W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Whereas once medieval Europe had adhered to a common Catholic religion, a common Latin language, and common well-spiced cuisine (at least, for the elite), the balkanization of the Christian world along national lines now meant that nations could no longer gather around the same table as easily as before. Even though it would take some years, the Europe-wide fashion for spices-as much as Latin-would be a casualty of Martin Luther's squabble with the bishop of Rome.”
“Whereas ordinary officers must be content with behaving correctly in front of their men, the great leaders have always carefully stage-managed their effects.”
“Whereas our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America, we their descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil.”
“Whereas our common past, out of Africa, saw a global diaspora of humankind, our common future depends on a global coming together and consensus, resulting in a more equitable distribution of the Earth's largesse. When Africa, which gave us the wealth of life, has that debt returned, the world will have come of age.”
“Whereas our grandparents lived as if they had swallowed gyroscopes, we think and act as if we have swallowed Gallup polls.”
“Whereas painters of the early and middle 1400s enriched their own (and their countrymen's) understanding of the Gospel by recreating it in reality, their successors used this technique to study (and broaden) their entire world view. Hieronymus Bosch mastered a whole genre by merging the realism of Flemish painting with fantastic allegories of the human condition. His pictures of vermin and birds in men's clothing, atrocities, and weirdly juxtaposed objects use the realism of the earlier masters as a means of stark caricature. It was in this form, the most extreme possible, that character and moral differentiation were introduced into the realm of realistic depiction.”
Source: The Invention of Culture
“Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people.”
“Whereas Philadelphia was home to the first savings bank established in the United States - Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, in the year 1816 - Philadelphia is also the city that became home to the first commercial bank established in the United States.
Thirty-four years before America had its first savings bank - Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, in 1816 - the first commercial bank in the United States was established. This first American commercial bank was also established in the very same city that America’s first savings bank had been created - the city of Philadelphia.”
“Whereas previous generations had to face some unpredictability, current generations are facing unprecedented levels of instability.”
Source: Becoming Generation Flux: Why Traditional Career Planning is Dead: How to be Agile, Adapt to Ambiguity, and Develop Resilience
“Whereas protecting society is very eminently a legitimate function of society, but must in my opinion be exercised under the rubric of the law and due process, and never under the rubric of medicine or science or mental health.”
“Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!”
“Whereas religious prayers sing of peace and harmony, religion has divided human beings through an atrocious history of enmity and bloodshed. Yet, behind the veil of superficiality and hypocrisy, I always believed in the inherent beauty of God that lies at the essence of all true spiritual paths.”
“Whereas Rolling Stone, I just never had anything to do with them. I'd stop by the office maybe twice a year.”
“Whereas Schaeffer and Henry were working like samplers, their idea was to capture those sounds which couldn't be serially calibrated because they were too complex in character.”
“Whereas science elicits changes in order to know, technology knows in order to elicit changes.”
“Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.”
“Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.”
Source: A Widow For One Year
“Whereas smaller computer languages have features designed into them, C++ is unusual in having a whole swathe of functionality discovered, like a tract of 19th century Africa.”
“Whereas some dwell on the bright side of life, enjoying an exciting spectrum of contingencies, and get all the breaks, others live in the confined inner court of their being, cramped within the fence of their mind. Only imagination may arouse a spark of expectation, stir up resilience and create an equitable prospect.”
“Whereas some schools of Buddhism distinguish more sharply between the preparatory practice of concentration and the liberating practice of insight, Zen views concentration and insight as two sides of the same coin: when the mind is cleared, settled, and focused, it naturally attains insight and manifests its innate wisdom.”
Source: Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism
“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.”
“Whereas students minds used to be the chief concern of colleges and universities, it is now more their bank accounts (more accurately, that of their parents and of the taxpayers). If students happen to learn anything useful while enrolled, that's good, but if not, as long as they've paid their bills, that's not the university's problem.”
“Whereas the ancients held that garlick hindred the attraction of the Loadstone, he contradicts this by experience; but I cannot think the ancient Sages would write so confidently of that which they had no experience; of, being a thing so obvious and easie to try; therefore I suppose they had a stronger kind of garlick, then is with us”
“Whereas the average individuals "often have not the slightest idea of what they are, of what they want, of what their own opinions are," self-actualizing individuals have "superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general."”
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”
“Whereas the chemico-chemists always find in industry a beautiful field of gold-laden soil, the physico-chemists stand somewhat farther off, especially those who seek only the greatest dilution, for in general there is little to make with watery solutions.”
