Best absolutes & conditions Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“REFUSAL, n. Denial of something desired; Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists the refusal assentive.”

Lasts Desire Conditions Absolutes Scales Denial Feminine Refusal Descending Finality

Book:Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

“"There is one basis of science," says Descartes, "one test and rule of truth, namely, that whatever is clearly and distinctly conceived is true." A profound psychological mistake. It is true only of formal logic, wherein the mind never quits the sphere of its first assumptions to pass out into the sphere of real existences; no sooner does the mind pass from the internal order to the external order, than the necessity of verifying the strict correspondence between the two becomes absolute. The Ideal Test must be supplemented by the Real Test, to suit the new conditions of the problem.”

“Reason cannot desire for man any condition other than that in which not only every individual enjoys the most absolute, unbounded freedom to develop himself out of himself, in true individuality, but in which physical nature, as well, need receive no other shaping by human hands than that which is given to her voluntarily by each individual, according to the measure of his wants and his inclinations, restricted only by the limits of his energy and his rights.”

Men Want Needs Humans Wells Reason Hands Desire Individual Energy Given Enjoy Rights Conditions Limits Absolutes Individuality Inclination Human Hands

Author:Wilhelm von Humboldt

“And so I continue in borderline poverty, save for my one indulgence, no, my single absolute necessity: I take cabs. Yes, on occasion, when I wish to see what people with unpleasant skin conditions are wearing, I do take the subway. I have never, I am proud to say, taken the bus, because people who take the bus have given up.”

People Given Wish Poverty Taken Conditions Proud Skins Absolutes Occasions Bus Indulgence Given Up Subway Cab Borderline

Book:I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey

Source: I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey

“My pessimism (which, by the way, is far from absolute) originated with my despair in the lack of perfection to be found in human nature. I was attempting in my successive books to show the inevitable handicap of the human condition.”

Way Humans Book Shows Found Conditions Human Nature Despair Perfection Absolutes Inevitable Pessimism Human Condition Attempting Handicaps

Author:Stanislaw Lem

“In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleeting aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.”

Ifs Self Use Law Universe Names Conditions Awareness Activity Absolutes Labels Temporary Infinity Laws Of Nature Unchanging Inexorable Short Lived Withering Ephemera

Author:Frank Herbert

“Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncracy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination.”

Self Faces Individual Existence Successful Conditions Personality Determination Universal Absolutes Individuality Supreme Realization Self Determination Affirmation Adaptation Innate

Author:Carl Jung

“I learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety. The damage such perception did to me I have felt ever sinceI could never belong entirely to one side of any question.”

People Humans May Facts Truth Felt Sides Conditions Perception Absolutes Affair Variety Damage Absolute Truth

Author:Pearl S. Buck

“We have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the last twentieth century, we see that our povertyis as absolute as that of the poorest nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need.”

“As long as you perceive that anyone is holding you back, you have not taken full responsibility for your own liberation. Liberation means that you stand free of making demands on others and life to make you happy. When you discover yourself to be nothing but Freedom, you stop setting up conditions and requirements that need to be satisfied in order for you to be happy. It is in the absolute surrender of all conditions and requirements that Liberation is discovered to be who and what you are. Then the love and wisdom that flows out of you has a liberating effect on others.”

“Let me define a garden as the meeting of raw nature and the human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their beauty. Every sign indicates that nature wants us and wishes for collaboration with us, just as we long for nature to be fulfilled in us. If our original state was to live in a garden, as Adam and Eve did, then a garden signals our absolute origins as well as our condition of eternity, while life outside the garden is time and temporality.”

“No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.”

“Putting together a really strong unifying team was an absolute condition. When that fell away, I think that Michael [Gove] felt things had changed.”

Thinking Together Strong Felt Team Conditions Changed Absolutes Unifying

Author:Dominic Raab

“A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.”

Ifs Humans God Would Be Humanity Liberty Conditions Lovers Absolutes Admire Phrases Jealous Reverse Abolish

Book:God and the State

Source: God and the State

“No sex, age, or condition is above or below the absolute necessity of modesty; but without it one vastly beneath the rank of man.”

Men Age Sex Conditions Absolutes Modesty

Author:Bruce Barton

“Absolute identity with one's cause is the first and great condition of successful leadership.”

Inspirational Firsts Causes Leadership Successful Conditions Identity Absolutes Absolute Freedom

Book:Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-president

Source: Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-president

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”

Life Long Reality Existence Conditions Absolutes Sanity Sane Continuing Organisms Escapism Larks

Book:The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.”

Source: The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Years Long Dream Reality Might House Silence Darkness Doors Conditions Wall Mets Horror Stones Absolutes Lays Woods Hills Firm Sane Organisms Bricks Eighty Larks Darkness Within

Book:The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

“It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.”

Source: Lord Jim

“To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.”

Source: Rise of Endymion

“What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?”

“Those who desire to rise as high as our human condition allows, must renounce intellectual pride, the omnipotence of clear thinking, belief in the absolute power of logic.”

Thinking Believe Humans Desire Belief Clear Conditions Pride Intellectual Logic Absolutes Human Condition Renounce Omnipotence Absolute Power Clear Thinking Intellectual Pride

Author:Alexis Carrel

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

“The strongest of metals is forged under the most violent of conditions, my lord. It is buried deep in the hottest coals and then beat and pounded until it is bent into shaped. Then it becomes the strongest, most lethal of weapons. A thing of absolute beauty and force”

Force Lord Conditions Weapons Beats Absolutes Violent Strongest Buried Metals Bent Coal Forged Hottest

Book:Styxx

Source: Styxx

“Extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them. This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance... This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.”

“An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death.”

Death Individual Belief Nations Successful Conditions Acceptance Absolutes Acceptance Of Death

Book:Perseus In The Wind: A Life of Travel

Source: Perseus In The Wind: A Life of Travel

“When a man has fulfilled all four of these requisites-to be wide awake, to have fear, respect, and absolute assurance-there are no mistakes for which he will have to account; under such conditions his actions lose the blundering quality of the acts of a fool. If such a man fails, or suffers a defeat, he will have lost only a battle, and there will be no pitiful regrets over that.”

Ifs Men Action Suffering Lost Loses Mistake Quality Courage Four Failing Conditions Regret Fool Battle Respect Accounts Absolutes Defeat Wide Awake Fulfilled Assurance Pitiful Wide Awake

Author:Carlos Castaneda

“The inviolability of the person which is a reflection of the absolute inviolability of God, finds its primary and fundamental expression in the inviolability of human life. Above all, the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights-for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture- is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination.”

“Any picture firmly held in any mind, in any form, is bound to come forth. That is the great, unchanging universal law that, when we cooperate with it intelligently, makes us absolute masters of the conditions and situations in our lives.”

Mind Form Law Situation Our Lives Conditions Masters Universal Absolutes Bounds Unchanging Universal Laws

Author:Roger McDonald

“The taking of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict on another, even when backed by legal process. Where the death penalty persists, conditions for those awaiting execution are often horrifying, leading to aggravated suffering.”

Humans Life Is Suffering Process Human Beings Conditions Absolutes Execution Penalties Persist Death Penalty Irreversible Aggravated

Author:Ban Ki-moon

“If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.”

Ifs Left Language Teach Conditions Humility Perspective Absolutes Lifetime Oneself Isolation Exile Accelerate

Author:Joseph Brodsky

“Whereas, Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another portion; the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment, and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination; in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence.”

Source: The Public Life of Capt. John Brown, with an Auto-biography of His Childhood and Youth

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Absolutes Quotes