The Chinese are brought up to believe that you should be silent in class. The teacher speaks, and you just listen and absorb what they say.
What Jimmy Page did was pretty inspiring for guitar players. He married a lot of acoustic elements into hard rock. The kind of chords he used were very left of center, with a lot of dissonance – I absorbed that like a sponge. It’s all over the music I write, always.
I think that part of the reason I like collaboration so much is because it’s something unexpected coming in, and you have to stretch yourself to absorb it.
Green roofs, roadside plantings, porous pavement, and sidewalk gardens have been proven to reduce flooding. They absorb rainwater before it swamps the streets and sewage systems.
It’s tempting, when confronted by political malfeasance, to become so absorbed with its symptom that we give too little attention to treating its cause.
Pretty much every night of their lives, my 8-year-old sons have absorbed themselves entirely in books. As toddlers, they pointed out pictures, made conjectures; lately, we find them in their bunk beds embarked upon two-hour comic-reading benders.
Nature is good at connectivity. The impact of diverse human activities is observed and absorbed throughout nature. Everything is linked. Nature has no problem with coherence. Ecosystems react with their own logic.
The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation.
For her PhD, Maria Goeppert Mayer, a theoretical physicist, came up with the idea of multi-photon physics. That means an atom absorbs two or more photons simultaneously.
Beg of God the removal of envy, that God may deliver you from externals, and bestow upon you an inward occupation, which will absorb you so that your attention is not drawn away.
I think people have to sharpen their eyes and look. I always feel like a big sponge: I feel like I learn lots of things by osmosis, and I feel that I’m always absorbing. I mean, when people say, ‘What is your inspiration?’ I could throw up. I mean, I’m inspired by the fact I get up in the morning. And I’m still here.
Humans, the supremely social mammals, are ethical and intellectual sponges. We unconsciously absorb, for good or ill, the influences that surround us.
I am extraordinarily fascinated by the future of technology. We are in the early infancy of technology, and we have an opportunity to guide how technology develops and integrates into our lives. I talk a lot about the ‘invisible interface,’ or the idea that we can utilize technology without being absorbed into a screen.
We are approaching a time when human intelligence alone will be incapable of managing a highly advanced society. Existing technologies are rapidly exceeding the human capacity to absorb and process information.
On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors – mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.
When you are absorbed in a biographical subject, you get so close you don’t realise the potential effect of what you say. You are trying to get at the truth.
Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.
Maybe bitcoin is a kind of a bubble. I don’t like it. I’m not comfortable with it. I’m kind of an old dog to be absorbing that kind of a new trick.
After all, film is so porous, and to my mind, so oddly occult, that I think that film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin.
Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.
I am still very observant. I am absorbed by people and why they do what they do.
Healthy forests and wetlands stand sentry against the dangers of climate change, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it away in plants, root systems and soil.
I was a crazy little seven-year-old. I used to get up an hour early to watch the big kids train. I thought, ‘I must absorb their awesomeness.’ That was my goal from when I was seven. I told my coach, ‘I’m going to the Olympics.’
There is a subconscious way of taking violence as a way of expression, as a normality, and it has a lot of effects in the youth in the way they absorb education and what they hope to get out of life.
I listen to lots of music, especially Bach, opera (all periods), German lieder, chamber music, and rock, old and new. I can’t listen to music while I write. It’s too absorbing.
I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.
Frank Ocean would be incredible; I’d love to be a sponge and absorb everything he says. Every song he puts out, I’m like, ‘Why didn’t I think of this?’
The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells – caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls.
It’s interesting that reading, like listening to podcasts, is a lone pursuit, one where we keep our mouths shut and let someone else do the talking. Where we absorb rather than emit. By occasionally isolating ourselves, we can more successfully, more generously, socialise.
I think what has allowed me to be successful is that I can absorb more information than most and drill down to the key business elements of that information and make faster decisions. And of course, I truly try to enjoy every minute of my life. I can never understand why anyone wouldn’t.
Indeed, there is much in pure humanitarian culture, as opposed to rigid scientific training, which encourages absorption in the affairs of mankind, and more or less indifference to the unfathomed abysses of star-strown space that yawn interminably about this terrestrial grain of dust.
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.
However, all gifts seem now to be absorbed in one and a man must be either a Preacher or nothing.
As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater.
Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but, barring something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results without its overall health being threatened.
In ’77 there was no Internet, there was no Twitter or Facebook, and I think that, without being some old git who hates anything new, people’s attention spans are too short. Back then you had ‘Top Of The Pops’ and ‘Melody Maker,’ and you had to make the effort to go to a show so that you absorbed the culture of music.
I was listening to a lot of bebop. And to Miles Davis. Everyone thinks I was just in the folk world in 1966, but in 1963 and 1964, I was absorbing enormous amounts of music, from baroque to jazz to blues to Indian music.
When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.
We didn’t start out to make a protest record at all. That would have been too shallow. As usual, it was simply a case of absorbing what’s going on around us.
People need to realize that even the greatest jazz musicians, when they listen to jazz, they’re not like, analyzing it and deconstructing it – they’re enjoying it. It’s like listening to any other style of music. It’s saying something to you, and you kind of just absorb it.
It was sort of his ‘Brando’ moment – his very ‘method’ moment. He just absorbed it and continued on.
I find it’s nice when I can be a listener and absorb things coming at me. It’s important, especially for me, when so much of my job is about putting things out into the world. So those quiet moments are rejuvenating.
Fatherhood, parenthood, is something that completely overwhelms you and absorbs you, and you just have to be the best dad that you can be.
When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn’t as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.
I am always attracted to the moments when a person who is associated with a certain message, image or sensibility evolves. I am very interested in how audiences respond to that maturation and absorb the evolution.
I’ve been naturally quick at learning things, and I learn by doing things, so if I sit beside someone who is actively doing something, I look at how they do it and absorb the way in which they do something and find my own comfortable way of reimagining that, or using certain techniques in my own way.
To possess dignity is to be worthy of respect. Worthy of high esteem. Absorb this: you are worthy of respect.
The U.S. Constitution has absorbed the end of slavery, the Civil War, Civil Rights and Watergate.
Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.
