Rudiments Quotes & Sayings

The apes are, after all, behind the bars of their cages, and we are not. Eager for the experiments to begin, they are also impatient for their food to be served, and they seem impatient for little else. After undergoing years of punishing trials at the hands of determined clinicians, a few have been taught the rudiments of various primitive symbol systems. Having been given the gift of language, they have nothing to say. When two simian prodigies meet, they fling their placards at each other. (pg. 20) — David Berlinski

Spoken of the young Archimedes: ... [he] was as much enchanted by the rudiments of algebra as he would have been if I had given him an engine worked by steam, with a methylated spirit lamp to heat the boiler; more enchanted, perhaps for the engine would have got broken, and, remaining always itself, would in any case have lost its charm, while the rudiments of algebra continued to grow and blossom in his mind with an unfailing luxuriance. Every day he made the discovery of something which seemed to him exquisitely beautiful; the new toy was inexhaustible in its potentialities. — Archimedes

You need to go and find someone to teach you the rudiments of irrational discourse. — Larry Wall

For imitation is natural to man from his infancy. Man differs from other animals particularly in this, that he is imitative, and acquires his rudiments of knowledge in this way; besides, the delight in it is universal. — Aristotle.

I understood the therapists were trying to rebuild Paul's vocabulary, beginning wit the rudiments, but Paul found it taxing, boring, and disturbingly condescending. His loss of language didn't mean he was any less a grown-up with adult feelings, experiences, worries, and problems. [p. 144] — Diane Ackerman

Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The ignorant Looker-on can't imagine what the Limner means by those seemingly rude Lines and Scrawls, which he intends for the Rudiments of a Picture, and the Figures of Mathematick Operation are Nonsense, and Dashes at a Venture, to one uninstructed in Mechanicks. We are in the Dark to one another's Purposes and Intendments; and there are a thousand Intrigues in our little Matters, which will not presently confess their Design, even to sagacious Inquisitors — Joseph Glanvill

Behind great discovery three values are the rudiments; inspiration , motivation and determination. To be a succesful general , you must be inspired, motivated and determined . — Osunsakin Adewale

A person who wills to have a good will, already has a good will
in its rudiments. There is solid satisfaction in knowing that the mere desire to get out of an old habit is a material advance upon the condition of submergence in that habit. The longest step toward cleanliness is made when one gains
nothing but dissatisfaction with dirt. — William Ernest Hocking

The most fitting monuments this nation can build are schoolhouses and homes for those who do the work of the world. It is no answer to say that they are accustomed to rags and hunger. In this world of plenty every human being has a right to food, clothes, decent shelter, and the rudiments of education. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

It is only with the best judges that the highest works of art would lose none of their honor by being seen in their rudiments. — John Frederick Boyes

Every human being carries with them the stories of their ancestors, the story of their generation, and the rudiments of pliable clay to build future storylines that will shape their community of kindred souls. Storytelling unites us as a species and supplies texture to our lives. By listening to other people's stories and by sharing our personal story, we deftly weave the threads that compose the sacred hoop of the tribe. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The first Rudiments of Morality, broach'd by skilful Politicians, to render Men useful to each other as well as tractable, were chiefly contrived that the Ambitious might reap the more Benefit from, and govern vast Numbers of them with the greater Ease and Security. — Bernard De Mandeville

I acknowledge Thee, Lord of heaven and earth, and praise Thee for my first rudiments of being, and my infancy, whereof I remember nothing; for Thou hast appointed that man should from others guess much as to himself; and believe much on the strength of weak females. — Saint Augustine

For Nature is accustomed to rehearse with certain large, perhaps baser, and all classes of wild (animals), and to place in the imperfect the rudiments of the perfect animals. — Marcello Malpighi

The barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education, except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the rudiments of religious instruction, turned with childlike attachment to men whose minds were stored with the knowledge of Scripture, of Cicero, of St. Augustine; and in the scanty world of their ideas, the Church was felt to be something infinitely vaster, stronger, holier than their newly founded States. — Lord Acton

In the morning, real nurses taught us the rudiments of anatomy and instructed us in the preparation of dressings and bandages. But then in the afternoon, representatives of the Frauenschaft, the women's auxiliary of the Nazi Party, came to instruct us in our real mission: to boost the morale of the wounded and spread the propaganda of German invincibility. — Edith Hahn Beer

Once the rudiments of loyalty are in place, the ambitious have been inclined to work with them to promote their own political advancement, and they have availed themselves of the symbols of loyalty to mobilize popular support for their own personal ends. — Michael Waller

Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harrass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you - alas, it is true of almost every one of us! — Fyodor Dostoevsky

When I understood the rudiments of what nanotech was all about, I knew I wanted to participate. — Bernard Marcus

Oh, I was super serious about practicing and rudiments, and still am. I still have all my books. — Travis Barker

Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have. — P. J. O'Rourke

We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets - and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan. — Atul Gawande

But a man who does none of these things, who does not even try to do them, who never attempts to learn the rudiments of any branch of knowledge so that he may at least do what he can towards promoting it - such a one, born as he is into riches, is a mere idler and thief of time, a contemptible fellow. He will not even be happy, because, in his case, exemption from need delivers him up to the other extreme of human suffering, boredom, which is such martyrdom to him, that he would have been better off if poverty had given him something to do. And as he is bored he is apt to be extravagant, and so lose the advantage of which he showed himself unworthy. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Tarrasch's 'dogmas' are not eternal truisms, but merely instructional material presented in an accessible and witty form, those necessary rudiments from which one can begin to grasp the secrets of chess ... — Garry Kasparov

