Familiarity Quotes

1. "The revelation that there was nothing "special" about humanity didn't shock her. Not specifically. She'd always been cynical about that sort of thing. The idea that reality was all too big to even quantify in any meaningful way didn't disturb her much either. Except, deep down, she'd assumed there was some inherent logic at work. Like ricocheting molecules congealing into planets and stars, dogs and cats. At least the made sense, even if it wasn't very comforting. At least it put things in neat little boxes with neat little labels that she didn't always understand but could rely on in terms of familiarity."
Author: A. Lee Martinez

2. "Familiarity breeds contempt."
Author: Aesop

3. "I have no pretence to greater physical courage than my neighbours, but familiarity with a subject robs it of those vague and undefined terrors which are the most appalling to the imaginative mind. The human brain is capable of only one strong emotion at a time, and if it be filled with curiosity or scientific enthusiasm, there is no room for fear. ("The Brown Hand")"
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

4. "Imagine that Jesus is calling you today. He extends a second invitation to accept His Father's love. And maybe you answer, "Oh, I know that. It's old hat."And God answers, 'No, that's what you don't know. You don't know how much I love you. The moment you think you understand is the moment you do not understand. I am God, not man. You tell others about Me - your words are glib. My words are written in the blood of My only Son. The next time you preach about My love with such obnoxious familiarity, I may come and blow your whole prayer meeting apart.Did you know that every time you tell Me you love Me, I say thank you?"
Author: Brennan Manning

5. "Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer."
Author: Brian Greene

6. "The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity."
Author: C.S. Lewis

7. "Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we rceive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best--if you like, it 'works' best--when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance."
Author: C.S. Lewis

8. "They shared a laugh, and then the silence that so often intruded on their discussion asserted itself once again, a gap born of equal parts weariness, familiarity and--conversely--the many differences that fate had created between those who had once gone about lives that were but variations on a single melody."
Author: Christopher Paolini

9. "A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact."
Author: Daniel Kahneman

10. "I feel like I'm stepping into a place of spiritual contemplation every time I enter a studio; it's always had a certain magic to me that has never worn off with familiarity."
Author: David Knopfler

11. "Many of them were familiar from childhood with the fables of La Fontaine. Or they had read Voltaire or Racine or Molière in English translations. But that was about the sum of any familiarity they had with French literature. And none, of course, could have known in advance that the 1830s and '40s in Paris were to mark the beginning of the great era of Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, and Baudelaire, not to say anything of Delacroix in painting or Chopin and Liszt in music."
Author: David McCullough

12. "Fear is an unavoidable element of the mortal condition. Creation in all its ravishing beauty, with its infinite baroque embellishments and subtle charms, with all the wonders that it offers from both the Maker and the made, with all its velvet mystery and with all the joy we receive from those we love here, so enchants us lack we lack the imagination, less than the faith, to envision an even more dazzling world beyond, and therefore even if we believe, we cling tenaciously to this existence, to sweet familiarity, fearful that all conceivable paradises will prove wanting by comparison."
Author: Dean Koontz

13. "Through our maps, we willingly become a part of their boundaries. If our home is included, we feel pride, perhaps familiarity, but always a sense that this is ours. If it is not, we accept our roles as outsiders, though we may be of the same mind and culture. In this way, maps can be dangerous and powerful tools."
Author: Debbie Lee Wesselmann

14. "I wanted to get that sense of peace and even boredom that comes with long familiarity."
Author: Debbie Reynolds

15. "Home was homeless. It could exist anywhere, because its only substance was familiarity."
Author: Diana Evans

16. "It's hard to part the curtains when the dark holds such familiarity."
Author: Donna Lynn Hope

17. "The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

18. "I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling."
Author: Jack Kerouac

19. "The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreakthat went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify(by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.Taip buna miškuose, jie visada atrodo pažistami, kadai prarasti, išbluke lyg seniai mirusio giminaicio veidas, tartum sena svajone, tarsi nuotrupa pamirštos dainos, plaukiancios virš vandens, o labiau už viska - tarsi auksines praejusios vaikystes amžinybes ar preejusios brandos, ir visa, kas gyva, visa, kas mire, visa širdgela, ištikusi prieš milijona metu, ir debesys, plaukiantys tau virš galvos, liudija savo vienišu artimumu ši jausma."
Author: Jack Kerouac

20. "Encouraged by this to a further examination of his opinions, she proceeded to question him on the subject of books; her favourite authors were brought forward and dwelt upon with so rapturous a delight, that any young man of five-and-twenty must have been insensible indeed, not to become an immediate convert to the excellence of such works, however disregarded before. Their taste was strikingly alike. The same books, the same passages were idolized by each -- or, if any difference appeared, any objection arose, it lasted no longer than till the force of her arguments and the brightness of her eyes could be displayed. He acquiesced in all her decisions, caught all her enthusiasm, and long before his visit concluded, they conversed with the familiarity of a long-established acquaintance."
Author: Jane Austen

21. "That Hollywood thing, where everybody hugs and kisses everybody else - I always stiffen. It's an assumed familiarity. It's phony."
Author: Jennifer Tilly

22. "She hated the implied familiarity when customers requested things from her by name..."
Author: Jennifer Weiner

23. "She looked a bit like a different person. It was weird. Just a few weeks away from home could rub the familiarity right off of someone."
Author: Jojo Moyes

