Vague Image Quotes & Sayings

It is not so much in buying pictures as in being pictures, that you can encourage a noble school. The best patronage of art is not that which seeks for the pleasures of sentiment in a vague ideality, nor for beauty of form in a marble image, but that which educates your children into living heroes, and binds down the flights and the fondnesses of the heart into practical duty and faithful devotion. — John Ruskin

You may have noted the fact that it is a person's virtues as often as his vices that make him difficult to live with. — Kate Douglas Wiggin

Bees chase flowers. — Tracy L. Shreve

From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories. — William Butler Yeats

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space. — Don DeLillo

After you've read a novel, you only retain a vague memory of its contents. You remember the atmosphere, the odd image or phrase or vivid cameo. — Arthur Smith

The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop. — Saul Bellow

I forgot to mention that sometimes this typist is nauseated by the thought of food. This dates from her childhood when she discovered that she had eaten a fried cat. The thought revolted her for ever more. She lost her appetite and felt the great hunger thereafter. She was convinced that she had committed a crime; that she had eaten a fried angel, its wings snapping between her teeth. She believed in angels, and because she believed in them, they existed. — Clarice Lispector

Oh God just look at me now ... one night opens words and utters pain ... I cannot begin to explain to you ... this ... I am not here. This is not happening. Oh wait, it is, isn't it?
I am a ghost. I am not here, not really. You see skin and cuts and frailty ... these are symptoms, you known, of a ghost. An unclear image with unclear thoughts whispering vague things ...
If I told you what was really in my head, you'd never let me leave this place. And I have no desire to spend time in hell while I'm still, in theory, alive. — Emily Andrews

We have no participation in Being, because all human nature is ever midway between being born and dying, giving off only a vague image and shadow of itself, and a weak and uncertain opinion. And if you chance to fix your thoughts on trying to grasp its essence, it would be neither more nor less than if your tried to clutch water. — Michel De Montaigne

Elections? You can't ignore them and you can't escape them. — Steve Merrick

This stretch through the fogbound forest gradually lulled Grange into his favorite daydream; in it he saw an image of his life: all that he had he carried with him; twenty feet away, the world grew dark, perspectives blurred, and there was nothing near him but this close halo of warm consciousness, this nest perched high above the vague earth. — Julien Gracq

While the law of God is something we intuitively, if partially, know because we are made in his image, in our sinful condition we repress that knowledge and fight against our consciences when they alert us to our own wrongdoing. We need his law more than we need a vague admonition to "love" and "worship. — Joe Thorn

Set within the seed of the soul is not jut a fleeting image or a vague pattern but a lifelong story enfolded within, waiting to be cracked open and lived all the way out. — Michael Meade

If the U.S. can transform its domestic market for HIV/AIDS drugs, it will certainly transform the world market and make HIV/AIDS drugs more affordable for everyone, everywhere. — Bernie Sanders

Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment. — George Eliot

I have a vague memory of seeing an image of a child in an iron lung and the phrase "sad little breathing machine" coming into my head. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that on certain days - the worse ones - we could all be described as sad little breathing machines. — Matthea Harvey

There comes a moment during which almost every girl or boy falls into melancholy; they are tormented by a vague inquietude which rests on everything and finds nothing to calm it. They seek solitude; they weep; the silence to be found in cloister attracts them: the image of peace that seems to reign in religious houses seduces them. They mistake the first manifestations of a developing sexual nature for the voice of God calling them to Himself; and it is precisely when nature is inciting them that they embrace a fashion of life contrary to nature's wish. — Denis Diderot

In general, people are not drawn to perfection in others. People are drawn to shared interests, shared problems, and an individual's life energy.
Humans connect with humans. Hiding one's humanity and trying to project an image of perfection makes a person vague, slippery, lifeless, and uninteresting. — Robert Glover

I don't believe that any question is too big, you simply have to tailor your answers. — Nina George

He was already fading. I knew that it wouldn't be long until he was just a vague image, however much I tried to cling onto his memory. — Caroline Green

The warm, pulsing breath of the sweet grass surged through the open windows in a fashion to turn the head of a stone image. It was exotic, too sweet, exaggerated, like everything else in this climate! Cornelis turned over again, seeking a cool place on the broad bed. Then he sat up in bed, impatiently throwing off the sheet. A thin streak of moonlight edged the bed below his feet. He slipped out of bed, walked over to a window. He leaned out, looking down at the acres of undulating grass. There seemed to be some strange, hypnotic rhythm to it, some vague magic, as it swayed in the night wind. The scent poured over him in great, pulsing breaths. He shut his eves and drew it in, abandoning his senses to its effect.

