Medium Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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.

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.

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

Hunter S. Thompson

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."

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.

I suggest, then... that the first step was an advance under favor of peculiar conditions, from the simplest forms of being, to the next more complicated, and this through the medium of the ordinary process of generation.

Robert Chambers

Thus we give, as is meet, a respectful reception to what is revealed through the medium of nature, at the same time that we fully reserve our reverence for all we have been accustomed to hold sacred, not one tittle of which it may ultimately be found necessary to alter.

Robert Chambers

What the music says may be serious, but as a medium it should not be questioned, analysed, or taken so seriously. I think it should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself.

My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.

Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?

The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.

George Stillman Hillard

Language is the medium of thought, and cannot be separated from it. He who would think well must have a good command of language, and he who has the best command of language I am almost tempted to say will think the best.

Josiah Parsons Cooke

It must be admitted that among a certain number of advanced mathematical physicists whose work has lain mainly in the twentieth century, the ether is regarded with suspicion, or even with contempt. And some of the opponents go so far as to as to say that the nineteenth century idea of the ether has failed to establish itself, and that in consequence the whole idea of the ether is under a cloud, and that it is only upheld by a few antiquated supporters, who, though are willing to admit many modifications in the original nineteenth century notions of an ether, feel the need of a medium capable of performing the functions attributed to it.

The image is not a medium for which we have to find the proper use. It is what it is and it is beyond all our moral considerations. It is by its essence immoral, and the world's becoming-image is an immoral process.

Jean Baudrillard

Artists are perennially implored to consider 'the limitations of the medium.' Whoever invented this expression exaggerated the limitations of the English language. We are not concerned with what effects cannot be produced with our materials.

Walter J. Phillips