Fixed Action Patterns

Famous quotes containing the words fixed, action and/or patterns:

    The foot of the heavenly ladder, which we have got to mount in order to reach the higher regions, has to be fixed firmly in every-day life, so that everybody may be able to climb up it along with us. When people then find that they have got climbed up higher and higher into a marvelous, magical world, they will feel that that realm, too, belongs to their ordinary, every-day life, and is, merely, the wonderful and most glorious part thereof.
    —E.T.A.W. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Wilhelm)

    The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
    Charles Lamb (1775–1834)

    Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sunflecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)