W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.”
“What then is holiness? Holiness is nothing but the implanting, writing and living out of the gospel in our souls (Eph 4:24).”
“What, then, is one to conclude? Most of all, one comes away from the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 with great unease. This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.”
Source: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
“What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life?”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“What then is the criterion that the mind uses to select an infinitesimal minority of possible outcomes to worry about?”
Source: Anathem
“What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.”
Source: Knowledge And Decisions
“What then is the purpose of national education? Rather than devise complex theoretical interpretations, it is better to start by looking to the lovely child who sits on your knee and ask yourself: What can I do to assure this child will be able to lead the happiest life possible?”
“What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions and therefore it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfillment, from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. What actions are these? Obviously such actions as promote the physical and social conditions requisite for the expression and development of free—or moral—personality.... Law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. Happily it is impossible. No code of law can envisage the myriad changing situations that determine moral obligations. Moreover, there must be one legal code for all, but moral codes vary as much as the individual characters of which they are the expression. To legislate against the moral codes of one’s fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters.”
“What then is the right way to live? Life should be lived as play.”
“What, then, is the soul but a prisoner of your flesh? An undying yet constrained energy, bound and enslaved within a shuffling, steadily rotting suit of tissue and savage needs?”
Source: This Book Is Full of Spiders
“What, then, is the soul of community? It is a desire to be connected with something greater than the egos of other people and the projects in which we might engage with them. Fundamentally, a successful human community is the unfolding of a spiritual dynamic. It cannot be contrived or made to happen. Rather, it erupts from our desire for the depths, and that desire is certain to constellate the shadow in ourselves and the other.”
Source: Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse: Cultivating the Relationships We Need to Thrive
“What then is the source of my errors? They are owing simply to the fact that, since the will extends further than the intellect, I do not contain the will within the same boundaries; rather, I also extend it to things I do not understand. Because the will is indifferent in regard to such matters, it easily turns away from the true and the good; and in this way I am deceived and I sin.”
“What then is the wisdom of the times called old? Is it the wisdom of gray hairs? No. It is the wisdom of the cradle.”
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
Source: Confessions
“What then is to be the lot of Rossetti's fame and influence? 'An amateur who failed in two arts', it is true; yet it hardly harms Rossetti or touches his standing. On the contrary, it defines both very brilliantly. The small word 'failed' is a small word and little more to artists who are forever going on until they give up over a game that must be lost. Every artist, when confronted by the immensities of art, which is life, must confess to failure. A failure is a thing very relative.”
“What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.”
“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
Source: On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche
“What then, is "Western Maoism"--whitch captured a number of the European Left in the 1960s and 1970s--in light of the clarification outlined here? It is a curious amalgam of various bits and pieces of Mao's thought, from Mao Zedong Thought and the Maoism of the Cultural Revolution, and then reframed in terms of utopian tendencies inherent in Western Marxism.”
“What then is your duty? What the day demands.”
“What, then?'
'Nothing', I say. But I immediately wish I would have said, 'Everything.”
Source: Reminders of Him
“What, then, of the priest's iconic representation of Christ at the altar? If there is no specifically masculine or feminine charism or ontology, the significance of the priest's maleness fades away. What matters—as patristic Christology recognized centuries ago with its dictum, 'That which is not assumed [by the Son of God in the incarnation] is not healed'—is that Christ became human, assuming and thereby healing the nature common to men and women. Although biologically a man, Christ assumed human nature in such a way as to include both men and women in his salvific work. And that means, in turn, that to refuse to allow a woman to preside at the Eucharist may be to say much more than opponents of women's ordination realize—namely, 'that women are not adequate icons of Christ.' The result, notes [Sarah] Hinlicky Wilson near the end of her book, is nothing less than 'to leave both their humanity and their salvation in doubt.' If women can't reflect the human nature of Christ at the altar, how then can they trust Christ's human nature to save them at all?”
“What then remains, but well our power to use,
And keep good-humor still whate'er we lose?
And trust me, dear, good-humor can prevail,
When airs, and flights, and screams, and scolding fail.”
Source: The Works of Alexander Pope: With a Memoir of the Author, Notes, and Critical Notes on Each Poem
“What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31 NIV) a”
“What, then, should you do? With an excellent hand, you should bet: You lose nothing if your opponent folds, while giving yourself a good chance of winning a big pot if he calls. But with a middling hand, you shouldn't bet: If he has a bad hand, he'll fold, and you'll win the ante, which is what you'd have won anyway by checking; but if he has a good hand, he'll call and win. It's heads he wins, tails you don't. You should check instead, and hope your middling hand wins the ante.
