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Absolutes Quotes

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Absolutes Quotes

“Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex.”

Children Philosophy Asks Absolutes Complexes Philosopher Naked Covered Creeds Dogma Smallest Leafs Figs

Author:Yevgeny Zamyatin

“Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos.”

Mean Ideas Five Objects Gains Absolutes Complexes Notion Senses Impression No Idea Cosmos Receiving

Book:Lovecraft's Works

Source: Lovecraft's Works

“An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other to his advantage.”

“Here in the United States, the Zionists and their co-religionists have complete control of our government. For many reasons, too many and too complex to go into here at this time, the Zionists and their co-religionists rule these United States as though they were the absolute monarchs of this country. Now you may say that is a very broad statement, but let me show you what happened while we were all asleep.”

May Country States Reason Shows Government United United States Happened Let Me Absolutes Complexes Statements Broads Monarchs Zionist

Author:Benjamin H. Freedman

“My own sense of the world is that very little is absolute or black and white or easily understood. I suppose in all my writing I'm trying to cast the reader into this spiritually ambivalent dream world, which hopefully mirrors more honestly the complex reality we find ourselves in.”

World Writing Trying Littles Dream Reality Black My Own White Reader Understood Absolutes Mirrors Complexes Casts Honestly Hopefully Black And White Dream World Ambivalent

Author:Andre Dubus

“When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.”

People Made Truth Suffering Simple Media Honesty Mass Absolutes Complexes Radical Relative Distortion Unfamiliar Dogmatic Hypothetical

Book:Essays in the Public Philosophy

Source: Essays in the Public Philosophy

“I began dividing life in absolutes... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it.”

People Black White Bears Hero Built Absolutes Complexes Defeat Disaster Triumph Delusion Villain Black And White Epic Contradictory Ambiguity Dividing Perfectly Good Barricades

Author:J. R. Moehringer

“The world is not that black and white, Rachel. There are no moral absolutes. It is complex.”

World Black White Moral Absolutes Complexes Black And White

Author:Emily Giffin

“I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don't think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex.”

Thinking Sometimes Reality Used Suffering Hate Given Easier Concepts Opposites Absolutes Embrace Complexes

Book:Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.”

“We godless lack that certainty, and we know the world is a complex place that requires compromise and is not ruled by a moral force - virtue is subject to negotiation, and is found in working together with others to find mutually satisfactory solutions. Good is not absolute, it is an emergent property that arises from successful networks of individuals. It is also something that is measured by evidence: we look at the good that people do, not the promises that they make and never keep, or the lies that dovetail nicely into dogma. Competence is a virtue. Intent is meaningless without action.”