Contrivance Quotes

“We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson

“If everyone perceives a different reality based on their unique physical and psychological attributes, their histories, needs, and desires, then whose reality is accurate? The point is, our so-called reality, the world we think we live in, is actually a contrivance. It’s a projection of what we perceive, think, feel, and believe at any given moment. That may sound depressing, but it can be quite the opposite. It can be empowering. Why? Because, if our reality is contrived, it can be adjusted . . . and elevated.”
― Joseph Deitch, Elevate: An Essential Guide to Life

“The old man continued, “You have been a real blessing to me. Today, I understand something I didn’t see before: every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don’t want anything else in life. But you are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so....

And, as he smothered the coals in the hookah, he told the boy that he could begin to sell tea in the crystal glasses. Sometimes, there's just no way to hold back the river.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“It has been observed of the warring Turks, that often they used this notable deceit - to send a lying rumor and a vain tumult of war to one place, but, in the meanwhile, to address their true forces to another place, that so they might surprise those who have been unwarily led by pernicious credulity. So have we manifest (alas! too, too manifest) reasons to make us conceive, that whilst the chief urgers of the course of conformity are skirmishing with us about the trifling ceremonies (as some men count them), they are but laboring to hold our thoughts so bent and intent upon those smaller quarrels, that we may forget to distinguish between evils immanent and evils imminent, and that we be not too much awake to espy their secret slight in compassing further aims.”
― George Gillespie, A Dispute Against the English Popish Ceremonies Obtruded on the Church of Scotland