Quotes & Sayings About Vicarious

Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience. — Albert Bandura

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen. — Roger Ebert

Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them. — Clive Barker

If moral precepts alone could have reformed mankind, the mission of the Son of God into all the world would have been unnecessary. The perfect morality of the gospel rests upon the doctrine which, though often controverted has never been refuted: I mean the vicarious life and death of the Son of God. — Benjamin Rush

Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration. — Christopher Hitchens

Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense. — Lewis Mumford

You thought I was that type: that you could forget me, and that I'd plead and weep and throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare, or that I'd ask the sorcerers for some magic potion made from roots and send you a terrible gift: my precious perfumed handkerchief. Damn you! I will not grant your cursed soul vicarious tears or a single glance. And I swear to you by the garden of the angels, I swear by the miracle-working ikon, and by the fire and smoke of our nights: I will never come back to you. — Anna Akhmatova

When I was young and knew Virginia Woolf slightly, I learned something that startled me - that a person may be ultrasensitive and not warm. She was intensely curious and plied one with questions, teasing, charming questions that made the young person glow at being even for a moment the object of her attention. But I did feel at times as though I were "a specimen American young poet" to be absorbed and filed away in the novelist's store of vicarious experience. Then one had also the daring sense that anything could be said, the sense of freedom that was surely one of the keys to the Bloomsbury ethos, a shared secret amusement at human folly or pretensions. She was immensely kind to have seen me for at least one tea, as she did for some years whenever I was in England, but in all that time I never felt warmth, and this was startling. — May Sarton

It's all about escapism. That's essentially what all movies are about. It's a vicarious thrill. — Todd Phillips

Why should we not shep naches from the accomplishments of our machines? This vicarious joy or success sounds somewhat odd, but it shouldn't be. We get excited when our sports team wins a game; why should it disturb or disappoint us when our creations turn out to be more accomplished than ourselves? — China Mieville

The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth. Tom says football guru Nick Hornby says in his book that men's obsession with football is not vicarious. The testosterone-crazed fans do not wish themselves on the pitch, claims Hornby, instead seeing their team as their chosen representatives, rather like parliament. That is precisely my feeling about Darcy and Elizabeth. They are my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or, rather, courtship. I do not, however, wish to see any actual goals. I would hate to see Darcy and Elizabeth in bed, smoking a cigarette afterwards. That would be unnatural and wrong and I would quickly lose interest. — Helen Fielding

In photography, the issue of the integration of form and content is exceptionally difficult because of the widely held belief that photographs must be a kind of vicarious experience of the subject itself. — Peter C Bunnell

I'm such a Goody Two-shoes, but I get a vicarious thrill at someone sticking it to the Man. — Heather Langenkamp

In God's case, if He had said in the infinite sovereignty of His absolute will, "I will have no substitute, but each man shall suffer for himself, he who sinneth shall die," none could have murmured. It was grace, and only grace which led the divine mind to say, "I will accept of a substitute. There shall be a vicarious suffering; and My vengeance shall be content, and My mercy shall be gratified. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Aspiring novelists should be taught that the old adage, "Write about what you know," isn't limited to what you have personally experienced. Vicarious experience is also a great part of what you know. Read a lot of history and it becomes part of your store of knowledge, part of what you're prepared to write about. The same goes for stories and memories that other people share with you. — James Carlos Blake

No one who believes that Jesus died for man can doubt the validity and efficacy of vicarious ministration. — James E. Talmage

Perhaps nuns felt like this, she thought, when they passed within convent walls and left the glitter of the world behind. But their renunciation was of the will, while circumstances beyond her control had stripped her of the people who meant everything to her. And yet was it not possible that they had endured the same impoverishment, so that when the glory that was life had become husks they found it good to exchange those dead things for service and whatever vicarious happiness could be salvaged? Maybe selflessness was only selfishness on another level. — Margaret Landon

I have heard stories from the depths of human lives where men and women were wrestling with the elemental problems of misery and sin--stories that put upon a man's heart a burden of vicarious sorrow, even though he does but listen to them. Here was real human need crying out after the living God revealed in Christ. Consider all the multitudes of men who so need God, and then think of Christian churches making of themselves a cockpit of controversy when there is not a single thing at stake in the business. So much of it does not matter! And there is one thing that does matter--more than anything else in all the world--that men in their personal lives and in their social relationships should know Jesus Christ. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

