Gestures famous quotes
05-15-2025
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Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.
-- Andrew Eldritch -
We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.
-- Anne Enright -
Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world.
-- Anthony Bourdain -
Everybody uses mime and gesture in real life, though we don't realize it. It's very useful as a performance technique, though it can be boring to watch on its own.
-- Anthony Daniels -
Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it.
-- Augustus Baldwin Longstreet -
I remember very clearly someone saying, 'Don't shake hands with the cactus,' and I thought, 'Well, why not? What could possibly go wrong?' Shaking hands is a friendly gesture.
-- Benedict Cumberbatch -
It is hard for me to imagine that I felt good about behaving like that. I also remember that the smallest gesture of affection would bring a lump to my throat, whether it was directed at me or at someone else. Sometimes all it took was a scene in a movie. This juxtaposition of callousness and extreme sensitivity seemed suspicious even to me.
-- Bernhard Schlink -
Outcomes rarely turn on grand gestures or the art of the deal, but on whether you've sent someone a thank-you note.
-- Bernie Brillstein -
Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one.
-- Brian Morton -
I really like the structure of my body. It moves well, it looks good, it photographs well, it understands gesture and nuance.
-- Carrie Mae Weems -
I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from.
-- Charles Lamb -
My method is to find a word with a gesture.
-- Christian Morgenstern -
Sometimes a slow gradual approach does more good than a large gesture.
-- Craig Newmark -
A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.
-- Damon Galgut -
There is only one way to receive transmission. When I tell you something, do it immediately, without the least wavering thought. That's it. Learn. Open your heart and act. Thought stops action. It perverts it into calculated gesture stripped of grace and efficiency.
-- Daniel Odier -
I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.
-- Derek Walcott -
A period film, where you, for example, where you have a traditional wardrobes, you are bound to act a certain way. But in a modern film, a lot of body gesture.
-- Donnie Yen -
somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence; in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near
-- e. e. cummings -
It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.
-- E. M. Forster -
They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.
-- Edith Wharton -
Typographical design should perform optically what the speaker creates through voice and gesture of his thoughts.
-- El Lissitzky -
And I must bear What is ordained with patience, being aware Necessity doth front the universe With an invincible gesture.
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning -
Listen- all that she was then, all that she is now, those gestures, everything I remember but won't or can't articulate anymore, the perfect words that are somehow made imperfect when used to describe her and all that should remain unsaid about her- it is all unsupported by reason. I know that. But that enigmatic calm that attaches itself to people in the presence of reason- it's something from which I haven't been able to take comfort, not reliably, not since her.
-- Elliot Perlman -
In drawing, I don't erase. I believe the original gesture has to be the best.
-- Ellsworth Kelly -
The Boomers have modeled a set of bad habits, and one grand gesture is not going to unwind all those bad habits.
-- Eric Liu -
Sometimes I feel that every word spoken and every gesture made merely serve to exacerbate misunderstandings. Then what I would really like is to escape into a great silence and impose that silence on everyone else.
-- Etty Hillesum -
Few enjoy noisy overcrowded functions. But they are a gesture of goodwill on the part of host or hostess, and also on the part of guests who submit to them.
-- Fannie Hurst -
Doubt is what allows a single gesture to have a heart.
-- Fanny Howe -
Gestures, in love, are incomparably more attractive, effective and valuable than words.
-- Francois Rabelais -
I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall
-- Frank Stella -
A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures but just goes ahead and attacks.
-- Frans de Waal -
Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature.
-- Garth Stein -
Can we not will ourselves to achieve the impossible? Can we not use the power of our life force to change something: one small thing, one insignificant moment, one breath, one gesture? Is there nothing we can do to change what is around us?
-- Garth Stein -
But I also know that sometimes Adam needs to do things the dramatic way. He is fond of the Grand Gesture
-- Gayle Forman -
The retrospective glance is a relatively easy gesture for us to make.
-- George Crumb -
The highest of the world's mountains, it seems, has to make but a single gesture of magnificence to be the lord of all, vast in unchallenged and isolated supremacy.
-- George Leigh Mallory -
Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.
-- Glen Duncan -
What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures.
-- Gustave Flaubert -
We see that every external motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind.
-- H. P. Blavatsky -
But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.
-- Hanif Kureishi -
The big moment came when it was decided to paint...Just To Paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value- political, aesthetic, moral.
-- Harold Rosenberg -
It’s disgusting. On trains, the number of those people doing that strange masturbation-like gesture is multiplying.
-- Hayao Miyazaki -
You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.
-- Henry David Thoreau -
Sometimes, one gesture comprises an entire drama, the accent of one word ruins an entire existence, and the indifference of one glance kills the happiest passion.
-- Honore de Balzac -
A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken
-- Ian Mcewan -
Politicians do nothing but ask of us, during every expiration of a legal statute, "a gesture of trust." But here trust is not enough; what's needed is an act of faith.
-- Indro Montanelli -
All my life I have struggled to make one authentic gesture....
