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.

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

I think most of us are raised with preconceived notions of the choices we're supposed to make. We waste so much time making decisions based on someone else's idea of our happiness - what will make you a good citizen or a good wife or daughter or actress. Nobody says, 'Just be happy - go be a cobbler or go live with goats.'

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Synergy is what happens when one plus one equals ten or a hundred or even a thousand! It's the profound result when two or more respectful human beings determine to go beyond their preconceived ideas to meet a great challenge.

At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.

Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.

For somebody famous, it's weird anyway to meet someone, because they have a preconceived notion of who you are.

Usually, when people hear my last name, before they really get to know me or work with me, there's probably a lot of preconceived notions that come with that. And I imagine most of them aren't good. Because for every wonderful second generation of a famous person, there's people that aren't that way. More entitled people.

America, 5 years after this brutal attack, is testament that a Nation conceived in liberty and equality will endure. It is a triumph of millions of Americans but it is also the triumph of an idea larger than any one person, larger than any one nation.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

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.

The primary goal of management education was, as originally conceived, to impart knowledge that could be applied to a variety of real-world business situations.

The more Mommy blogs going nuclear over playground etiquette I read and birthday parties of glazed adults munching cupcakes like demoralized zombies I attend, I realize this is what my friends who conceived before me meant by, 'You just won't care.'

I just think that people take me a little more seriously as a brunette. I don't know if that's just because of a societal preconceived notion that all blondes are stupid, but it's a different kind of attitude.

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.

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.

All anger is not sinful, because some degree of it, and on some occasions, is inevitable. But it becomes sinful and contradicts the rule of Scripture when it is conceived upon slight and inadequate provocation, and when it continues long.

It's amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.