A Quote by Italo Calvino

A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

Italo Calvino

Quote Topics

Background Background Noise Classic Even Holds Incompatible Noise Present Sway Totally Which Work

Quote Author

Italo Calvino
Italian - Journalist
October 15, 1923 - September 19, 1985

While everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates.... For I can see in the midst of death, life persists, in the midst of untruth, truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists.

Mahatma Gandhi

The great disadvantage of our present electoral system is that it freezes the pattern of politics, and holds together the incompatible because everyone assumes that if a party splits it will be electorally slaughtered

Roy Jenkins

One of the things that make Liars so fascinating after five albums, each one so completely different from the others, is that even though they play around with all the classic tropes of art-damaged angst-noise perv-rock, they exude a totally cheery and boyish enthusiasm onstage, goofing around with their keyboards and beatboxes.

Rob Sheffield

There is a Silence that is totally impersonal. It is not the fruit of anybody’s work. Peace is there, but there is no peacekeeper. This Peace is only known when the noise of the person is not present. In the absence of the 'person' there are no distractions. Only the ever-pure Awareness prevails. The Ultimate is nobody’s achievement at all.

Mooji

The original 'Scream' is one of those classic things, but it totally pokes fun at itself too. It's never taking itself too seriously, which is why I think it's such a cult classic.

Shenae Grimes

Silence is helpful, but you don't need it in order to find stillness. Even when there is noise, you can be aware of the stillness underneath the noise, of the space in which the noise arises. That is the inner space of pure awareness, consciousness itself.

Eckhart Tolle

A classic liberal is more like a libertarian. I'm sorry. Classic liberal, actually, from the 1800s has a totally different meaning than a liberal who is [modern] classic.

Glenn Beck

Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy-since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.

Edgar Allan Poe

There are lots of reasons email persists, even as faster and simpler forms of communication proliferate and your personal communications likely have mostly migrated elsewhere. But one big one is that new types of media channels rarely totally kill off old ones, even though everyone predicts they will.

Walt Mossberg

Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.

William Zinsser

There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.

Chaim Potok

For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.