-- Isadora Duncan -
What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?
-- Jacques Lacan -
The material memories are not usually part of what is said about a picture, and that is a fault in interpretation because every painting captures a certain resistance of paint, a prodding gesture of the brush, a speed and insistence in the face of mindless matter...
-- James Elkins -
There is no relationship between the gestures and what an orchestra will do.
-- James Levine -
I have a big problem with conductors who gesture a lot.
-- James Levine -
Great cataclysmic things can go by and neither the orchestra nor the conductor are under the delusion that whether they make this or that gesture is going to be the deciding factor in how it comes out.
-- James Levine -
But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn't have to be a genius. You didn't even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. It said, "A human being passed here." And changed zero to one.
-- Janet Fitch -
Gesture will survive whatever kind of light you have. Gesture can triumph over anything because of its narrative content.
-- Jay Maisel -
Sometimes, all it takes is one gesture, one word, to change the course of someone's life. Even if you know it won't last forever.
-- Jean-Claude Izzo -
She believed not in divine salvation but in the proposition that we poor mortals are fully capable of saving ourselves, if conditions and inclinations are right, and the evidence of this potential is found in the smallest of gestures, like the uncertain resting of a large hand on a bony shoulder.
-- Jeffery Deaver -
Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.
-- Jiddu Krishnamurti -
You know a relationship has deteriorated past the point of salvage when one person detests another's gestures.
-- Josephine Humphreys -
There's nothing more frustrating than seeing a conductor say, 'Play softer,' as they're waving their hands in huge gestures.
-- Joshua Bell -
I thought of betrayal and how it came so easily - in a word, a glance, a gesture.
-- Juliet Marillier -
Can I ask you a personal question"? Of all the rhetorical questions in the world, that is the one which irritates me most with its simultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is about to follow.
-- Kamila Shamsie -
I don't make big grand gestures, generally.
-- Katherine Heigl -
The nondual universe of One Taste arises as a spontaneous gesture of your own true nature.
-- Ken Wilber -
No exclusive,†I said aloud, watching Al for his opinion and seeing him shake his head and hold his hands out in a “bigger†gesture. He didn’t even know how large the offer was, and he thought I could get one bigger.
-- Kim Harrison -
how magnanimous was a gesture if one were constantly aware of its magnanimity?
-- Laura Lippman -
If this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary, Id do it.
-- Lee J. Cobb -
When the music is physically demanding, I want to make sure that the effort involved is put across to the audience through physical gesture.
-- Leila Josefowicz -
I can only gesture at what makes a story good.
-- Leonard Michaels -
Generous gestures yield the most when that isn't their purpose.
-- Malcolm Forbes -
His movements were so graceful that I wondered if he had been a dancer, but his words betrayed to me that his fluid gestures were those of a trained killer.
-- Maria V. Snyder -
You can, when Time is ripe, swope to your feet - at your full height - at a single gesture. Ready to go where? Why... Wherever God motions.
-- Marita Bonner -
It is (often) the quiet gesture which carries the most significance - the one which suddenly directs the symphony.
-- Mary Anne Radmacher -
It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.
-- Marya Hornbacher -
Stillertook part in the Spanish Civil WarIt is not clear what impelled him to this military gesture. Probably many factors were combined--a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time.
-- Max Frisch -
This changes nothing. It can't. You are my friend, my king,but that's.... All you can be." He nodded, but it was a gesture that indicated that he heard her, not that he agreed, which was abundantly clear as he said, "And you are my queen, my savior, my partner---and that's everything.
-- Melissa Marr -
A brand is a living entity-and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.
-- Michael Eisner -
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
-- Milan Kundera -
I am not married, no. I wasn't really into the notion when I was younger, but now I think a proposal is the ultimate romantic gesture.
-- Miranda Hart -
Tasting is an act of pleasure and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast.
-- Muriel Barbery -
The gesture must be correct. If the gesture is correct, your mind really creates the reality of the figure, and it is not necessary to hang on all the rest [of the details]...
-- Nathan Oliveira -
Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.
-- Nelson Mandela -
Sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.
-- Nicole Krauss -
If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag, wash it.
-- Norman Thomas -
Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life.
-- Octavio Paz -
Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?
-- Padgett Powell -
Politicians would only move beyond gestures once there was a critical mass of informed citizens.
-- Paul Collier -
Major brands don't know what to do with happy customers. They make it hard for customers to say thanks and way too often companies don't celebrate and embrace customers' positive gestures.
-- Paul Walker -
London goes beyond any boundary or convention.It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.
-- Peter Ackroyd -
Is courage just the awareness that gestures, journeys, lives have intrinsic shape, and must, one way or another, be completed?
-- Peter Behrens -
How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.
-- Peter Sloterdijk -
Humanity needs to see these gestures of peace and to hear words of hope and peace!
-- Pope Francis -
There is no gesture more devastating than the back turning away.
-- Rachel Simmons -
Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.
-- Rae Armantrout -
Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’
-- Randall Munroe
