Quotes about Variety

I, ever knowing the living beings
Who tread the Path and those who do not
In response to those who may be saved
Preach to them a variety of dharmas,
Each time having this thought:
'How may I cause the beings
To contrive to enter the Unexcelled Path
and quickly to perfect the Buddha-body?'

Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet. The human world manifests the same reality and will not seek our permission to celebrate itself in the magnificence of its endless varieties. Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have; narrowness of heart and mind is not.
~ Chinua Achebe, 1930- ~

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustable variety of life.

A Garden, an Elaboratory, a Work-house, Improvements and Breeding, are pleasant and Profitable Diversions to the Idle and Ingenious: For here they miss Ill Company, and converse with Nature and Art; whose Variety are equally grateful and instructing; and preserve a good Constitution of Body and Mind.

The secret of love is seeking variety in your life together, and never letting routine chords dull the melody of your romance.

Of the infinite variety of fruits which spring from the bosom of the earth, the trees of the wood are the greatest in dignity.

In things to be seen at once, much variety makes confusion, another vice of beauty. In things that are not seen at once, and have no respect one to another, great variety is commendable, provided this variety transgress not the rules of optics and geometry.

The great source of pleasure is variety.

Our creator rejoices in diversity and variety. Any observation of our abundant earth and its incredibly different life-forms proves this.

Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.

. . . a hermitage, which is about an acre of ground - an island, planted with all variety of trees, shrubs and flowers that will grow in this country, abundance of little winding walks, differently embellished with little seats and banks; in the midst is place a hermit's cell, made of the roots of trees, the floor is paved with pebbles, there is a couch made of matting, and little wooden stools, a table with a manuscript on it, a pair of spectacles, a leathern bottle; and hung up in different parts, an hourglass, a weatherglass and several mathematical instruments, a shelf of books, another of wood platters and bowls, another of earthen ones, in short everything that you might imagine necessary for a recluse.

Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated.

If variety is the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.

In all places where there is a Summer and a Winter, and where your Gardens of pleasure are sometimes clothed with their verdant garments, and bespangled with variety of Flowers, and at other times wholly dismantled of all these; here to recompense the loss of past pleasures, and to buoy up their hopes of another Spring, many have placed in their Gardens, Statues, and Figures of several Animals, and great variety of other curious pieces of Workmanship, that their walks might be pleasant at any time in those places of never dying pleasures.

The heavens rejoice in motion, why should I Abjure my so much loved variety.

Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era, also presaged the feasibility of an evolutionary theory: The agreement of so many kinds of animals in a certain common structure, which seems to be fundamental not only in their skeletons, but also in the arrangement of the other parts - so that a wonderfully simple typical form, by the shortening and lengthening of some parts, and by the suppression and development of others, might be able to produce an immense variety of species - allows a ray of hope, however faint, to enter our minds, that here perhaps some result may be obtained, by the application of the principle of the mechanism of nature (without which there can be no natural science in general). This analogy of forms, which with all their differences seem to have been produced in accordance with a common prototype, strengthens our suspicions of an actual blood-relationship between them in their derivation from a common parent through the gradual approximation of one class of animals to another - beginning with the one in which the principle of purposiveness seems to be best authenticated, ie. man, and extending down to the polyps, and from these even down to mosses and lichens, and arriving finally at raw matter, the lowest stage of nature observable by us.

It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, nor the amount of religious conversation in which you mix, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things till the truth in them becomes your own and part of your being, that ensures your growth.

Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.

All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.

So, Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

There is deep intuitive wisdom in this American tolerance of economic variety and in our refusal to commit ourselves to any one social and economic system. It is recognition of the fact that life and truth are too varied and complex to be confined within the pattern of any single deliberately planned economic system.

One country . . . one ideology, one system is not sufficient. It is helpful to have a variety of different approaches . . . We can then make a joint effort to solve the problems of the whole of humankind.

The physical rhythm of life established through sensitivity to qualitative time mirrors the ebb and flow of water. Maintaining rhythm is dependent on our daily decisions concerning vocation, recreation and work. Using the image of water roots Watershed Spirituality in diversity and pluralism. Life in a "variety of forms" implies an emphasis on inter-religious appreciation and the universalist vision.

Variety is the soul of pleasure.

Of priests we can offer a charmin' variety, Far renowned for larnin' and piety.

Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain Here earth and water seem to strive again, Not chaos-like together crushed and bruised, But, as the world, harmoniously confused: Where order in variety we see, And where, though all things differ, all agree.

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all in their separate and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere. The desirable things which the individuals of a people can not do, or can not well do, for themselves, fall into two classes: those which have relation to wrongs, and those which have not. Each of these branch off into an infinite variety of subdivisions. The first - that in relation to wrongs - embraces all crimes, misdemeanors, and nonperformance of contracts. The other embraces all which, in its nature, and without wrong, requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself. From this it appears that if all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need for government.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can not fool all the people all of the time. Attributed to Abraham Lincoln. - Alexander K. McClure, "Abe" Lincoln's Yarns and Stories, p. 184 (1904). Many quotation books have also attributed this to Lincoln, with a variety of sources given. According to Roy R Basler ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 3, p. 81 (1953), "Tradition has come to attribute to the Clinton [Illinois] speeches [September 2, 1858] one of Lincoln's most famous utterances - 'You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.'" But he goes on to say that the epigram and any references to it have not been located in Surviving Lincoln documents. This remark has also been attributed to P. T. Barnum.