Vicarious Quotes

1. "You do not seem aware, for all of your knowledge of the great world I do not frequent, of the usual response which the productions of the Female Pen--let alone as in our case, the *hypothetick* productions--are greeted with. The best we may hope is--oh, it is excellently done--*for a woman.* And then there are Subjects we may not treat--things we may not know...We are not mere candleholders to virtuous thoughts--mere chalices of Purity--we think and feel, aye and *read*--which seems not to shock *you* in us, in me, though I have concealed from many the extent of my--vicarious--knowledge of human vagaries. Now--if there is a reason for my persistence in this correspondence--it is this very unawareness in you--real or assumed--of what a woman must be supposed to be capable of. This is to me--like a strong Bush, well-rooted is to the grasp of one falling down a precipice--here I hold--here I am stayed--"
Author: A.S. Byatt

2. "Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience."
Author: Albert Bandura

3. "Long after our cities are condemned and deserted, our city parks will stand as a testament of the serenity of our weekends to distant trespassers. As we wait in the bushes to embrace their heavy garments, the trespassers may think, cuddling themselves in their warm garments, ‘what a carefree people this was, a people much like ourselves before the cold.' The trespassers idealize us, unaware of the many serious life lessons the recreationist would have been confronted with on any given visit:- No feeding the geese. If a man doesn't know how to eat, he isn't fit to teach lesser beings.- Pick up your trash. The park is a place where your children vicariously display your own values, but cutely. It is not a dumping ground.- Keep off the grass. Because Sunday is not Sin-day. Take your blankets into the woods for that kind of summer fun."
Author: Benson Bruno

4. "My mother told me on several different occasions that she was livin' her dream vicariously through me. She once said that I was getting' to do all the things that she would have wanted to have done."
Author: Buck Owens

5. "She begins to feel that the reality show is the university she never attended. Vicarious reality. Emotion without a value-added tax. Movement without danger. Alma finds her reality. She no longer has a reason to put herself at risk and go out into the hostile, degrading world."
Author: Carlos Fuentes

6. "I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

7. "The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

8. "At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them."
Author: Clive Barker

9. "Napster's only alleged liability is for contributory or vicarious infringement. So when Napster's users engage in noncommercial sharing of music, is that activity copyright infringement? No."
Author: David Boies

10. "Stories serve multiple purposes. At a basic level they are great entertainment, which is essential for living a happy and healthy life, but on a deeper level stories help us explore issues that are otherwise difficult to address. On one hand a good book helps us escape our troubles, and on the other hand it can help us face up to those troubles by bringing real issues to the fore, often in a more manageable way, since the problems are experienced vicariously through the eyes of another."
Author: Dean F. Wilson

11. "A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt."
Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

12. "I don't have any tattoos - I live vicariously through my sister, Langley, who has many. If I can't stick to one ensemble, I don't think I could stick to one tattoo."
Author: Dree Hemingway

13. "If you've been married for 400 years, as I have, it's nice to experience first love again and you can vicariously through a book."
Author: E. L. James

14. "I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious."
Author: Elon Musk

15. "I feel like I've come out of this grown up, maybe because I live through the character vicariously and she grows up so much during the course of this story."
Author: Emmy Rossum

16. "Such a woman is called "Mother's FRIEND" always ready to give judicious Parental advice and living vicariously on the experience of others"
Author: Eric Berne

17. "At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain - as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

18. "I think when life gets heavy, people look for an escape. "The Love Boat" is an escape. We have happy endings. You don't see many of those around. I think it gave people a vicarious adventure."
Author: Gavin MacLeod

19. "I accept what I am, but I did not choose it. I experience human life in the only way I can, vicariously. I am a voracious consumer of books, tapes, holoplays, fictions and drama and histories of all sorts. I have experimented with dreamdust."
Author: George R.R. Martin

20. "If you're a good journalist, what you do is live a lot of things vicariously, and report them for other people who want to live vicariously."
Author: Harry Reasoner

21. "The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth. Tom says football guru Nick Hornby says in his book that men's obsession with football is not vicarious. The testosterone-crazed fans do not wish themselves on the pitch, claims Hornby, instead seeing their team as their chosen representatives, rather like parliament. That is precisely my feeling about Darcy and Elizabeth. They are my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or, rather, courtship. I do not, however, wish to see any actual goals. I would hate to see Darcy and Elizabeth in bed, smoking a cigarette afterwards. That would be unnatural and wrong and I would quickly lose interest."
Author: Helen Fielding

22. "History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him."
Author: Hilary Mantel

23. "You can not drop astronomy. To get through this semester, I must live vicariously through you and hear about Cam at least three days a week.""I'm not going to drop the class-" Even though I sort of wanted to. "-But I doubt I'm going to have anything to tell you. It's not like we're even going to talk again."Jacob let go of my arm and sat back, eyeing me. "Famous last words, Avery."
Author: J. Lynn

