that shoots through your body may be a refining fire to consume your dross
a beam of glory to light up the secret parts of your soul. Are the eyes growing dim? Jesus will be your light. Do the ears fail you? Jesus' name will be your soul's best music, and His person your dear delight. Socrates used to say, "Philosophers can be happy without music;" and Christians can be happier than philosophers when all outward causes of rejoicing are withdrawn. In Thee, my God, my heart shall triumph, come what may of ills without! By thy power, O blessed Spirit, my heart shall be exceeding glad, though all things should fail me here below. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I believe the ultimate goal of living and refining your values is to identify and achieve congruence with universal principles. — Steve Pavlina

I get excited about what the Holy Spirit is doing now through all the people he is refining and raising up all over this planet. I love connections and relationship and networking but it must be led by the Spirit. — Daniel Smith

To me, getting notes, honing the part, and refining the role is the real fun of the play. — Swoosie Kurtz

He knew that he was very near achieving the General Temporal Theory that the Ioti wanted so badly for their spaceflight and their prestige. He knew also that he had not achieved it and might never do so. He had never admitted either fact clearly to anyone. Before he left Anarres, he had thought the thing was in his grasp.
...
He wasn't quite sure he was ready to publish. There was something not quite right, something that needed a little refining. As he had been working ten years on the theory, it wouldn't hurt to take a little longer, to get it polished perfectly smooth. The little something not quite right kept looking wronger. A little flaw in the reasoning. A big flaw. A crack right through the foundations...The night before he left Anarres he had burned every paper he had on the General Theory. He had come to Urras with nothing. For half a year he had, in their terms, been bluffing them.

Or had he been bluffing himself? — Ursula K. Le Guin

wasn't a storm meant to destroy - but it was the perfect storm of God's purifying and refining grace. — Kimberly Wagner

Repeatedly place your pet opinions and prejudices before God. He will surprise you by showing you that the best of them need refining and some the purification of destruction. — Charles Brent

In refining their senses and aesthetic judgement, blind tasters become much more conscious of the richness not only of wine but also of other potentially complex beverages such as tea, coffee, and spirits, and, by extension, the flavours in food, the scents in the air, and the play of light in the world. For life is consciousness, and consciousness is life. — Neel Burton

Our democracy is not a product but a continual process. It is preserved not by monuments but deeds. Sometimes it needs refining; sometimes it needs amending; sometimes it needs defending. Always, it needs improving. — Lee H. Hamilton

Before all else I learned that these playthings were not mere idle trifles invented by manufacturers and dealers for the purposes of gain. They were, on the contrary, a little or, rather, a big world, authoritative and beautiful, many sided, containing a multiplicity of things all of which had the one and only aim of serving love, refining the senses, giving life to the dead world around us, endowing it in a magical way with new instruments of love, from powder and scent to the dancing show, from ring to cigarette case, from waist-buckle to handbag. This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan. All were the plastic material of love, of magic and delight. Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle cry. — Hermann Hesse

The emotional, physical and aesthetic value of a sound is linked not only to the causal explanation we attribute to it but also to its own qualities of timbre and texture, to its own personal vibration. So just as directors and cinematographers (even those who will never make abstract films) have everything to gain by refining their knowledge of visual materials and textures, we can similarly benefit from disciplined attention to the inherent qualities of sounds. — Michel Chion

I travel a ridiculous amount, so I've thought a lot about, and spent a lot of time refining, what I carry and how I carry it. — David Pogue

Bahya Kumbhaka Introduce bahya kumbhaka after students are at ease doing antara kumbhaka. Guide them into ujjayi, bringing attention to the natural pause when empty of breath. Do several rounds of ujjayi, refining awareness of the movement in and out of that pause. With the first few retentions of the exhalation, hold for just one count and then do several rounds of seamless ujjayi before repeating. Gradually expand the count, staying with simple retention. Encourage students to keep their eyes, face, throat, and heart center soft and not to grip in their belly. Unlike inhalations, exhalations naturally stimulate mula bandha and uddiyana bandha. — Mark Stephens

If (early humans) weren't using and refining language I would like to know what they were doing with their autocatalytically increasing brains. — Dean Falk

We have indeed, felt the effects of the epic journey that has been our life. We have covered a lot of ground, parenting, marriage, career, family and otherwise, and at times, surely, have felt the worse for the wear, especially when different circumstances have chewed us up and spit us out! When it felt as if the kiln was stoked to maximum heat levels, and that we would shatter into a billion pieces that would never all be found! There are some differences now, having a little more seasoning to us. First of all, now we understand there is no such thing as being finished. There is always more firing, refining and glazing we can experience, and it is only a matter of when and how, not if we will do so. Secondly, we look forward to it, knowing now it would take more heat than possible to break us beyond repair. — Connie Kerbs

Cleave believed the concentration of carbohydrates in the refining process did its damage in three ways. — Gary Taubes

I'm a free spirit. A spirit that evolves. I'm a diamond. I'm just refining it. Polishing it. Glossing it up. — Simeon Rice

There must be something about art ... almost all cultures have done art. It's a refining of the senses, which are there to keep us alive. As far as we know, no other animals do that. — Roy Lichtenstein

I do make my own brushes and have done so for many years. I'm constantly refining the designs, trying new materials, re-configuring other brushes - all in my never-ending quest for the perfect brush. — James Nares

Most people traffic in abstractions and generalizations because they are grossly incompetent at culturing their intuition or powers of evidency, refining it to grasp the Thisness (Haecceitas) of what is before them. Thinking is like a Stradivarius that has more potential variations in how it is played than any human can finitely perform or capture. — Kenny Smith

I appreciate the constant evolution in refining food, but not in making food gimmicky. — Daniel Boulud

I would have any one, who really and truly has leisure and ability, make verses. I think it a more refining and happy-making occupation than any other pastime accomplishment. — Sara Coleridge

No refining of one's taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one's powers of insight in matters of science or psychology, can ever take the place of one's sensitiveness to the life of the earth. This is the beginning and the end of a person's true education. — John Cowper Powys

Yoga is the technology of upgrading, activating, and refining these inner energies for the highest possibilities. Suddenly, your capabilities reach a level of brilliance that you never imagined possible. An accidental and limited life turns near-miraculous. But — Sadhguru

Man cannot bear to be in the wrong. As soon as he feels guilt or remorse, he bends his ethics to suit himself. Actions do not flow from ethics, but ethics from actions, and it is by refining our actions that we refine our ethics. — Neel Burton

An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. — Adrienne Rich