Top 960 Recurring Themes Quotes & Sayings - Page 15

When I make film music, I'm a filmmaker first and foremost. It's about serving the needs of the film. You're telling a story; in a way, you stop becoming a composer and become a storyteller instead. You tell the story with the most appropriate themes. How you approach these things is a very personal matter, but your goal is to tell the story first.

We take it for granted that Jesus was not interested in political life: his mission was purely religious. Indeed we have witnessed . . . the 'iconization' of the life of Jesus: 'This is a Jesus of hieratic, stereotyped gestures, all representing theological themes. In this way, the life of Jesus is no longer a human life, submerged in history, but a theological life -- an icon.

I think there are lots of things that people think are so different but they're not. People think there is a huge difference between hip hop and country music, but there is really not when you start looking into themes and what people are struggling with or celebrating. When you break it down to the chords and the beats it is all the same. Personally, I am obsessed with music as it is a limitless tunnel that you can explore.

We need games like 'A Closed World' for many reasons. When you hear another developer talk about how games need to grow up, they need to tackle adult themes, and how they need to embrace that ability to transport the player into a different world, this is that game that they want other developers to make.

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

One of the favorite conservative themes is that the cure for poverty is more marriage and earlier marriage. We hear that all the time; there have been billions of dollars now, between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, which has continued the marriage education program, on trying to get more people to get married.

I think most comedians go through that (period), where you have to change or evolve. You don't want to just keep doing variations on the same themes. And, besides, it would look kinda creepy for a guy my age to be doing stuff that, like, a 20-year-old would do. 'Yeah, this is bullshit!' It's, like, 'Really? You don't have bigger concerns at this point in your life?'

Tribeca Film Festival Doha will promote Middle Eastern themes and filmmakers, but not exclusively. Approximately 40 films will be presented at the new Museum of Islamic Art and in cinemas across Doha. Innovative work by established filmmakers will be shown alongside the debuts of newly discovered directing talents.

To begin... To begin... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay, so I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana-nut. That's a good muffin.

One of the themes of 'The Longest War,' my book, which came out before the Arab spring happened, was how al-Qaida and bin Laden was losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world, not because the United States was winning them, but because al-Qaida was simply losing them.

I think Bergman's films have eternal relevance, because they deal with the difficulty of personal relationships and lack of communication between people and religious aspirations and mortality, existential themes that will be relevant a thousand years from now. When many of the things that are successful and trendy today will have been long relegated to musty-looking antiques, his stuff will still be great.

What I find interesting and heartening, though, is that there does seem to be a shift in the subject matter being written about by women that is doing well in the culture. We're seeing more women writing dystopian fiction, more women writing novels set post-apocalyptic settings, subjects and themes that used to be dominated by men.

In some ways, Lotus Eaters is a journey disguised as a party film; there's a circus in the movie, and there are parties, but the real story is of an internal journey. There's themes of emptiness and excess and beauty and grief around it, but it's always surrounded by these glamorous events, and those are ways of waylaying her on her journey in the same way that it is in the ancient Greek story.

The thing that I think a director has to have in order to make a movie really work, and to certainly make a film that feels personal, which I hope this one does, is that you have to have a sense of the feeling that you want to create in people, the tone which you want to tell the story, and the basic themes you want to come out. You can't compromise on those because you are then not making the movie that you are going to be good at telling.

The privilege I've had over 15 movies over a very long time has been to make movies that were ambitious or grown-up, complex, that had themes in them that were sometimes political, sometimes challenging, to make these movies on a scale.

What do we really want to say to the world? Three main themes. The inability to find completion in our modern society, the inability to find completion within ourselves, and the new way to be human in what Christ offers us - His love and His perfect plan of redemption for us.

Blackness is an ocean, a universe, a possibility that can never be exhausted. And so we have to constantly reaffirm the necessity of excavation, of archiving and curating, but also exploring, and understanding afresh and learning for the first time what it is that we need to know, and what the limits and boundaries are, and what the themes and preoccupations should be, and what the redemptive character of that erudition is. I find myself in the exciting position of doing all that, and at the same time having the obligation to explain to white people what the deal is.

I actually think history doesn't repeat itself. There are recurrent themes, but they're repeated with variations. Each time there's an immigration crisis, a threat from outside which is met with inhospitable wall building, it's different. And I think it's helpful to notice the big patterns in history, but it's also important to pay attention to the details, which makes each situation distinct from another.

The potential beauty of human life is constantly made ugly by man's ever recurring song of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever rising tides of revenge. Man has never risen above the injunction of the lex talionis: "Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." In spite of the fact that the law of revenge solves no social problems, men continue to follow its disastrous leading. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path.

