Setting The Stage Quotes & Sayings

In choosing where to live or vacation, we may be setting the stage for the play of ourselves, treating nature as prop. — Deborah Tall

Setting the stage for the Tower of Babel, the author says that, while humanity had a mission to reflect God, it had been distracted by its own reflection and was both fascinated and fearful of what it saw. — N. T. Wright

Troubles are God setting the stage for greater blessings in your life. — John Yates

Shut up, lumpen-head," Billy had said, setting the stage for our future amicable relationship.
I remembered that very well too. That had been a first too. Nobody had called me a lumpen-head before that. Tavi had had to explain what it meant, and then I had punched Billy in the stomach. People had to help Pradyun separate us and one of the ladies had exclaimed, "But she looked like such a sweet, little girl too!"
"She's not a girl," Billy had said. "She's an ugly lumpen-head, and her parents found her under a toadstool."
Billy had been a sweet, little boy himself. Still was. Hadn't changed a bit over the years. — Sonal Panse

At times life orchestrates a very efficent, yet rather painful, modality to allow us to release grievances and judgements towards some people. It consists in slowly setting the stage for us to be in the same circumstances, which eventually lead us to behave exactly like those people.
Each time we express hard judgments regarding what is wrong with others, a complex and long series of events is activated till we reach the moment when we can see our own finger pointing against us.
There is also another way, the most efficent and painless, which does not require any complexity and long orchestration, for it simply takes place in the present. It consists in abstaining right from the beginning from any judgement towards others. — Franco Santoro

If the only effect of these rampant esteem-inflating biases was to make people feel good about themselves, they would not be a problem. In fact, evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions.20 But such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled. — Jonathan Haidt

If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page. — Don DeLillo

A lot of my words come to me when I'm out and about as well, riding the bus or sat in the pub. I went through a stage of going to a strip bar called the White Horse at lunch times and did a lot of writing in there. They were fine with that but I don't know how they would feel about me setting up the easel. — Danny Fox

Truly remarkable leadership is not just about motivating others to follow, it's about inspiring them to become leaders themselves and setting the stage for even greater opportunities for future generations. — Condoleezza Rice

[ ... ] ideology was like a set of enormous wheels at the back of the stage, turning and setting in motion wars, revolutions, reforms. The wheels of immunology turn without having any effect upon History. — Milan Kundera

As parents, we have the responsibility and the power to create a foundational love for nutritious foods that will influence our children's choices for decades to come, setting the stage for our children, grandchildren, and future generations to flourish in wellness and health. — Leah Borski

If passed by the U.N. and ratified by the U.S. Senate, the U.N. Small Arms Treaty would almost certainly force the United States to ... create an international gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun confiscation. — Paul Broun

My ideal setting is I walk from the streets, backstage, and straight onto the stage. Two minutes, and I am on the stage. That way, in my head I have gone from my world and then into a social setting with my friends. — Trevor Noah

I prefer the competitive atmosphere of a classroom setting, like yoga or Pilates. That keeps me going. Although performing on stage is great exercise! — Dita Von Teese

Fate, the monstrous scene-shifter, was setting the stage for the death of Uncle Fred, the elderly man. — George Bellairs

What the young writer needs to develop, to achieve his goal of becoming a great artist, is not a set of aesthetic laws but artistic mastery. He cannot hope to develop mastery all at once; it involves too much. But if he pursues his goal in the proper way, he can approach it much more rapidly than he would if he went at it hit-or-miss, and the more successful he is at each stage along the way, the swifter his progress is likely to be. Invariably when the beginning writer hands in a short story to his writing teacher, the story has many things about it that mark it as amateur. But almost as invariably, when the beginning writer deals with some particular, small problem, such as description of a setting, description of a character, or brief dialogue that has some definite purpose, the quality of the work approaches the professional. Having written some small thing very well, he begins to learn confidence. — John Gardner

Loving those who hate us means wantonly setting the stage and orchestrating the situation in a way that's sure to result in a production of great personal calamity. But to not love them is an even greater calamity. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Some of the greatest spiritual revivals in the past occurred just when the situation seemed to be the darkest. In the history of our own nation, for example, countless thousands turned to Christ during the darkest days of the Civil War, setting the stage for national reconciliation later on. — Billy Graham