What about with a terrible hand? Should you check or bet? The answer is surprising. Checking would be unwise, because the hands will be compared and you will lose. It actually makes more sense to bet with these bad hands, because the only way he might drop out is if you make a bet. Perversely, you are better off betting with awful cards than with mediocre ones, the quintessential (and rational) bluff.
There's a second reason for you to bet with terrible cards rather than middling ones: Your opponent will have to call a little more often. Because he knows that your bets are sometimes very weak, he can't afford to fold too easily. That means that when you bet with a good hand, you are more likely to be called, and to win when you are. Because you are bluffing with bad cards, your good hands make more money.”
Source: The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
“What, then, was left to her? She had no allies. She had no throne. She had no Mehmed, no Radu. She had only these sharp men and sharp knives and sharp dreams, and no way to make use of any of them.”
Source: Now I Rise
“What then, will a little fame distract you? Look at the speed of universal oblivion, the gulf of immeasurable time both before and after, the vacuity of applause, the indiscriminate fickleness of your apparent supporters, the tiny room in which all this is confined. The whole earth is a mere point in space: what a minute cranny within this is your own habitation, and how many and what sort will sing your praises here!”
Source: Meditations
“What then, is correctness of speech but the maintenance of the practice of others, as established by the authority of ancient speakers? But the weaker men are, the more they are troubled by such matters. Their weakness stems from a desire to appear learned, not with a knowledge of things, by which we are edified, but with a knowledge of signs, by which it is difficult not to be puffed up in some way; even a knowledge of things often makes people boastful, unless their necks are held down by the Lord's yoke.”
“What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That's pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There's the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace.”
Source: The Poisonwood Bible
“What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”
Source: Unity [devoted to Practical Christianity]
“What these books and their like have done for me is tap into some roaming tendency of the mind; I know that I could never have done what these writers have done, been where they have been, pursued the interests they have pursued, but I want to know what it is like. We go to fiction to extend experience, to get beyond our own, For me, this kind of non-fiction writer is furnishing the same need--taking me out of my own comfortable expectations and showing me how it might be elsewhere. Armchair travel? Not quite. I have never believed that travel broadens the mind, having known some well-travelled minds that were nicely atrophied. Rather, these are books--experiences--that encourage a leap of the imagination.”
Source: Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
“What these companies need is a tech-savvy workforce with a deep empathetic understanding of people's behaviors, interactions, and preferences. For new technologies like these to reach their potential, they simply must be created by teams with a diverse set of perspectives.”
“What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.”
Source: You Are Not a Gadget
“What these memos do is they make legal acts that were criminal prior to these memos.”
“What these men do not know about me, though... is a black widow dangling by herself on a single thread... is a deadly thing. A really dangerous thing.”
Source: Black Widow #6
“What these older physicians exhibited is termed clinical curiosity. They stroke to understand their patients in order to elucidate the underlying medical conditions. This thoroughness, patience, and dogged curiosity may have been ingrained in them because they trained at a time when they were no rapid CTs or MRIs. But even now, when these diagnostic tools are at their fingertips, these physicians maintain this approach to patients, one that serves to appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each patient and his or her illness.”
Source: What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
“What these people do here is obviously not working. They sit in their commuter traffic hour after hour. They make the earth a toxic waste dump.”
“What these professing Christians are saying is that the reason for addiction is early childhood deprivation, not simply a sinful nature successfully tempted to sin.”
Source: 12 Steps to Destruction: Codependecy/Recovery Heresies
“What these young men feared and hated more than anything else was being spoken to by people they hadn't met, or having to explain themselves to people they didn't know.”
Source: Popular Hits of the Showa Era
“What they [Jim deMint and the oil lobby] do care about is the precedent. If they open up ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), they'll think they can do anything to the environment - anything at all. Drilling in Yosemite? In the Grand Canyon? What's next?”
“What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.”
“What they [the 9/11 attackers] abominate about 'the west', to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.”
“What they are doing is disarming in the battle to stop illegal drugs and illegal aliens.”
“What they ask—quietly, with eyes too old for their years—is to be seen. To be held in the gaze of someone who will not flinch at the storm.”
“What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.”
Source: The New Gods
“What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.”
Source: The Picture Of Dorian Gray
“What they call witches - most of them are just regular people, nice people. The evil ones are those that hunt and hurt others, witch or no.”
Source: Bloodleaf
“What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.”