My most recent project has been acting and dancing on VH1's TV series Hit the Floor. On the show, we perform at least one dance number an episode. They are all different themes and different dance styles and keep us literally on our toes. The show is exuberant, exciting, and full of scandal. Tune in and I know you'll get addicted.

If modern design moved the stage picture away from the specific, tangible, illusionistic world of Romanticism and Realism into a generalized, theatrical, and poetic realm in which the pictorial image functioned as an extension of the playwright's themes and structures (a metanarrative), then postmodern design is a dissonant reminder that no single point of view can predominate, even within a single image.

I read Norman Lock’s The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain’s original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy—and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America’s greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive.

Women have always been healers. Cultural myths from around the world describe a time when only women knew the secrets of life and death, and therefore they alone could practice the magical art of healing... The emergence of women whose consciousness blends with the ancient themes of healing is the single most promising event in health care.

You can be horrified by the state of the prisons, the misery in certain neighborhoods of its cities, or their level of poverty. Anti-Americanism, by which I mean a hatred for America as such-its transformation into a metaphysical category, which incarnates all the evil in the world-is one of fascism's favorite themes. Look at writer and political theorist Charles Maurras in France. The philosopher Martin Heidegger in Germany. The radical Islamists of today!

The classic war movies of the post-Vietnam era have generally taken on grand, philosophical themes: the meaninglessness of war, the grinding down of man by the machine - the machine being war itself, represented by someone like Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in 'Full Metal Jacket,' the sadistic marine who turns his boys into instruments of death.

I'm always writing something. I've got so much stuff, I don't know what to do with it. Some of it will be Strokes, some of it will be I don't know what - stuff for pop singers. TV themes. I've got a jar stuffed with songs, all these ideas that are just me humming into a recording device.

I genuinely was just such a fan of the books. When I heard that this was on the cards, I've got to do this; I've got to get involved with this. I'm such a Philip Pullman fan and actually his philosophies, morals and the way he looks at the world. He does what he does brilliantly as a writer. He writes children's stories with major adult themes and major ideas about making the right choices.

The themes in my books, like in life, are about grace and redemption and you never know when they're going to show up and what form they're going to be in. Stories emerge from keeping your heart open to the people that cross in front of you or the dogs or the mice, and their ability to open you up and enrich your life.

I did a cake for the 60th birthday of Elton John, for Britney Spears' 27th birthday and for the 'Circus' album she put out - the cake had circus themes. I prepared a cake for a surprise 82nd birthday event for the architect Frank Gehry; the cake was comprised of mini-replicas of his buildings.

Whatever is being investigated, created or produced now, in movies or TV, needs to consider the context in which it is being distributed. It's not a vacuum. There are certain universal themes of love, conflict, loyalty or family that are everlasting and that need to be presented in a way that makes it feel relevant, even if it's a period piece. You need to consider what context that film, that story and those characters are being seen in.

... the job [at the Manhattan Institute] gives me a platform where I can focus on the themes that I explored in both Gusher of Lies and Power Hungry: that the myths about "green" energy are largely just that, myths; that hydrocarbons are here to stay; and that if we are going to pursue the best "no regrets" policy with regard to energy, then we should be avidly promoting natural gas and nuclear energy.

I think that my music is really honest and I think I have something to say. The world revolves around so much negativity that I feel we really need something positive right now. I think people need to be encouraged to strive after those things that seem impossible. That is one of the common themes that runs through my record.

Themes don't change very much in story telling, and I think each writer has his or her own territory; however, I think craft and style take a lot of time to develop. I don't think there's any other way to develop your own style without reading your betters.

I do read some of the scripts from America and, even though the themes or subject of the film is very interesting, and some of the scenes are very interesting, there is a tendency that they have to explain everything. There will be no dilemma. This guy was evil, and this girl was very sweet. And in the end, we'd have to see eight endings because we'd also have to know what happened to the uncle. It's like, "Are you kidding me?!"

What gets made that's considered for men - it's really just T&A stuff. It's not stuff than any guy I know really wants to watch, you know, the stuff with jiggling boobs and all that. Something with real sort of male themes and male strength and things I want to watch in a drama.

I don't really wanna think about themes. I wanna just think about the experience of the movie. I feel like, as soon as I reduce it to a theme, once I write that sentence, it won't be that great. I feel like there's more potential for it to mean something interesting if I'm not forcing it to mean something I've already decided.

It's not necessarily a church theme and it's not really about church. I like my album themes to be metaphors because it gives me the freedom to speak about something else that's going on in my life, so the Born Sinner thing is not about church, it's not even about religion. It's using that as canvas to get other messages across and that's what the album will be.

Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an origincal affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a political history of truth would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free--nor error servile--but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this.