("Sweet Grass") — Henry S. Whitehead

He wondered where his mind had wandered this time, what life it had lived as a trail of neurons sped through networks of possibilities particle-fast, too rapid to catch without a hadron collider, causing super quarks of weirdness and leaving him with only a vague after-image like a melting dream. He had to accept that he couldn't catch all his thoughts, all the things going on in his body, the processes which slipped by in the background just leaving a shadow, an itch, the grain of sand that probably wouldn't become a pearl, a blazing after-trace that lives a second then is gone forever. All those possibilities occurring in a second of frantic life: it never ceased to amaze him. The world was an incredible and beautifully constructed thing.
However, there wasn't really time for a wank. — Karl Drinkwater

Why a widow should raise an attractive or pathetic image in one's mind, or at the worst something rather bold and dashing, while widower seemed to have a vague connection with the word mother-in-law cannot be explained. Brightness falls from even Clive Newcome when we have to envisage him as a young widower in mourning. As for David Copperfield, his creator most wisely sent him abroad almost at once, and while he was still in England surrounded him with events so overwhelming that we never have time to think of his widowerhood. She — Angela Thirkell

The fear of making mistakes and not doing a particular ministry well has paralyzed many believers, and that is a tragedy. They fail to see that perfectionism is religion (form without power). Excellence is Kingdom. Saying yes to the King is the first step in discipleship. And being driven by love makes it impossible to remain stationary. — Bill Johnson

You're certain that rakshasi fruit is out of your system?" asked Vikram.
"Yes?"
"Good." He took a deep breath. "Because, once more, I told you so."
"You do realize that I don't need the enhancements of demon fruit to knock you to the ground?"
"I do. But I concede that some bodily harm from you is inevitable. I'm just trying to minimize the damage."
"How very wise," I said, rolling my eyes. — Roshani Chokshi

To experience the satisfaction and enjoyment of success in life, a definitive goal is essential. Many people fail at this vital point. The goal must be definite and specific, not in any sense vague or fuzzy. And to prove attainable, its image needs to be sharpened and resharpened continually, so that it stands out vividly in your thoughts. You must know, at all times, precisely and for certain what it is you want to accomplish and achieve. Strong and organized purposefulness toward a definite objective will focus your powers into a strong motivation in attainment of your goal. — Norman Vincent Peale

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abandoned the idea of spiritual or intellectual happiness in order to have this material happiness, consisting of a certain number of essential consumer goods. And hence, in the nineteenth century, happiness was linked to a well-being obtained by mechanical means, industrial means, production. The new thing that Saint-Just spoke about was that, in the past, happiness could appear as a very vague, very distant prospect for humanity, whereas now, people seemed to be within reach of the concrete, material possibility of attaining it. That was why happiness was to become an absolutely essential image for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, and for modern society. Happiness was attainable thanks to industrial development, and this image of happiness brought us fully into the consumer society. — Jacques Ellul

Have you ever had the experience of finding in a book some vague idea that's already occurred to you, some obscure image that comes back to you from the depths of your mind, or a perfect expression of your most subtle feelings? — Gustave Flaubert

Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term. — Soren Kierkegaard

Just for a while": Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.
Join the Rat Race "just for a while."
Concentrate on your career "just for a while."
Move in with your girlfriend "just for a while."
Find a bigger place, out in the burbs "just for a while."
Lie down in that wooden box "just for a while. — Christopher Brookmyre

It is also the irrational instinct of religionism, the vague yearning for something to worship - a reflection or shadow of the true devotional principle - which prompts men to project a subjective image of the lower, personal mind, and to endow it with human attributes, and then to claim to receive "revelations" from it; and this - the image of the Beast, or unspiritual mind, - is their anthropomorphic God, a fabulous monster the worship of which has ever prompted men to fanaticism and persecution, and has inflicted untold misery and dread upon the masses of mankind, as well as physical torture and death in hideous forms upon the many martyrs who have refused to bend the knee to this Gorgonean phantom of the beast-mind of man. Truly, where the worshipers of this image of the Beast predominate, the man whose brow and hand are unbranded by this superstition, who neither thinks nor acts in accordance with it, suffers ostracism if not virulent persecution. — James Morgan Pryse

The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Important encounters are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other — Paulo Coelho

Once one had seen her eyes, the rest of the face grew vague, and when one tried to recall her image afterwards, only the piercing, questioning violence of the wide eyes remained. — Paul Bowles