This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.

Set out with some definite purpose in life and accomplish that purpose. There is little that the human mind can conceive that is not possible of accomplishment. The thing to do is to make up your mind what you are going to drive for, and let nothing stand in the way of its ultimate accomplishment.

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

Postmodernism is, of course, the dead end from which hauntology starts – but one of its role is to denaturalise what postmodernism has taken for granted, to conceive of postmodernism as a condition in the sense of a sickness.

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.

Stand-up comedy seems like a terrifying thing. Objectively. Before anyone has done it, it seems like one of the most frightening things you could conceive, and there’s just no shortcut – you just have to do it.

The Singaporean speculative tradition is different. Singapore doesn’t conceive itself as the centre of the world or the one country that’s going to save the world, so there’s a different tone that comes out in the way speculative fiction is done. That’s refreshing to read.

I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.

I cannot conceive of Israel withdrawing if Arab states do not recognize Israel, within secure borders.

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

I think in terms of content and subjects and whatever kind of production it dictates. Can I conceive of an idea that would really connect with my personal rhythms and cost a lot of money? I don’t gravitate in that direction, but it is possible.

I knew I didn’t want to pursue an academic career at all, which, of course, my father would have loved me to have done. I didn’t want to go to university. The only other thing I could do was paint, and so I went to art school because they couldn’t conceive of how one would be an actor.

Sometimes I get into the mindset that being heterosexual is a brave new world, because you can conceive, and you work out the rest of it once you’re pregnant.

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality.

For this is our most perfect duty and yet least known to us by nature: Whatever we conceive or will should be joined with the good of our neighbor.

I got a lot of flak; in Texas, football is not only the social thing you must do, but you do it also to prove your manhood. They all couldn’t conceive of why I’d want to stop to do ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.’

I didn’t think I could conceive.

What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

Traditional Christians cannot conceive of God as Mormons do: a God who has a wife, who invites other human beings to become gods with him.

It’s such a weird self-confidence that an artist has – to conceive of this thing that serves no function and say, ‘I’m going to really work hard for it and give it and it’s just going to matter to people.’ You really have to believe it all on your own.

There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won’t get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.

The short film project I just finished for W Hotels and Intel, I didn’t have my script finished until a few days before we began filming. We edited it very quickly and now it’s up online. It was great to conceive an idea and have it premiere just a few weeks later, compared to a feature, which takes a year or more.

I try to look at the films as I make them from a distance, in a way. I think of them as kind of pop culture artefacts. I’ll often make posters and tag lines as I’m working on them, and not just conceive of them as a story I’m going to tell, but as a whole, a piece – a whole object that exists in the pop culture realm.

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, ‘the ability to conceive failure as progress.’

All I try to do is as earnestly and as acutely as I can, conceive a character and try to portray this character just honestly. If the humor is within the absurdity and the awfulness of situations, then let it be seen that way.

Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

There were no clippings of Ambedkar. The only thing I had was a two-and-a-half minute film which I saw countless times. Nobody knows how he walked, how he spoke, or how he behaved. I had to conceive all those things in my mind. I had to work a lot on the make-up, too.

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

A freewheeling mind can conceive a virtually infinite number of sequences, but just how that mind picks out and stores those that may perhaps be used later to deal with a given tension, a given situation, is far beyond my understanding.

The very fact that we find it hard to conceive of an alternative to limitless economic growth is an indication of our spiritual condition.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

When I first came to Wakefield Cathedral, I thought, ‘How does man conceive to build something like this?’ It’s a building that has transcended time over the centuries, and you appreciate the magnitude of humankind‘s power and vision. When you’re inside, you feel as though the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. I know rather that the sun, around which my planet Earth revolves, is a middle sized star in a galaxy called the Milky Way that has over a hundred billion other suns or stars within it.

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it’s difficult to conceive that there’s a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

There aren’t traditions of freedom in a place like Iraq. They’re going to have to come to grips with a concept that they hadn’t been allowed to conceive before.

Whether it be the heart to conceive, the understanding to direct, or the hand to execute.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.

That settled Abraham Lincoln with me. I was thoroughly satisfied that no such man ought to be President; but I could not yet conceive it possible that such a monster would be the choice of a majority of the people for President.

One thing I was thinking about the other day was you can’t even conceive of the kinds of things you can do in movies today. The idea that you could draw, in a computer, dinosaurs and have them running around was totally impossible.

God… a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive.

The king is full of kindnesses toward me, and I love him tenderly. But it is pitiable to see his weakness for Madame du Barri, who is the silliest and most impertinent creature that it is possible to conceive.

I can’t conceive of caring more about my president than my own partner.

But the first differentiation of its reflection in the manifested World is purely Spiritual, and the Beings generated in it are not endowed with a consciousness that has any relation to the one we conceive of.

How can justice be attained when, in the expiation of an old wrong, another wrong is to be committed? No reasonable creature would conceive of the idea of obliterating ink stains with ink, or spots of oil with oil. Only blood must be washed out with blood.

