Quotes About Figure

So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, "What is that difference?" I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there's the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter.

I think my favorite scenes [in Night Music] are the ones that kind of happen when the handsome Englishman shows up.. He doesn't quite figure out she is from the 1920s because he doesn't really figure out she is a ghost, because she has manifested into physical form.

There's so many things happening with computers and what-not, where we may be able to live until 150 and even longer, but if the planet's not here for us to live on it, if we burn ourselves out from global warming and everything else, if we don't figure that out, if we don't figure out an alternative form of energy, I think we're in big, fat trouble.

Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.

The trick [in comedy] is always to figure out how real you're playing it and how real it's supposed to feel. That's a hard thing to figure out.

The way I figure it, we know we got this world, so live in this one while you’re here. I figure the next one will take care of itself.

The same goes for the refugees. Mrs.[Indira] Gandhi says ten million. It's obvious she started with that figure in order to legalize her offensive and invade East Pakistan. But when we invited the United Nations to check, the Indians were opposed. Why were they opposed? If the figure were exact, they shouldn't have been afraid of its being verified.

We also don't always know what we want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it's actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a hundred of them.

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.

Bob Dylan had been a big sort of presence in my life but I'd never quite registered what he was trying to tell me. He was always this kind of figure, a sort of bear-like figure in the corner of the room. You know, every time I imagined what Bob Dylan looked like, he looked a bit like Steve Earl used to look - with the beard.

Educate yourself. Understand what you're dealing with. Then figure out how to fight it. Then figure out how to raise money for that fight. It'll help you cope. It'll help your child.

It's difficult to talk to people who whisper even at home, afraid of Americans eavesdropping on them. It's not a figure of speech, not a joke, I'm serious.

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution. (OK, it doesn't take a genius, or even a politician, to figure out that big changes are afoot when we have a medium that lets someone throw up a virtual storefront on the Web and instantly gain access to the global market.)

What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.

I don't have to figure out how God is going to solve my problem. I don't have to understand how He's going to bring it to pass. That's His responsibility. My job is to simply believe that He will.

On a movie set that works, you have your father figure, the director, you have your siblings, your other actors.

Filmmaking is like any kind of art form. You have to try to figure it out, and you're going to do that by trying. It's like teaching a child to walk. It may start by walking, but eventually it will fall. And I have kids, but I know that that will enable them to stand up again and understand why they fell, and how they can avoid that. They will walk better and faster, and stronger. Filmmaking is the same.

She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.

Don't get ahead of yourself. Companies need time to figure out what they want to be.

Turn off your email; turn off your phone; disconnect from the Internet; figure out a way to set limits so you can concentrate when you need to, and disengage when you need to. Technology is a good servant but a bad master.

I don't take off as many days as most other producers and songwriters, so I'm working every single day, and I do songs every day. So it's just about finding time, scheduling, getting in and cutting the records. I make it happen and that's the name of the game. It's no excuses - you gotta figure it out.

After I discovered my degree in photojournalism would only get me a job in a camera store, I taught myself lighting. I read tons of magazines and books and studied the photos trying to figure out how they were done. I bought some flash equipment and played around until I figured out how to make a subject look as I envisioned it should look.

A lot of times, when you're acting, you have to explain things to the audience, and it's boring work to do that. It's really hard to make that interesting. I like the discovery of characters. I think people are smart. Audiences are intelligent and can figure things out by just watching behaviors.

The biggest problem is getting beyond the "you can't" syndrome. The moment you figure that out, you're on your way to flying. Anyone who cannot see problems around him or herself is utterly blind. All the problems sitting there are an invitation for you to be creative, make use of your skills and resources and find a solution.

I'm six-foot-five. I'm not going to win the gold medal in figure skating. But I can try, and that's what matters. Trying.

I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three.

During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at-bats a season. That means I played 7 years without ever hitting the ball.

A lot of those old ideas are dying with the people who created them, and there's this new generation of filmmaker that's saying, "We're in this together, these are issues that we all deal with, let's just present issues to screen without bias and figure out what the audience has to say about them."

Part of the reason I'm writing it is to try to figure out what that is myself. It's not like I came back from Iraq and said, "We need to have a conversation, I know exactly what it is." It was just this sort of sense of something missing and then trying to write toward what that was, and to solicit from other people a sense of what that might be.

Age, what is it? It's not a figure that has ever meant anything to me.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

You are the master of your environment. You've got your own head, your own mind. So once you figure out what you want for yourself, you have to create the proper environment to make sure you can live out all the things you want.

I always tell girls who say they want to start a band but don't have any talent, well, neither do I. I mean, I can carry a tune, but anyone who picks up a bass can figure it out. You don't have to have magic unicorn powers. You work at it, and you get better. It's like anything- You sit there and do it every day, and eventually you get good at it.

Ignorant men differ from beasts only in their figure.

If we could just figure out how to have more fun at it, maybe more of us would join the ranks of those who seek after justice and mercy.

Boxing kept me out of the streets, by giving me something to do. And it gave me a father figure in the coach that was there for me. I just reiterated what my mother was trying to teach me about focusing and getting my life together.

I am very happy. Extremely, blissfully so. Even in my pain, I'm happy. I like crying. It makes me feel alive. Challenges, when you're in a tumultuous situation, are an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to get closer to God, an opportunity to find and kind of reform yourself, and to figure out what really matters and what your priorities are. Not that I'm welcoming tribulation, but I find that it is beneficial.

It’s more that I’m afraid of time. And not having enough of it. Time to figure out who I’m supposed to be… to find my place in the world before I have to leave it. I’m afraid of what I’ll miss.

Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.

I like to work around identification for the audience, and when there's a grown-up or a moral figure or something like that, people tend to go there.

All the rejection that I've been through only made me stronger, and it's part of being an entrepreneur. You kind of have to take the kid gloves off and let them feel it because it's not going to be the first time that someone's going to say "no" or close a door in your face. You're going to have to figure out how to burst through it.

Anonymous sources are to journalism what silicon enhancements are to the feminine figure; they look impressive to the gullible, but something doesn't feel right.

I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don't know.

As a writer, you know what the purpose of the scene is. It really has nothing to do with the actor so you have to really get out of that space because for actors it's a micro-focus and then you figure out your arc through what the writers have given you to say. But that arc is just one little piece of the huge arc of the whole film. It took a while to get out of that.

When I was 26, 27 years old I was running a kitchen in New York, and I was a raving lunatic. The older you get, you figure out you don't need to do that. You realize at a certain point, there's a certain gravity to what you say and what you do. If that's not enough, all the yelling in the world is not going to matter.

Steve [Jobs'] brilliance is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put it into the context of his design methodology - everything is design.

Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both.

I think that if you do the best you can in your life, you get your just reward. You sometimes give up a great deal to achieve a plane you're looking for. But if you find that it's important enough, then you do it. You have to decide. Even when you figure you've given up a great deal to get a small amount of something, the pain is only there for a short time. It really goes away. Whatever the quandary, it leaves you.