Comedy is hard. In many ways, it's like singing: If you have perfect pitch, it's much easier. But you can still go a long way toward mastering the rudiments if you must trust your voice. Most of the mistakes I've seen people make in trying to write funny is that they don't trust their own senses of humor. They don't think they're funny, and they set out to write funny the way they've read other people being funny with a grim determination that pretty much precludes any chance that anybody is going to have fun. Relax, listen to your characters, exploit their fears and flaws, and mine their situations for places in which they can use their own brands of humor. — Jennifer Crusie

I can only surmise about what Liebling would make of today's pugilistic dark ages. In his era, fighters fought rematches of close fights, even title fights, almost automatically. Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta met six times, inconceivable for champions today. In the 1950s a quality pro thought himself underemployed if he had only eight or ten bouts a year, and the amateur scene was thriving. Nowadays pros who make a living from boxing are about as common as Yetis, and amateurs can't get enough fights to learn the rudiments of the craft. — A.J. Liebling

Sauces in cookery are like the first rudiments of grammar - the foundation of all languages. — Alexis Soyer

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she'd read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art - she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent's Park, rain in the street outside - a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years. — Alan Hollinghurst

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed. — Edward Steichen

He wasn't such a bad fellow after all. The rudiments of self-improvement and the intention to achieve it were definitely present. — Walter Moers

The man comes closer. I recognise him. It's Johannes, who teaches rudiments and solfege at the local school. I raise my hand in the notes for greeting and he carves out the response. So crisp and clear I can't help feeling the implied correction of my slumped tones. — Anna Smaill

It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing. — Richard Dawkins

Christians are not in bondage to do things as the world does, and moreover, the traditions and rudiments of men are not necessary to honor God. — Monica Johnson

Although the rudiments of snobbery are there, its finer developments are basically alien to the Australian soul - that is, if Australians have a soul; many people believe that they are too matter-of-fact and down-to-earth to have such fancy commodities. — George Mikes

Now that they were no longer half-numbed with starvation, they had time both for leisure and for the first rudiments of thought. — Arthur C. Clarke

The battle was first waged over the right of the Negro to be classed as a human being with a soul; later, as to whether he had sufficient intellect to master even the rudiments of learning; and today it is being fought out over his social recognition. — James Weldon Johnson

his refusal to be seduced by new ideas or faraway places, but walking through the tiny twisting streets of New Delhi, Annie understood that Desmond's world was limited by fear. He couldn't bear to step out of the known, the familiar. In Europe he could understand the rudiments of language, the coordinates of the culture, but elsewhere he was flummoxed. The same went, she began to understand, for his absolute reliance on order and routine. — Hannah Mary Rothschild

Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation; in — Iain M. Banks

And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art. — Albrecht Durer

Love the animals: God gave them the rudiments of thought and an untroubled joy. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When the sappy boughs Attire themselves with blooms, sweet rudiments Of future harvest. — John Phillips

The fanciful insignia of the guild painted on the ceiling above the dining area. The forest in autumn was like heaven. So many things about Germany were like that: beautiful settings, bizarre behavior. I did not become close to the other women working at the Red Cross. I kept to myself and did what was necessary. I said "Good morning" and "Good evening." In the morning, real nurses taught us the rudiments of anatomy and instructed us in the preparation — Edith Hahn Beer

A party is a slightly artificial event where one learns the rudiments of human behavior at its most admirable: speaking when spoken to, looking somebody in the eye, shaking hands and being friendly under duress. — Phyllis Grissim-Theroux

He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that. Even more interesting were the trips to scavenge for parts. — Walter Isaacson

Personally, if I had two children, and one was a boy and the other a girl, and if I could afford to educate only one, I would have no hesitation in giving the higher education to the girl. The male could bend his energies to manual effort for reward, but the girl's function was the maintenance of home life and the bringing up of the children. Her influence in the family circle was enormous and the future of the generation depended upon her ability to lead the young along the right paths and instruct them in the rudiments of culture and civilisation.

- Sultan Muhammad Shah, The Aga Khan III — Aga Khan

; the chipped plates might have been disinterred from some kitchen midden near an inhabited lake; and the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to one's mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first rudiments of cookery from his dim consciousness, scorched lumps of flesh at a fire of sticks ... — Joseph Conrad

Dreams are rudiments
Of the great state to come. We dream what is
About to happen. — Philip James Bailey

An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise. — Robert South

See that your children are properly educated in the rudiments of their mother tongue, and then let them proceed to higher branches of learning.. — Brigham Young

The camera for an artist is just another tool. It is no more mechanical than a violin if you analyze it. Beyond the rudiments, it is up to the artist to create art, not the camera. — Brett Weston

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind. — Eric Hoffer

Choosing Luther and Calvin instead of the spiritual reformers who were their contemporaries, Protestant Europe got the kind of theology it liked. But it also got, along with other unanticipated by-products, the Thirty Years' War, capitalism and the first rudiments of modern Germany. If — Aldous Huxley

Nevertheless, it is with the help of these metaphysical toys that governments have been established since the beginning of the world, and it is with their help that we shall come to resolve the enigma of politics, if we are willing to make the slightest effort to do so. I hope I will be forgiven, then, for labouring this point, as one does in teaching the rudiments of grammar to children. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. — Augustine Of Hippo