Quotes on Lines

The twin sister to autonomy and freedom is responsibility and accountability. You cannot have one with out the other. If someone is given an area of responsibility, not only must they be set free to do it, they must also be held accountable for what they do. Accountability clarifies freedom. In the teams and companies where you see boundary confusion, power struggles, control, over-reaching of one's line of responsibility, you will also see lapses in accountability as well.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.

How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.

I ground matter to find the continuous line. And when I realized I could not find it, I stopped, as if an unseen someone had slapped my hands.

I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to de land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land.

People are at their most mindful when they are at play. If we find ways of enjoying our work blurring the lines between work and play the gains will be greater.

In this age, I don't care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are, if you cannot create harmony - even vicious harmony - on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete. We have got to have officers who can create harmony across all those lines.

There was a fine line between love and hate you heard that cliche all the time. But no one told you that the moment you crossed it would be the one you least expected. You'd fall in love and crack open a secret door to let your soul mate in. You just never expected such closeness one day to feel like an intrusion.

Some false representations contravene the law; some do not. The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business, and, besides, could not be done. The line between honesty and dishonesty is a narrow, shifting one and usually lets those get by that are the most subtle and already have more than they can use.

Nine times of ten an army has been destroyed because its supply lines have been severed

Most great entrepreneurs I know are nothing like the other kids. They're almost like tangent lines - those lines that seem to go nowhere. Nothing connects them, until they get out in the real world. Then they connect just fine.

When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don't touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people?

A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dinghy one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not probable to the average experience, which is never at sea in a dinghy.

Is it too late to prevent us from self-destructing? No, for we have the capacity to design our own future, to take a lesson from living things around us and bring our values and actions in line with ecological necessity. But we must first realize that ecological and social and economic issues are all deeply intertwined. There can be no solution to one without a solution to the others.

You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.

Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.

It's America's classical music ... this becomes our tradition ... the bottom line of any country in the world is what did we contribute to the world? ... we contributed Louis Armstrong

And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.

Everyone's supposed to stay in their lines and be neat. 'You're a rapper. You're supposed to rap, carry a boom box, wear chains, and go to the club - that's all you do. What are you doing collecting art? What are you talking about? Wait a minute, you're getting out of the zone.' People hate when people cross lines.

When on the brink of complete discouragement, success is discerning that...the line between failure and success is so fine that often a single extra effort is all that is needed to bring victory out of defeat.

The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use.