For me, directing a film is like confining myself. I want to do something beyond direction. I can conceive stories, write screenplays, etc. That’s better for me.

It did not come naturally; in fact, it would be difficult to conceive of any more dogmatic and less tolerant people than the first settlers on New England shores.

Today’s students can put dope in their veins or hope in their brains. If they can conceive it and believe it, they can achieve it. They must know it is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude.

As my mind can conceive of more good, the barriers and blocks dissolve. My life becomes full of little miracles popping up out of the blue.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

It is necessary for him who would endure existence with patience that he should conceive himself to be something – that he should be persuaded he is not a cipher in the muster-roll of man.

Love stories require an obstacle between the lovers, something that keeps them from one another. You have to yearn for the love that can’t be fulfilled. And it gets harder to conceive of viable cultural or racial or sexual obstacles between people as we move forward progressively.

Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.

A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.

I cannot conceive of how more than 1% of us could possibly survive a cyberwar.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

It’s too bad that one has to conceive of sports as being the only arena where risks are, for all of life is risk exercise. That’s the only way to live more freely, and more interestingly.

I cannot conceive of circumstances where Labour MPs are marshalled to go through the lobby to vote against us staying in the single market and customs union with the likes of Jacob Rees Mogg, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.

Aaron Sorkin was completely unable to understand the actual psychology of Mark or of Facebook. He can’t conceive of a world where social status or getting laid or, for that matter, doing drugs, is not the most important thing.

The ‘Bird‘s Nest’ National Stadium, which I helped to conceive, is designed to embody the Olympic spirit of ‘fair competition.’ It tells people that freedom is possible but needs fairness, courage and strength.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

People generally don’t recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

We can conceive of eternity because we cannot conceive of a cessation of time. We can conceive of infinite space because we cannot conceive of so much matter that our imagination will not stand upon the farthest star and see infinite space beyond.

At least in the U.S., the party you believe in plays a big role in how you conceive of yourself. It feels good to think that your party is smarter, and that the smarts are what drive people to your party.

Here, again, as I conceive, gentlemen forget that this government is a republican one, resting exclusively in the intelligence and virtue of the People.

I was told it might be quite difficult to conceive, so it really was a great blessing when my pregnancy suddenly happened. I had been diagnosed years ago with polycystic ovarian syndrome, which can affect your fertility – but luckily, in my case, it didn’t.

I’ve not given up having a child. But I hope whatever route of parenthood I choose, whether it’s adoption or I’m able to conceive, I just hope that I’m able to give someone as beautiful a life as my parents gave me.

We should conceive of ourselves not as rulers of Earth, but as highly powerful, conscious stewards: The Earth is given to us in trust, and we can screw it up or make it work well and sustainably.

The next big project, you yourself have to conceive.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.

Everything starts with a thought. Your thoughts become things, and anything that your mind can conceive, you can achieve.

It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law.

To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed.

I was taught by my grandfather that anything that your mind can conceive, you can have. It’s a reality.

In what way can a revelation be made but by miracles? In none which we are able to conceive.

Once in a while, when I’m alone, I think about my age. I think, ‘How many more years do I have on this earth?’ But I can’t really conceive of dying.

Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I’d say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love.

I don’t want to disrupt anything. We never conceive of our products as disruptive – we don’t look at something and say, ‘Let’s disrupt that.’ It’s always about how we can evolve this and make this better.

Anyone who knows gangs knows that lawmakers cannot conceive of a law that would lead a hard-core gang member to ‘think twice.’

The Italian word ‘stanza’ means ‘a room’, and a room is a good way to conceive of a stanza. A room, generally speaking, is sufficient for its own purposes, but it does not constitute a house. A stanza has the same sense of containment, without being complete or independent.

He was the first to conceive of movies as an art form. His belief was that if the traditional art form would not find room for him, then he would make an art form of his own.

I can easily conceive, most Holy Father, that as soon as some people learn that in this book which I have written concerning the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, I ascribe certain motions to the Earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected.

Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of – the end of the world – and I knew I would go there one day.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.

I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.

If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.

So, the older I got the more I started to appreciate balance and variety in my life, and once you get a taste of that returning and realize how happy it can make you it is very difficult to conceive giving that up again.

Writing that’s native to the web is different in ways that are crucial but subtle enough that you can miss them if you conceive of your audience as reading a printed product.

It’s actually very beautiful when you can’t conceive on your own, you can actually go to the doctors and with science you can create a child.

My hope is that this life is not all there is. This life is like preparation for what is coming next, and what is coming next is something so glorious that the Bible says minds can’t conceive it, eye has never seen, your imagination could never even enter into all that God is preparing for those who love him.

As I toiled up the Mount of Olives, in the very footsteps of Christ, panting with the heat and the difficult ascent, I found it utterly impossible to conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me.