24. "'Free' is more of that 'familiarity breeds contempt' kind of thing. It's about saying 'Wait, I'm longing for something more than I have and I don't know what it is that I want, but I know I want it.' It has nothing to do with what I'm going through, personally."
Author: Jon Crosby

25. "[...] these questions gave way, in the course of time, to a different preoccupation, namely, a slow and growing awareness of familiarity with the landscape into which she was being carried. A familiarity based not on the sighting of particular landmarks, but on her feeling that the very contours of the hills and fields, and the very shapes and colours of the buildings, now appeared as surviving monuments to the existence of a much earlier self whom she had long forgotten. She knew, of course, that they could not bring that self back to life, perish the thought, but they reminded her of it in a way which she did not find disagreeable."
Author: Jonathan Coe

26. "Anne's is a world very like this one, and you can move about in it with familiarity - but not freedom: it is a place of rigorous consequence, where the weak have to give way to the strong, where her governess heroine Agnes must walk as best she can in the cold shade of money and masculinity."
Author: Jude Morgan

27. "Initially, you continue doing what you used to do with her, out of familiarity, love, the need for a pattern. Soon, you realise the trap you are in: caught between repeating what you did with her, but without her, and so missing her; or doing new things, things you never did with her, and so missing her differently. You feel sharply the loss of shared vocabulary, of tropes, teases, short cuts, injokes, sillinesses, faux rebukes, amatory footnotes – all those obscure references rich in memory but valueless if explained to an outsider."
Author: Julian Barnes

28. "He went out with a variety of women, slept with some of them, hated the whole meaningless process. Drinks, dinners, plays and concerts and gallery openings ... He grew to despise the rigid formality of dating, missed the easy familiarity of simply being with someone, sharing friendly silences and unforced laughter."
Author: Ken Grimwood

29. "I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship."
Author: Laurence Sterne

30. "Small towns are sometimes like that; familiarity runs high, while regard for personal space is low, if nonexistent."
Author: Laurie Notaro

31. "Love should not make us blind to faults, nor familiarity make us too ready to blame the shortcomings we see."
Author: Louisa May Alcott

32. "Of course, the plea for respect for nonhuman life goes far beyond the scientific delight of familiarity with our planet mates. The nonhuman forms of life with which we 6,000 million talking, upright apes share this finite planet are directly or indirectly connected to our well-being."
Author: Lynn Margulis

33. "Though some choices may slow our journey, every path we take gives us more familiarity with how our actions affect the world around us, giving us more opportunities to learn how to help ourselves and others."
Author: Matthew Underwood

34. "Her fragility makes her uncomfortable, but it has a familiarity, too, like the biting cold of winter that you only half forget during other seasons."
Author: Meg Donohue

35. "So, for a variety of reasons, ranging from convenience to fear to economics, people stayed in their own neighborhood, loving it, enjoying the closeness, the friendliness, the familiarity, and trying to save enough money to move out."
Author: Mike Royko

36. "There was an awful lot to be said for familiarity, if you thought about it. It was an extremely underrated virtue, ignorable until the very moment that you were in danger of losing whatever or whoever it was that was familiar—a house, a view, a partner."
Author: Nick Hornby

37. "The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity."
Author: Noam Chomsky

38. "There's some familiarity in Celtic music, even if you've never heard that piece of music before."
Author: Nobuo Uematsu

39. "Advertising produces familiarity which produces sales"
Author: Paul Cookson

40. "[Poetry] strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bear the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms."
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

41. "Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle."
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

42. "Repetition and familiarity work. What is repeated becomes familiar, and this becomes a part of us. Our own culture understands this, but alas, not always the church. Far too many equate ritual with spiritual dryness. True, ritual and liturgy can be dead--even using the terms can raise hackles--but only when the significance and power of those rituals are forgotten. Spiritual death is not a property of ritual itself. To the contrary, ritual has always been and will always be a means of securing for future generations the power and reality of the gospel." (Peter Enns, Exodus, page 262)."
Author: Peter Enns

43. "I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music."
Author: Peter Maxwell Davies

44. "A label is a mask life wears. We put labels on life all the time. "Right," "wrong," "success," "failure," "lucky," "unlucky," may be as limiting a way of seeing things as "diabetic," "epileptic," "manic-depressive," or even "invalid." Labeling sets up an expectation of life that is often so compelling we can no longer see things as they really are. This expectation often gives us a false sense of familiarity toward something that is really new and unprecedented. We are in relationship with our expectations and not with life itself."
Author: Rachel Naomi Remen

45. "There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways."
Author: Richard Dawkins

46. "(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too."
Author: Robert M. Pirsig

47. "Within a week or two the calm returned between us, but something was missing. Dad could feel it, too. The first casualty of distrust, I learned, is familiarity. My father saw me as a slightly different person now."
Author: Ryan Knighton

48. "She considered what had made Denmark home to her anyway. Was it the sense of familiarity? That wherever she went there were echoes of a hundred memories she could pluck from her thoughts?"
Author: Sage Steadman

49. "Familiarity can provide the misguided illusion of understanding. Assume nothing."
Author: Truth Devour

50. "Children at once accept joy and happiness with quick familiarity, being themselves naturally all happiness and joy."
Author: Victor Hugo

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