The fourth paradigm forces us at every point to discern between the creationally valid and the sinfully perverse and thus confronts us with a never-ending task which requires not only competence but also spiritual discernment. Yet this is precisely the task which we must assume, even at the risk of being vague on specifics. The alternative is to compromise basic themes of authentic Christianity.

We're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works - groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless - have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end.

The weirdest thing I've been fascinated with nowadays is the new contemporary country music, which to me sounds like very strange '70s pop, and sometimes like rock music. But some of the themes in there - maybe it's because I know how the songs were written, but it really does sound like it was written by two or three people, with the idea to appeal to the most general audience.

The trouble is that when you read criticisms about the other films that I've made you get the impression that they're all about themes, or problems, or ideas. But those are actually things that develop out of characters, out of images and out of other things. These more abstract things develop while working on the material, and out of it. It's not a theoretical exercise from the outset.

The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?

I have an idea and a first line -- and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what I’m going to say, or where it’s going. I have some idea of how long it’s going to be -- but not what will happen or what the themes will be. That’s the intrigue of doing it -- it’s a process of discovery. You get to discover what you’re going to say and what it’s going to mean.

I had Paterson, and The Art Lover, to guide me for The Tales of Horror (written from 1988-'97 and published in 1999), but I still was so lost, back then, as I tried to understand what I was writing and how it went together. There was a draft of that manuscript that had all these brightly colored paper clips on the pages so I could visualize what I saw as the book's themes and threads - that was a long time ago.

The thing that I think a director has to have in order to make a movie really work, and to certainly make a film that feels personal, is that you have to have a sense of the feeling that you want to create in people, the tone which you want to tell the story, and the basic themes you want to come out. You can't compromise on those because you are then not making the movie that you are going to be good at telling.

Neither loss of father, nor loss of mother, dear as she was to Mr Thornton, could have poisoned the remembrance of the weeks, the days, the hours, when a walk of two miles, every step of which was pleasant, as it brought him nearer and nearer to her, took him to her sweet presence - every step of which was rich, as each recurring moment that bore him away from her made him recal some fresh grace in her demeanour, or pleasant pungency in her character.

Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world. You're just trying to make a love letter, a gift.

You have so much more time to observe and learn with a documentary because of the time between the shoots. You get a much deeper understanding of day-to-day life and its themes. It's also much more of a mess after three years; you have to comb it out carefully and see what fits together and makes sense.

I really am just trying to tell stories. But stories are often grounded in larger events and themes. They don't have to be - there's a big literature of trailer-park, kitchen-table fiction that's just about goings-on in the lives of ordinary people - but my own tastes run toward stories that in addition to being good stories are set against a backdrop that is interesting to read and learn about.

I'm very surprised at Carol didn't get a best picture. Todd Haynes is an Academy darling, his period pieces are nothing short of brilliant, and they hold up. And I definitely feel like Carol speaks to, even though it's set in the past, it speaks to themes we're dealing with in life right now. It's really really shocking that it didn't get it.

Too many politicians are shifting the critical themes of our national conversations from a 'big ideas' American Brand Platform to narrowly focused, polarizing sound bites that put party philosophy before what used to be heralded as the common good. These ideas, more often than not, divide us rather than serve to bind us.

Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world.

I think we all have a certain number of "coming of age" songs, and then a writer has to expand and grow into more varied and specific themes. And the music industry is, like Jawbreaker says, "selling kids to other kids," so it makes sense that those early songs in a writer's life are often the ones that catch people's ears, and later work is more difficult and less immediate.

I think that when you're exploring themes of humanity and what defines a hero and what makes us our best self and what makes us our worst self, you're going to stumble into territories of societal issues and that kind of thing. Sometimes you have accidents where you're not trying, but then the opportunity just presents itself. and you lean into it.

Life can be unsettling. Writers have always gravitated to conflict, unhappiness and disturbing themes. We as readers would get bored pretty quickly if stories were about all the pleasant things in life. Since we know our troubles are always coming we want to see in our fiction examples of how others have dealt with them.

The specifics of the platform, I don`t think, are necessarily going to be written by Bernie Sanders, but the themes of the platform are going to be written by Bernie Sanders.

When I write what publishers call 'fantasy' I am writing in what I think is the most important tradition of fiction: starting with Homer and up through Shakespeare and Milton, the most important themes to tackle are those of the mythopoeic domain, tales of the body and mind seen through a temperament and a cosmos divorced from current reality so what is said can be more clear.

I think what's fun of making a Transformers movie is that it gets to be all of the above. I think, thematically, this movie is ... because of the third movie, you can ask questions in this movie you couldn't ask in the previous films. Like I was referring to the fact that they were abandoned by humans in the previous film; their attitude is different, so we've been able to tackle different themes.