«My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.»

«Doubt, the essential preliminary of all improvement and discovery, must accompany the stages of man's onward progress. The faculty of doubting and questioning, without which those of comparison and judgment would be useless, is itself a divine prerogative of the reason.»

«A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind»

«Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.»

«War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.»

«DUEL, n. A formal ceremony preliminary to the reconciliation of two enemies. Great skill is necessary to its satisfactory observance; if awkwardly performed the most unexpected and deplorable consequences sometimes ensue. A long time ago a man lost his life in a duel.That dueling's a gentlemanly vice I hold; and wish that it had been my lot To live my life out in some favored spot -- Some country where it is considered nice To split a rival like a fish, or slice A husband like a spud, or with a shot Bring down a debtor doubled in a knot And ready to be put upon the ice. Some miscreants there are, whom I do long To shoot, to stab, or some such way reclaim The scurvy rogues to better lives and manners, I seem to see them now --a mighty throng. It looks as if to challenge _me_ they came, Jauntily marching with brass bands and banners! --Xamba Q. Dar»

«I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.»

«Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say ''thus it shall be!'', it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past / they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their ''knowing'' is creating, their creating is a law giving, their will to truth is / will to power. Are their such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?»

«The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do.»