Do you young people want a sure way to eliminate the influence of the adversary in your life? Immerse yourself in searching for your ancestors, prepare their names for the sacred vicarious ordinances available in the temple, and then go to the temple to stand as proxy for them to receive the ordinances of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost. As you grow older, you will be able to participate in receiving the other ordinances as well. I can think of no greater protection from the influence of the adversary in your life — Richard G. Scott

It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking. — Fernando Pessoa

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust. — Steven Pinker

only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists. — Bertrand Russell

Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food. — Lewis Mumford

So,' bellowed Cosmo, pouring me a drink. 'How's your love-life?'
Oh no. Why do they do this? Why? Maybe the Smug Marrieds only mix with other Smug Marrieds and don't know how to relate to individuals any more. Maybe they really do want to patronize us and make us feel like failed human beings. Or maybe they are in such a sexual rut they're thinking, 'There's a whole other world out there,' and hoping for vicarious thrills by getting us to tell them the roller-coaster details of our sex lives. — Helen Fielding

Books allowed her vicarious tastes of infinite variety, but they didn't supplant the need to venture out into the big and the messy. In fact, just the opposite. Books convinced her that something more existed
something intuitive, beyond reason
and they whetted her appetite to find it. — Masha Hamilton

Through books Cathy and I have lived a zillion lives ... our vicarious way
to feel alive. — V.C. Andrews

I always felt that's why people buy records anyhow is because they get that vicarious excitement and thrill that they don't get unless they buy your record. — Cosimo Matassa

In one word, the great pillar of the Christian's hope is substitution. The vicarious sacrifice of Christ for the guilty, Christ being made sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in him, Christ offering up a true and proper expiatory and substitutionary sacrifice in the room, place, and stead of as many as the Father gave him, who are known to God by name, and are recognized in their own hearts by their trusting in Jesus
this is the cardinal fact of the gospel. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Don't ever live vicariously. This is your life. Live. — Lavinia Spalding

The imagination is also sometimes commended for offering us in vicarious form experiences which we are unable to enjoy at first hand. If you can't afford an air ticket to Kuala Lumpur, you can always read Conrad and imagine yourself in South-East Asia. If you have been monotonously married for forty years, you can always lay furtive hands on a copy of James Joyce's letters. Literature on this view is a kind of supplement to our unavoidably impoverished lives - a sort of spiritual prosthesis which extends our capabilities beyond their normal restricted range. It is true that everyone's experience is bound to be limited, and that art can valuably augment it. But why the lives of so many people should be imaginatively impoverished is then a question that can be easily passed over. — Terry Eagleton

There's a lot of dirty theology out there, the religious counterpart to dirty politics and dirty business, I suppose. You might call it spiritual pornography - a kind of for-profit exploitative nakedness. It's found in many of the same places as physical pornography (the Internet and cable TV for starters), and it promises similar things: instant intimacy, fantasy and make-believe, private voyeurism and vicarious experience, communion without commitment. That's certainly not what we're after in these pages. No, we're after a lost treasure as old as the story of the Garden of Eden: the ... — Brian D. McLaren

This is why the clergyman is so often called a vicar - he being the person whose vicarious goodness is to stand for that of those entrusted to his charge. — Samuel Butler

Public work brings a vicarious but assured sense of immortality. We may be poor, weak, timid, in debt to our landlady, bullied by our nieces, stiff in the joints, shortsighted and distressed; we shall perish, but the cause endures; the cause is great. — Winifred Holtby

The vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men, and that the faculty of action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only as one of the many and manifold forces of human community. — Hannah

She begins to feel that the reality show is the university she never attended. Vicarious reality. Emotion without a value-added tax. Movement without danger. Alma finds her reality. She no longer has a reason to put herself at risk and go out into the hostile, degrading world. — Carlos Fuentes

In detective stories ... I alternately identify myself with the murderer and the huntsman-detective, but ... there are those to which this vicarious outlet is too mild. — Bertrand Russell