“Whereas the comic confronts simply logical contradictions, the tragic confronts a moral predicament. Not minor matters of true andfalse but crucial questions of right and wrong, good and evil face the tragic character in a tragic situation.”
“whereas the dog strives to lessen the distance between himself and man, seeks ever to be intelligent and intelligible, and translates into looks and actions the words he cannot speak, the cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.”
“Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.”
Source: The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays
“Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego's regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society's longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas.”
“Whereas the insufficiency of a love neither sustained nor supreme cannot be ignored, the same should not be taken as cause to avoid one's total spiritual contractual engagement to this world.”
Source: Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World
“Whereas the intelligence of God is both the cause and the measure of the truth of things, things are both the cause and the measure of the truth of our intelligence.”
“Whereas the Islamic religious animosity aligned with juxtapose views of their shared history accentuates the Hindu-Muslim divide, the simmering Christian grouse against the Hindus is owing to their resentment of the fraudulent evangelism.”
“Whereas the law is passionless, passion must ever sway the heart of man.”
Source: Politics
“Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche
“Whereas the melancholic exhibits a state of general inhibition, in the manic patient even normal inhibitions of the instincts are partly or wholly abolished.”
Source: Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, M.D.
“Whereas the notion of purpose before was always associated with future, there is now a deeper purpose that can only be found in the present, through denial of time.”
Source: A New Earth (Oprah #61): Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
“Whereas the only real solution to the race problem in this country is a solution that involves individual self improvement and collective self improvement in, whereas our own, wherein our own people are concerned.”
“Whereas the pagans of yore groped after mystery in all the strange beauty of the world, the pagans of the 20th century, having supplanted nature with factories, saw the glimmer of the transcendental only in themselves. Hence, their longing for mystery—union in one sacred body, absolute order, and submission to an omnipotent lord—was manifested in an obscene eidolon palpable, for instance, in the Nazi motto, 'ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”
“Whereas the property-owning middle class could win freedom for themselves on the basis of rights to property--thus excluding others from the freedom they gain--the property-less working class possess nothing but their title as human beings. Thus they can liberate themselves only by liberating all humanity.”
Source: Marx: A Very Short Introduction
“Whereas the slave cargoes gathered on the African coast reconfigured the normative boundaries of social life, the slave communities in the Americas exploded those boundaries beyond recognition. If an Akan-speaking migrant lived to complete a year on a west Indian sugar estate, he or she was likely by the end of that time to have come into close contact with unrelated Akan strangers as well as with Ga, Guan, or Adangbe speakers in the holding station on the African littoral, with Ewe speakers on the slave ship, and with Angolans, Biafrans, and Senegambians on the plantation. This was the composite we call diasporic Africa—an Africa that constituted not the continent on European maps, but rather the plurality of remembered places immigrant slaves carried with them.
Like any geographic entity, diasporic Africa varies according to the perspective from which it is surveyed. Viewed from a cartographic standpoint (in essence, the view of early modern Europeans), diasporic Africa is a constellation of discrete ethnic and language groups; if one adopts this perspective, the defining question becomes whether or not the various constituent groups in the slave community shared a culture.
Only by approaching these questions from the vantage point of Africans as migrants, however, can we hope to understand how Africans themselves experienced and negotiated their American worlds. If in the regime of the market Africans’ most socially relevant feature was their exchangeability, for Africans as immigrants the most socially relevant feature was their isolation, their desperate need to restore some measure of social life to counterbalance the alienation engendered by their social death. Without some means of achieving that vital equilibrium thanks to which even the socially dead could expect to occupy a viable place in society, slaves could foresee only further descent into an endless purgatory.”
Source: Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
“Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.”
Source: Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker
“Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.”
Source: The Sheltering Sky
“Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yourself left at all?”
“Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.”
Source: Education: Ends and Means
“Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.”
Source: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
“Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.”
“Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren't a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them.”
“whereas there are many people in the world who can give life to others, there are but few who can help others to possess it.”
“Whereas there can be but one Baptism, they think they can Baptize; they have abandoned the fountain of life, yet promise the life and grace of the waters of salvation. It is not cleansing which men find there, but soiling; their sins are not washed away, but only added to. That being "born again" does not bring forth sons to God but to the Devil. Born of a lie, they cannot inherit the things which Truth has promised; begotten by the faithless, they are deprived of the grace of faith.”