Quotes About Mystification

Yet we wanted human feeling, gestures free from suspicion, some sympathetic if stammering articulation, half syllables of mystification, a temporary eternal.

Admissions of ignorance and temporary mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore unfortunate, to say the least, that the main strategy of creation propagandists is the negative one of seeking out gaps in scientific knowledge and claiming to fill them with 'intelligent design' by default.

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

Mystification is simple. Clarity is the hardest thing of all. You trust the mystifier more if you know his deliberately choosing not to be lucid. You would trust Picasso all the way because he could draw like Ingres.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

False worship, such as John portrays in the worship of the beast, is false precisely because its object is not the transcendent mystery, but only the mystification of something finite.

Not that I disapprove of women, except when they attempt to function as domestic animals. When they stick to the vocations for which they are best adapted, such as chicanery, sophistry, self-advertisement, cajolery, mystification, and incubation, they are sometimes superb creatures.

This book has two determinants: on the one hand, an ideological critique of the language of so-called mass culture; on the other, an initial semiological dismantling of that language: I had just read Saussure and emerged with the conviction that by treating "collective representations" as sign systems one might hope to transcend pious denunciation and instead account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit bourgeois culture into a universal nature.

They generally mistake emotional hunger for love. In effect, they hate us in practice and love us in theory and induce us to believe them when they define their hate as love. The consequent mystification, confusion and conflict continue to devastate marriages, families, and each generation of children.

A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

You felt like a beast, but you weren't simply one. Once you accepted the pregnancy was yours to bear, you did become vigilant. They were to grow. You were to tend them. But you were mystified by other women's joyfulness at your condition. You remembered overhearing, as a girl, their talk of how a young woman would hear a coo one day that would turn her soft and make her want a baby. Such a thing had never happened to you.

Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

As controlling officer, Bevan would become the mastermind of wartime deception, overseeing a worldwide web of deceit and mystification from the underground warren beneath Whitehall known as the Cabinet War Rooms.

Generally speaking, all the great events have been distorted, most of the important causes concealed, some of the principal characters never appear, and all who figure are so misunderstood and misrepresented, that the result is a complete mystification, and the perusal of the narrative about as profitable as reading the Republic of Plato or the Utopia if More.

There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.

I work with the people in the piazza, where there is reality. Here in Parliament, often there is a mystification of reality. They are not representatives of the people. They represent themselves and their own interests.

Thus 'falling in love' is no more than the process of alteration of male vision - through idealization, mystification, glorification - that renders void the woman's class inferiority.

Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn.

Santa mediated magically between parent and child--between the buyer and the recipient of the gifts. His presence was what took the gift out of the realm of commerce--in the eyes of parents, perhaps, as well as children. To phrase this in a more contemporary fashion, we might say that Santa 'mystified' consumption. He also mystified production and distribution.

El placer de la mistificación debía protegeros. Ésa fue de hecho nuestra estrategia, la de todos nosotros. Comprendimos desde hace mucho que ya no era posible subvertir el mundo, ni remodelarlo, ni detener su pobre huida hacia delante. Sólo había una resistencia posible: no tomarlo en serio.

not that I was too out of breath, but that I was, as it were, too alive, living too many lives at once, as if I were breathing for many men. In retrospect, this realization seems far from cogent, simply another layer of ontological mystification, but at the time it seemed akin to revelation.

The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.