All action is vicarious faith. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

There is no such thing as vicarious experience. — Mary Parker Follett

Just as our Redeemer gave His life as a vicarious sacrifice for all men, and in so doing became our Savior, even so we, in a small measure, when we engage in proxy work in the temple, become as saviors to those on the other side. — Gordon B. Hinckley

The key to thrillers is vicarious pleasure. — Lee Child

Watching a pig eat is the ultimate vicarious thrill. Seldom can you take such pleasure in another's joy. Here is someone following his bliss. Pigs are quite literally made for eating - they were bred to eat and get fat fast. — Sy Montgomery

Certainly the most obvious ... example of the strictly infantile essence of America's all-conquering mentality greets our eyes daily, anywhere and everywhere, in the guise of the tabloid newspaper. The tabloid newspaper actually means to the typical American of the era what the Bible is popularly supposed to have meant to the typical Pilgrim Father: viz. a very present help in times of trouble, plus a means of keeping out of trouble via harmless, since vicarious, indulgence in the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. — E. E. Cummings

As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames. — Douglas Rushkoff

It is otherwise with sports and the media. There, too, a shift has occurred, from active participation to the vicarious participation of spectatorship. Four people used to go bowling, but 100 million watch the Super Bowl. Football, where men try to hit and hurt, has replaced baseball as the national game. It is as if the demotion from participant to spectatorship and from live spectatorship to TV spectatorship has to be compensated by upping the ante in violence. — Walker Percy

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "generalization" of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. — David Foster Wallace

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. — George Santayana

My love has saved me. It wraps strong arms around me when I cry with despair;it gives me the routine of a working week to lend vicarious structure to my shapeless days. It brings me daily laughter, a reason to keep washing...and it slices me open with guilt. — Anna Lyndsey

You do not seem aware, for all of your knowledge of the great world I do not frequent, of the usual response which the productions of the Female Pen--let alone as in our case, the *hypothetick* productions--are greeted with. The best we may hope is--oh, it is excellently done--*for a woman.* And then there are Subjects we may not treat--things we may not know...We are not mere candleholders to virtuous thoughts--mere chalices of Purity--we think and feel, aye and *read*--which seems not to shock *you* in us, in me, though I have concealed from many the extent of my--vicarious--knowledge of human vagaries. Now--if there is a reason for my persistence in this correspondence--it is this very unawareness in you--real or assumed--of what a woman must be supposed to be capable of. This is to me--like a strong Bush, well-rooted is to the grasp of one falling down a precipice--here I hold--here I am stayed-- — A.S. Byatt

You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things. — Jack Vance

There are five key characteristics that will tend to explain how quickly an innovation is adopted. They are (in order of importance):
1.Relative advantage is whether the innovation is better than what is out there already. This can be in effectiveness, economic or even prestige terms.
2.Compatibility is the extent that an innovation is consistent with existing values and norms.
3.Simplicity is the degree to which innovations are perceived to be easy to understand and use.
4.Trialability is the extent to which innovations can be experimented with on a limited basis. Trialability is particularly important to early adopters, as they have no vicarious experience to draw on.
5.Observability is the extent to which the results of an innovation are visible to others. — Gary Johnson

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. [ ... ] It had been only through books - at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions - that I had managed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books; consequently, my belief in books had risen more out of a sense of desperation than from any abiding conviction of their ultimate value. — Richard Wright

Only in the biblical revelation is the tension between law and love resolved, with vast social and historical implications, in the person and work of Jesus Christ. By His perfect righteousness and His vicarious atonement, the strictest requirements of law and justice were fully met and fulfilled, and the statutes of God observed to every jot and tittle, and yet, at one and the same time, the love of God unto salvation was manifested in and through Him. The cross thus is the symbol of the unity of law and love in Jesus Christ and of the full requirement and mutual integrity of both. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Yes, movies! Look at them - All of those glamorous people - having adventures - hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone's dish, not only Gable's! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves - Goody, goody! - It's our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island - to make a safari - to be exotic, far-off! - But I'm not patient. I don't want to wait till then. I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move! — Tennessee Williams

