Top 63 Layman Quotes & Sayings

We do not wish to abolish teaching and to make every man his own master, but if the curates will not teach the gospel, the layman must have the Scripture, and read it for himself, taking God for his teacher.

There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.

Every interview I do, when I'm asked about scientific issues, I say I'm not a climate scientist. I'm just giving you the informed layman's perspective... .

We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.

His head was boiled, impaled upon a pole and raised above London Bridge. So ended the life of Thomas More, one of the few Londoners upon whom sainthood has been conferred and the first English layman to be beatified as a martyr.

A critic is a person who rationalizes his likes and dislikes in such impressive language that the layman thinks he is reasoning instead of rationalizing.

Fighting is spiritual. It appears to be physical from the layman's eyes. In my fights, I seemed to be angry and mad - all that stuff you saw me doing, the yelling and screaming and being mean in the ring - but I'm cool as a cucumber. I can hear everybody talking around me outside of the ring. I can see everybody. I know what is going on.

It seems that there's a constant humbling - I don't know if that's the right word - because things are disproved all the time with new discoveries, at least that's the way it feels sometimes in the layman's world. Like, people will make proclamations of something to be true, and then 50 years later that's proven wrong because there's something else.

The right to be heard would be, in many cases, of little avail if it did not comprehend the right to be heard by counsel. Even the intelligent and educated layman has small and sometimes no skill in the science of law.

In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt reminded us that the Constitution is, and I quote, "a layman's document, not a lawyer's contract."

Any man who is intelligent must, on considering that health is of the utmost value to human beings, have the personal understanding necessary to help himself in diseases, and be able to understand and to judge what physicians say and what they administer to his body, being versed in each of these matters to a degree reasonable for a layman.

Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must believe?

The lawyers' contribution to the civilizing of humanity is evidenced in the capacity of lawyers to argue furiously in the courtroom, then sit down as friends over a drink or dinner. This habit is often interpreted by the layman as a mark of their ultimate corruption. In my opinion, it is their greatest moral achievement: It is a characteristic of humane tolerance that is most desperately needed at the present time.

The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional.

I went to see Alison Krauss and Union Station at Disney Hall and I would say it was one of the most astonishing sonic experiences I have had. It's an enormous room that's acoustically perfect. My interpretation of receiving music as a layman is that the way the music kind of settled on me in that room was perfection.

My favourite writers are always great storytellers, like Bruce Springsteen; I adore Bruce Springsteen. I feel like he doesn't beat around the bush, and he doesn't overcomplicate things. He puts things into layman's terms and tells stories that anyone can understand.

To put it in layman's terms, crazy is crazy. And crazy will find a way to do something crazy. Racist is racist. And racist people will find a way to project their racism onto the world.

Sometimes when you're listening to a neuroscientist, they have a tendency to use a particular type of jargon that works in their world perfectly but that would lose the average layman.

Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.

Democracy - or any improvement on it - will rest on the layman's right to criticize. His criticism will be often - very often - damn silly, but if, like Plato and the Fascists, we take away his right to criticize, we take away his right to appreciate.

My mother is a Senior Casualty Claims Specialist I, which in layman's terms means the head insurance adjuster!

If you are not a psychiatrist, stay away from idiots. They are too stupid to pay a layman for his company.

When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault.

The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.

I'm a bit of a layman physics junkie. I don't really understand it, but I love trying to understand it.

The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.

Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that 'language' themselves just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs. Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way.

Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.

The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman's alchemy. . . . The magic of everyday things.

BERTRAND RUSSELL, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism We've associated that word philosophy with academic study that in its own way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read contemporary philosophy you've no clue, because it's almost become math. And it's odd that if you don't do that and you call yourself a philosopher that you always get 'homespun' attached to it.

I am the public, a boy from Chandigarh who's bought tickets in black and revered films since childhood, and when I choose scripts, I take out the garb of an actor-slash-star, and I consume the script as a layman.

I was called before the king's tribunal like a layman and was deserted in the quarter where I had looked for support. My brethren, the bishops, sided with the court and were ready to pronounce judgment against me.

I'm not the guy who will sit in a room with somebody who's using a bunch of big words and just act like I know what they're talking about, or sit on set with somebody and they'll be trying to explain something and not using layman's terms and I'll just say, "Hey, excuse me, what do you mean by that? Explain to me so I just understand."

Isolated, so-called "pretty theorems" have even less value in the eyes of a modern mathematician than the discovery of a new "pretty flower" has to the scientific botanist, though the layman finds in these the chief charm of the respective sciences.

The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.

The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.

From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary.

If physics is too difficult for the physicists, the nonphysicist may wonder whether he should try at all to grasp its complexities and ambiguities. It is undeniably an effort, but probably one worth making, for the basic questions are important and the new experimental results are often fascinating. And if the layman runs into serious perplexities, he can be consoled with the thought that the points which baffle him are more than likely the ones for which the professionals have not found satisfactory answers.

The search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where God wants him to be a pupil. What he wants from the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise- does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.

There was on section in First Corinthians 13 that talks about (showing) patience, kindness, politeness, how can I demonstrate forgiveness to my children and more fully enjoy them as they're growing up and vice versa. And so, each of those has a day's journey. There are 40 days that people will go through in applying these biblical principles for their kids. We spell them out in layman's terms so it's really easy to grasp a principle.

I treat everyone equally whether you are an intellectual, a layman or an auto driver.

A simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it

You simply collapsed, sir. In layman's terms, your body revoked its permission for you to continue heaping abuse upon it.

Making mathematics accessible to the educated layman, while keeping high scientific standards, has always been considered a treacherous navigation between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public misunderstanding.

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

I am no theologian. I am a layman. I am among those who are preached to, and who listen. It is not for me to preach. I should not willingly forego being a listener, a man who reads the Gospels and then listens to what others say that our Lord meant. But sometimes a listener speaks out, and listens to his own voice.

The key to understanding my career is that I was never into technology. From the beginning, I brought an outsider's point of view, which is why I write for a layman's publication.

There's something very satisfying about old cameras because they're ingenious. I mean when you take them apart and actually see, 'Oh, this is how we make photographs,' it's an ingenious thing, but it feels like it's in a way a layman can appreciate, whereas a digital camera, I don't even begin to know what goes into making a digital camera.

It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'.

The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven't given the experience itself. They had set themselves up as a sort of interpreter to the layman... Our interest is in a form where you realize that the media are just perception.

I consider myself a good layman's cook. Ninety percent of the time, I'm successful with what I set out to make, and I can improvise. Yes, I own a mandoline. Yes, we have a Vitamix.

Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate that we have been watching an ice age approach for some time without realizing what we are seeing... Scientists predict that it will cause great snows which the world has not seen since the last ice age thousands of years ago.

The best book on programming for the layman is 'Alice in Wonderland'; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

That I am a monk and you are a layman is of no importance ... rather that we are both in the light of the Holy Spirit ... Acquire peace, and thousands around you will be saved.

Photography is to the layman perhaps the most enticing art. As a buff and a follower, at a respectful distance, I find myself like others, having the heart of a Steiglitz with hands that sometimes seem impeded by boxing gloves. What is exasperating is that one can feel closer to managing the skills of photography than most other arts, and yet be a long hop, skip and delusional way from it.

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling. ... Though to the layman, the world revealed by the chemist may seem more commonplace, it is not so to him. Each new insight into how the atoms in their interactions express themselves in structure and transformations, not only of inanimate matter, but particularly also of living matter, provides a thrill.