Medium Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Laughter to begin with was probably glee at the misfortunes of others. The baring of the teeth in laughter hints at its savage ancestry. Animals have no malice, hence also no laughter. They never savor the sudden glory of Schadenfreude. It was its infectious quality that made of laughter a medium of mutuality.

All those who, since Adam Smith, have turned their attention to Political Economy, agree that in reality we do not buy articles of consumption with money, the circulating medium with which we pay for them. We must in the first instance have bought this money itself by the sale of our produce.

Jean-Baptiste Say

I have pledged my word to help people on to truth while living and - will keep my word. Let them abuse and revile me. Let some call me a medium, and a Spiritualist, and others an imposter. The day will come when posterity will learn to know me better.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Entrance into the Old Ways begins with the pricking of a finger with a rose thorn, which produces a drop of blood. This opens the way into the Thorned Path, a system, which uses five rose thorns to symbolize the five arts of Witchcraft that one should master. These arts are Herbalist, Fortune-Teller, Spirit Medium, Mystic, and Magician. We call mastering these aspects 'the gathered thorns' --thus the Thorned Path.

Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Eric S. Raymond

Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic matter is fitted not only to be a medium of physical interaction between distant bodies, and to fulfil other physical functions of which perhaps we have as yet no conception, but also to constitute the material organism of beings exercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours are at present is a question far transcending the limits of physical speculation.

James Clerk Maxwell

Painting is traditional but for me that doesn't mean the academy. I felt a need to paint; I love painting. It was something natural - as is listening to music or playing an instrument for some people. For this reason I searched for themes of my era and my generation. Photography offered this, so I chose it as a medium for painting.

Gerhard Richter

The medium of printed scientific text is first of all a visual one.

Good manners are the settled medium of social, as specie is of commercial, life; returns are equally expected for both.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

It is the striving after perfection that makes one an artist. It is the sense that one is imperfect, unfulfilled, unfinished. One attempts by a superhuman effort to fill the gap, to leap over it, to finish it in another medium. And one creates a third and separate thing: 'Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China. But he discovered America.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Among the innumerable celestial objects that may be seen through a telescope, the most beautiful of all is perhaps the planet Saturn. When viewed in the evening twilight while the sky is still bright, the yellow gold ball and its unbelievable rings shimmer in a brilliant blue medium, more like a rare work of art than a natural phenomenon.

Fred Lawrence Whipple

From the Anarchist standpoint, these artificial hindrances which are the cause of three main forms of usury-interest, profit, and rent, are, in the order of their importance, monopoly in the control of the circulating medium-money and credit, private property in land not based on occupancy and use, patent rights and copyrights, and tariffs.

Laurance Labadie

What properties are essential to a medium capable of transmitting wave motion? Roughly, we may say two: elasticity and inertia.

Laws governing pollution tend to move pollutants from one medium to another. So, for example, we scrub SO2 from power plants only to dispose toxic sludge on land. We "clean" water only to disperse toxic-laced solids on farmland or landfills. Pollution control becomes a kind of giant shell game by which we move pollutants between air, water, groundwater, and land.

Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors.

I am a simple man and I use simple materials: Ivory Black, Vermilion, Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre, Flake White and no medium. That's all I've ever used in my paintings.

It reveals us to ourselves, it represents those modulations and temperamental changes which escape all verbal analysis, it utters what must else remain forever unuttered and unutterable; it feeds that deep, ineradicable instinct within us of which all art is only the reverberated echo, that craving to express, through the medium of the senses, the spiritual and eternal realities which underlie them.

Hugh Reginald Haweis

It is the chief function of the ichthyologists, or fish people, to keep pointing out, day after day, the perfect fitness of fish for existence in a liquid medium. And they're right, at that. But I sometimes think that if fish were not well adapted for an aquatic life — if they were square, say — then it would be time to talk.

Among the things she said: "Women seem to possess all the natural gifts essential to a good portraitist... such as personality, patience and intuition. The sitter ought to be the predominating factor in a successful portrait. Men portraitist are apt to forget this; they are inclined to lose the sitter in a maze of technique luxuriating in the cleverness and beauty of their own medium."

Words are such a poor medium when you really want someone to feel something.

Hunter S. Thompson

The words "environment," "medium" denote something more than surroundings which encompass an individual. They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his own active tendencies.

There can be no richer man or woman than the individual who has found his or her labor of love. Personal fulfillment through the virtue of work is the highest form of desire. Work is the conduit between the supply and the demand of all human needs, the forerunner of human progress, and the medium by which the imagination is given the wings of action. A labor of love is exalted because it provides joy and self-expression to those who perform it.

Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be 'free,' but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

Hereditary property sophisticates the mind, and the unfortunate victims to it... swathed from their birth, seldom exert the locomotive faculty of body or mind; and, thus viewing every thing through one medium, and that a false one, they are unable to discern in what true merit and happiness consist.

Mary Wollstonecraft