It is necessary to realize that the most sacrosanct article of sexual politics in the period, the Victorian doctrine of chivalrous protection and its familiar protestations of respect, rests upon the tacit assumption, a cleverly expeditious bit of humbug, that all women were "ladies" - namely members of that fraction of the upper classes and bourgeoisie which treated women to expressions of elaborate concern, while permitting them no legal or personal freedom. The psycho-political tacit here is a pretense that the indolence and luxury of the upper-class woman's role in what Veblen called "vicarious consumption" was the happy lot of all women. The efficacy of this maneuver depends on dividing women by class and persuading the privileged that they live in an indulgence they scarcely deserve ... To succeed, both the sexual revolution and the Woman's Movement which led it would have to unmask chivalry and expose its courtesies as subtle manipulation. — Kate Millett

The vicarious policemanship which was the strongest emotion of Englishmen towards another man's muddle, in their case was replaced by the instinct to pass by as discreetly far as possible on the other side. — T.E. Lawrence

Outside, on the other side of a black iron grill, was another crowd, just as anxious, just as sweaty and frightened. These were the parents and friends of those departing. They all waited for deliverance. When all the customs procedures had been completed, when the crowd of travelers had passed through the last security booths and were walking toward the tarmac, you could see, on the faces of those left behind, the relief, the joy, the pride of vicarious success. The vision of a happier future elsewhere, anywhere but here. Smiles of contentment, faces radiant with happiness. Nowhere else in the world does separation bear the hideous face of joy. This was a grotesque face, a deviation from all rules of human nature. — Duong Thu Huong

A single week of Oprah takes you from bondage to all the violent terrors of life, to escape through vicarious encounters with celebrity, to visions of charity and hope, to hard resolve, to redemption and moral renovation. — Lee Siegel

Unashamed, accustomed to solitude, he began to enjoy his near-invisibility. From his position at the edge of the school around him, he took vicarious pleasure in the activities of those around him, silently celebrating the rise or fall of this or that playground emperor, or the examination failures of particularly unappetizing class-fellows: the delights of the spectator. — Salman Rushdie

Our sexual fantasies are often redundant and intense, like many other ideas involving ourselves. Most people approach sexuality limited to the idea that they should imitate other people, art (e.g., romantic literature) or movies (e.g., pornography). In this way, vicarious events and even fictions become a point of reference that we can actually feel. We judge actual people in our real lives against fictional events and unrealistic concepts. As such, real lovers seem inferior as a result. — Todd Vickers

However long the horror continued, one must not get to the stage of refusing to think about it. To shrink from direct pain was bad enough, but to shrink from vicarious pain was the ultimate cowardice. And whereas to conceal direct pain was a virtue, to conceal vicarious pain was a sin. Only by feeling it to the utmost, and by expressing it, could the rest of the world help to heal the injury which had caused it. Money, food, clothing, shelter - people could give all these and still it would not be enough; it would not absolve them from paying also, in full, the imponderable tribute of grief. — Jan Struther

I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant. — Paul Bloom

No vicarious charity can substitute for justice which is due as an obligation and is wrongfully denied. — Pope Pius XI

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems ... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious. — Elon Musk

History of the Jews (Johnson, Paul) - Your Highlight on page 34 | Location 758-759 | Added on Thursday, March 5, 2015 9:59:47 PM in the Mosaic law no property offence is capital. Human life is too sacred where the rights of property alone are violated. It also repudiates vicarious punishment: — Anonymous

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him. — Hilary Mantel

I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others' sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do. — Mother Jones

Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God's great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it. — Richard J. Foster

Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed. — Terry Tempest Williams

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves. — Christopher Hitchens

Even though more and more of his stories, as he went on, are set in autumn, one of the main occupations of his characters is to see how far they've come, or fallen rather, since the spring. Yet insofar as spring - youth - is visible, there's always the possibility of vicarious renewal or hopefulness, and the mixed feelings of seeing someone else's perhaps too-innocent illusions. — Pico Iyer

The central ideas of Christianity, an angry God and vicarious atonement, are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present stage of enlightenment, absurd, preposterous, and blasphemous propositions. — Virchand Gandhi