My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered the oak; it had been a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I. It had had a life of its own that bit by bit asphyxiated all of my life out of me. At the worst stage of major depression, I had moods that I knew were not my moods: they belonged to the depression, as surely as the leaves on that tree's high branches belonged to the vine. When I tried to think clearly about this, I felt that my mind was immured, that it couldn't expand in any direction. I knew that the sun was rising and setting, but little of its light reached me. I felt myself sagging under what was much stronger than I; first I could not use my ankles, and then I could not control my knees, and then my waist began to break under the strain, and then my shoulders turned in, and in the end I was compacted and fetal, depleted by this thing that was crushing me without holding me. — Andrew Solomon

The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting. — Mary Roberts Rinehart

It is easy to mislead people into thinking that they can move themselves to the next stage by just ... setting their mind to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The journey of faith is our personal journey, and movement on the journey is the place of mystery, holy ground. Moving from one stage to another reverences timing. It involves bringing our response in sync with God's grace in our lives. God does not make us move. God's grace allows us to move. — Janet O. Hagberg

Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation. — Roderick Nash

We need to set goals for ourselves. Start today ... if you don't have any goals, make your first goal getting some goals. You probably won't start living happily ever after, but you may start living happily, purposefully, and with gratitude ... Goals are gratitude in action. They give us the opportunity to build on what we already have. While achieving goals can be a lengthy process, we can learn to be grateful for each stage in the process of setting and meeting goals. — Melody Beattie

Entertaining shouldn't be about showing off. It's all about making people feel comfortable and setting a stage for everyone to have a good time, make new friends, and have stimulating conversations. You want to leave a party thinking: If I hadn't gone to that, I never would have met this wonderful person, or had that delicious meal, or felt that sense of camaraderie with the people I met at the dessert table. You don't want anyone looking at the clock, thinking, When can I leave? — Tim Gunn

If you create the stage setting and it is grand, everyone who enters will play their part. — Morris Lapidus

Secretly, the Bush administration is pursuing a policy to expand NAFTA politically, setting the stage for a North American Union designed to encompass the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. What the Bush administration truly wants is the free, unimpeded movement of people across open borders with Mexico and Canada. — Jerome Corsi

As a result, there's always another billion-dollar company, and in the B2B space there is room for a few of them. With the waves of Big Data, cloud, mobile, and social setting the stage, it's not hard to imagine that the next twenty years of information technology will be even more exciting than the last twenty. — David Feinleib

A farmer's work in many ways is like setting a stage. In theater, stage managers lay out furniture and props, set up lights, and clean to get a set ready for actors to take over and create a show. Farmers plow, fertilize, set up irrigation systems and fences, and otherwise prep the stage of their farms for the real actors -- the sun and the life within the seeds and animals -- to create the show. — Ben Hartman

Comedy takes all of life and puts it through a lens of acceptance, just by the mere act of talking about it on stage in a communal setting. It's very primal and ritualistic in that sense. — Ted Alexandro

I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire. — Robin Wasserman

On stage it's just a wild setting - we have a big screen - hecklers, I'm fighting. It's entertainment, but I want to pierce [the audience's] souls and have them think about what I have to say. — Mike Tyson

... the love we most cherish will, of necessity, bring us pain. Because that love is like the setting of a body with broken bones. But I want to stage the setting. I want to direct all scenes. — Rebecca Wells

The literary wiseacres prognosticate in many languages, as they have throughout so many centuries, setting the stage for new hautmonde in letters and making up the public's mind. — Fannie Hurst

The parallels between a stage and a book are compelling. You, like all authors, create 'characters' in a 'setting' who speak 'dialogue' encased in 'scenes.' Most importantly, you - like the playwright - have an 'audience.' — Nancy Kress

The time must come to all of us, who live long, when memory is more than prospect. An angler who has reached this stage and reviews the pleasure of life will be grateful and glad that he has been an angler, for he will look back on days radiant with happiness, peaks of enjoyment that are no less bright because they are lit in memory by the light of a setting sun. — Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey Of Fallodon

In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles ... And if we want to go beyond history, or even, while remaining in history, detach from our own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encumbered it, we realize that the calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery. — Gaston Bachelard

She seems to give a respectful credence to the statement that "God is love"only to hurry on to explore with real interest the possibility that "God is wrath." She can read from the book of Revelation with a ringing conviction in her voice that can make the creation seem only a stage setting for the triumphant thunderation of end. — Wendell Berry