Context Quotes

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark When neither is attended; and I think The nightingale, if she should sing by day When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren. How many thing by season seasoned are To their right praise and true perfection!

The same thing could have happened on Halloween if somebody in the neighborhood had jumped out and scared him.

There is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.

Pleasantry is never good on serious points, because it always regards subjects in that point of view in which it is not the purpose to consider them.

So our virtues lie in the interpretation of the time

To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.

It all depends on which side of the desk you're sitting on.

'Warm in December, cold in June, you say?'I don't suppose the water's changed at all.You and I know enough to know it's warmCompared with cold, and cold compared with warm.But all the fun's in how you say a thing.

To lay hold of the mean without taking into account the occasion is like grasping one thing only.

If Blake said that, said Father Brian, he never lived in Dublin.

To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides

Every beauty, when out of it's place, is a beauty no longer.

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

I have a good sense of my body in a bathing suit around people who appreciate what I'm doing, like a contest. Then I'm proud. On television I am proud. But on a beach most people are not experts. The general public doesn't know how to look. How proud can you be when they don't even know what they're looking at?

You can't escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you're always in it.

Every man deserves to be judged in the context of his times.

The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.

If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore or the ship.

Sometimes, whether a desire is excessive or negative depends on the circumstances or society in which you live in.

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

A story without context is like a diamond without a mounting. The stone may be beautiful lying loose on a table, but when it is carefully mounted in the right setting it can dazzle you with its brilliance and sparkling beauty.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

My mother... would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, 'I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?' You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.

A whale out of water is over-run by ants.