Weekend Words: View
"The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."
The multi-million dollar price tag for apartments with the highest views in New York City is falling.
The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.
—Bertrand Russell
Nothing’s beautiful from every point of view.
—Horace
There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.
—C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
—George Orwell
A writer must not shift your point of view.
And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
—William Safire, William Safires’ Rules for Writers
The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.
—Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
—Mark Twain
I view my job as being someone who is supposed to piss people off. I don’t want to be just one-of-the-guys. I don’t want to be just a smiling face you see on television presenting some vapid kind of easily-digestible garbage. This is rock and roll. I want to be a rock and roll star! Rock and roll is about shaking things up, making people act and react. That’s what I do.
—Marilyn Manson
She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.”
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
It was cold and barren. It was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me. The charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear.
—Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
My father says that there is only one perfect view — the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.
—E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
I don’t want someone shoving his views down my throat, unless they’re covered in a crunchy candy shell.
—Stephen Colbert
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
—Henry David Thoreau
There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.
—Chinese proverb
To hold the same views at forty as we did at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, Crabbed Age and Youth