What made Jesus' death uncommon, unusual? It was the dying of the just for the unjust. It was His sacrificial dying, His vicarious dying. He paid a debt He did not owe in behalf of the others too deeply in debt ever to pay. — A.W. Tozer

Whatever I may believe in theology, I do not believe in the doctrine of vicarious atonement in politics. — James A. Garfield

Vicarious traumatization. It can happen to those who bear secondary witness to the traumas of others. — Wally Lamb

Napster's only alleged liability is for contributory or vicarious infringement. So when Napster's users engage in noncommercial sharing of music, is that activity copyright infringement? No. — David Boies

People's conceptions about themselves and the nature of things are developed and verified through four different processes: direct experience of the effects produced by their actions, vicarious experience of the effects produced by somebody else's actions, judgments voiced by others, and derivation of further knowledge from what they already know by using rules of inference — Albert Bandura

The teachings of Christianity - from vicarious redemption to the love of enemies, no thought for the morrow need be taken, that no thrift or care or family or society or solidarity is necessary - these are immoral teachings that have done and continue to inflict untold moral and physical harm on our species. And until we outgrow this nonsense, we have no chance of emancipating ourselves. — Christopher Hitchens

Rationally considered, nothing can be more absurd than the baptism of infants under any circumstances. No statement, no matter by whom it may be said to have been uttered, can make that true which is radically false. If an innocent child, unconscious of good or evil, irresponsible to God and man, incapable of thought or action, is not already, in accordance with Christian theology, a member of Christ, then no vicarious promise or priestly ablution can make him one. For if this were so, a similar ceremony under devil worship could make him a member of Satan. — Tennessee Celeste Claflin

No sane man is unafraid in battle, but discipline produces in him a form of vicarious courage. — George S. Patton

When a person reaches the end of a book and says, 'I want to read that again,' what he's actually saying is that he wants to mentally merge with his favorite character and stroll among all the other creative personalities, feeding a hungry imagination through the vicarious reliving of each and every wild chapter that stirred his emotions, the whole while surrendering to a safe yet daring existence where any crazy, hopeful thing can and does happen. That's all. — Richelle E. Goodrich

History at its best is vicarious experience. — Edmund Morgan

You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models. — Charlie Munger

We get one chance at this life. We have one body, one mind, and one life to live. Reading provides us with a vicarious experience of others' lives. — Tony Reinke

I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea. — Neil Peart

There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness. — David Rakoff

Society has seldom considered the vicarious effects of domestic violence between partners on the lives of children. — Asa Don Brown

The great vicarious work for our kindred dead in our temples demonstrates both the justice and the fairness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. — James E. Faust

Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures. — Alan Hirsch

Michelle would get picked up and bang someone anonymous stud in the bathroom, and i would sip my drink wishing i could go home and curl up with a book. i sigh. thats ok. she was my vicarious slutty friend. and for that i loved her — Marata Eros

Ironically, white America will catapult books about race to the top of the best-seller list, even as racism remains a national open wound. Obsession ain't solution, however, because reading even at its most intense and verisimilitudinous is vicarious, and once you close the book you're off the hook. — Marita Golden

My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that is to say, Joe and I were going. — Charles Dickens

It was clear that the delight being taken ... was not the vicarious pleasure of watching people enjoying themselves and identifying with them, but in seeing people being humiliated while others enjoyed themselves at their expense. — Iain M. Banks

It is the case that, albeit to a lesser extent, all fictions make their readers live "the impossible", taking them out of themselves, breaking down barriers, and making them share, by identifying with the characters of the illusion, a life that is richer, more intense, or more abject and violent, or simply different from the one that they are confined to by the high-security prison that is real life. Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

All video games are games, obviously. They're designed. They're digital. They have rules; they give an audience some type of vicarious experience. — Tom Bissell

(A murderer about their victim
He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing. — P.D. James

School was my solace, and studying let me escape, allowing me to live a thousand vicarious lives. — Sarah Dessen

Failure is a great teacher; but never insist on hiring one for yourself. Learn vicariously from others' teachers. — Ashok Kallarakkal

I think when life gets heavy, people look for an escape. "The Love Boat" is an escape. We have happy endings. You don't see many of those around. I think it gave people a vicarious adventure. — Gavin MacLeod