24. "The current understanding of happiness identifies it as a pleasurable feeling. Pleasant feelings are surely better than unpleasant ones, but the problem today is that people are obsessively concerned with feeling happiness; people are slaves to their feelings. Feelings are wonderful servants but terrible masters. When people make happiness their goal, they do not find it and, as a result, start living their lives vicariously through identification with celebrities."
Author: J.P. Moreland

25. "Civilization comes at a cost of manliness. It comes at a cost of wildness, of risk, of strife. It comes at a cost of strength, of courage, of mastery. It comes at a cost of honor. Increased civilization exacts a toll of virility, forcing manliness into further redoubts of vicariousness and abstraction"
Author: Jack Donovan

26. "No one who believes that Jesus died for man can doubt the validity and efficacy of vicarious ministration."
Author: James E. Talmage

27. "One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sports and gambled on it. He had never looked at that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe."
Author: James Jones

28. "Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love."
Author: John Irving

29. "But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously..."
Author: Julio Cortázar

30. "Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience."
Author: Leland Ryken

31. "Michelle would get picked up and bang someone anonymous stud in the bathroom, and i would sip my drink wishing i could go home and curl up with a book. i sigh. thats ok. she was my vicarious slutty friend. and for that i loved her"
Author: Marata Eros

32. "...she kept hoping Mulder and Scully would kiss each other well and good. Having a relationship vicariously through fantasy and excellent scripting was all Aggie had at the moment - and to be honest, it wasn't all that bad. Her imagination was always better than reality..."
Author: Marjorie M. Liu

33. "Books allowed her vicarious tastes of infinite variety, but they didn't supplant the need to venture out into the big and the messy. In fact, just the opposite. Books convinced her that something more existed---something intuitive, beyond reason---and they whetted her appetite to find it."
Author: Masha Hamilton

34. "I still buy nice pieces but, at the moment, they're presents for other people, so I only collect vicariously."
Author: Michael Aspel

35. "Mistakes are the best teachers. One does not learn from success. It is desirable to learn vicariously from other people's failures, but it gets much more firmly seared in when they are your own."
Author: Mohnish Pabrai

36. "I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others' sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do."
Author: Mother Jones

37. "The first time he consulted me, I caught a glimpse of my salvation. He made a gift to me of the very thing that I - too corrupted by my bourgeoise blood to renounce it- could not be, merely by tacitly agreeing to be my client, simply by frequenting my waiting room on a regular basis, with his ordinary docile manner of a patient who makes no fuss. Later he gave me another gift, magnanimously, that of his conversation. Worlds hitherto unknown to me suddenly appeared, and the very thing that my flame had always coveted so ardently, and had despaired of ever obtaining, was suddenly mine, thanks to him, vicariously."
Author: Muriel Barbery

38. "Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself."
Author: Neil DeGrasse Tyson

39. "I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea."
Author: Neil Peart

40. "(A murderer about their victim:)"He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing."
Author: P.D. James

41. "Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God's great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it."
Author: Richard J. Foster

42. "When a person reaches the end of a book and says, 'I want to read that again,' what he's actually saying is that he wants to mentally merge with his favorite character and stroll among all the other creative personalities, feeding a hungry imagination through the vicarious reliving of each and every wild chapter that stirred his emotions, the whole while surrendering to a safe yet daring existence where any crazy, hopeful thing can and does happen. That's all."
Author: Richelle E. Goodrich

43. "We live vicariously through stories, because our own lives provide so few opportunities for high-stakes adventure and noble sacrifice."
Author: Sarah Cross

44. "Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed."
Author: Terry Tempest Williams

45. "It's all about escapism. That's essentially what all movies are about. It's a vicarious thrill."
Author: Todd Phillips

46. "Living organisms were not independently created, but have descended and diversified over time from common ancestors. And thus, no other biological theory so elegantly explains this. Evolutionary theory has withstood the test of time—by way of vicarious experimentation, observation, analysis, and relentless criticism, though opposing viewpoints still cling to the concept of "design." As a person of the biological sciences, I cannot subscribe to such misguided notions that suggest static biological states. Clearly, proper examination of the natural world reveal evolutionary trajectories—some random, others nonrandom—and all having observable genetic implications. It is only when we apply evolutionary explanations to living systems that it becomes ever so clear. The world was not specifically designed with us in mind, but rather we long since adapted and conformed to our surroundings, only giving it the illusionary appearance of "design."
Author: Tommy Rodriguez

47. "We get one chance at this life. We have one body, one mind, and one life to live. Reading provides us with a vicarious experience of others' lives."
Author: Tony Reinke

48. "What made Jesus' death uncommon, unusual? It was the dying of the just for the unjust. It was His sacrificial dying, His vicarious dying. He paid a debt He did not owe in behalf of the others too deeply in debt ever to pay."
Author: Tozer A.W.

49. "We haven't remained idle, twiddling our thumbs while you were off having a good time. Through books Cathy and I have lived a zillion lives . . . our vicarious way to feel alive."
Author: V.C. Andrews

50. "The central ideas of Christianity, an angry God and vicarious atonement, are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present stage of enlightenment, absurd, preposterous, and blasphemous propositions."
Author: Virchand Gandhi

Vicarious Quotes Pictures