Quotes About Minutiae

Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things, not about facts but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust because nothing is ever certain.

Just because I am paying attention to politics and culture doesn't mean that I should be talking about the health-care bill, talking about the minutiae.

We could write a completely new manual incorporating all our new policies and spelling out the emerging philosophy behind them. Or we could do away with the old manual and not just replace it. That way we would force people to make decisions based on common sense…We tried to write new rules. We really did. But at every turn we found ourselves wading into a swamp of minutiae.

In the business of politics, emotions and productive dissatisfaction with the world in which we live today are gradually being covered up by the minutiae of ordinary life.

Time is the nervous system of narration, whether factual or fictive. If it gets confused some of the minutiae of human nature are certain not to work, not to glow, not to strike home.

If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.

Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and--prayer.

Mais il faut prier n'importe où, et dans la nature en particulier. Dans la nature il y a cet ordre de la création qui me fascine. Quand je pense que les bourgeons se mettent en place au mois de septembre pour que les lilas fleurissent au mois de mai! C'est prodigieux! C'est merveilleux. Pour moi cette organisation de la nature, à la fois visible et invisible, si minutieuse et si riche, ne peut venir que de Dieu.

Some directors don't get involved in the cinematography and are just about story, but I'm definitely more tactile than that in terms of my involvement in the minutiae.

The thing you think is going to be huge ends up not being huge at all, and the most minute thing you do is talked about for the rest of your life, so I try not to have any expectations at all. I think that helps, if you're just focusing on the project at hand.

You theoretically have so much more time at home, but you fill it with the minutiae that you somehow managed to avoid when you were working.

I've never met a detail I didn't like.

Football is like that, it's details.

Scientists and academics in particular focus on detail and the minutiae. When they talk to each other, they usually don't focus on the broad ideas; they don't focus on social interconnectedness. They focus on the task that they're doing.

In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part, For the gods see everywhere

I tend to worry about the minutiae of life. But living in the mountains of Idaho and having retreated from fame, I am more in tune with life.

I feel like with a movie you know your whole journey, and even though little minutiae might change, you're able to get a better idea of where you're going, whereas TV is engaging a different side of your brain.

The essentialized approach is the opposite of that practiced by today's academic establishment, who reject system-building—that is, broad integration—in favor of the analysis of minutiae. I am as far from today's philosophy departments as an atheist is from the pope or, in more positive terms, as a man who wants to live is from an ascetic writhing in the desert. My explanation of today's philosophers is offered below, in my discussion of the D2 mentality.

The smaller the detail the greater the value.

The devil is in the detail.

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

Another might have missed the tension, but she had trained him in the Bene Gesserit Way - in the minutiae of observation.

Let specialists obsess about minutiae. Soros's motto was "Invest first, investigate later.

The true painter must be able, before an infinite panorama, to limit himself to reproducing a single ant.