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Absolutes Quotes

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Absolutes Quotes

“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

“And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.”

Knows Two Earth Lasts Form Order Love Is Steps Practice Fairs Essence Absolutes Notion Sake Essence Of Beauty Symposium

Book:The Portable Plato

Source: The Portable Plato

“I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common.”

Source: Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World: The motion of bodies

“(Because) the notion of absolute truth is difficult to sustain outside the context of religion, ethical conduct is not something we engage in because it is somehow right in itself but because, like ourselves, all others desire to be happy and to avoid suffering. Given that this is a natural disposition, shared by all, it follows that each individual has a right to pursue this goal. Accordingly, I suggest that one of the things which determines whether an act is ethical or not is its effect on others' experience or expectation of happiness.”

Desire Suffering Individual Given Difficult Goal Natural Effects Truth Is Expectations Ethics Absolutes Notion Determine Pursue Ethical Disposition Absolute Truth

Author:Dalai Lama

“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.”

“Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.”

“This notion that man can, and should, have absolute dominion over the "chaotic" powers of nature and woman...is what ultimately lies behind man's famous "conquest of nature" - a conquest that is today puncturing holes in the earth's ozone layer, destroying our forests, polluting our air and water, and increasingly threatening the welfare, and even survival, of thousands of living species, including our own.”

“The notion of "humanity" as a form of transcendence derives, I think, from the conviction that intellectuality possesses an absolute power, from the demand that our best behavior depends on our ability to think abstractly, in terms of a universal rule, about something called humanity, that we need to understand humanity abstractly so that we can act responsibly towards those who represent it.”

Thinking Needs Form Humanity Term Ability Depends Demand Behavior Universal Absolutes Notion Conviction Transcendence Absolute Power

Author:Talal Asad

“Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.”

Needs Giving May Father Leader Comfort Authority Concepts Absolutes Notion Grounded Daddy Those In Need

Book:Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia

Source: Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia

“You look at the absolute scorn that gets poured on a fallen celebrity, whether it's Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan or Marlon Brando, or Elvis when he got fat. They're not allowed the dignity of ordinary failure. And I think that plays into people's notions about Los Angeles, too. It's not allowed to be a regular city with problems.”

People Thinking Looks Play Problem Cities Ordinary Dignity Absolutes Notion Fats Fallen Los Angeles Toms Scorn Cruise Brando

Author:Matthew Specktor

“The other thing that's useful for me is this notion of the absolute versus the relative:if we walk out and it's a beautiful morning, it's only a beautiful morning because we don't have a broken leg or hemorrhoids or something.”

Ifs Beautiful Walks Morning Broken Absolutes Notion Legs Relative Versus Beautiful Morning Broken Leg Hemorrhoids

Author:George Saunders

“the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.”

“That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.”

Said Science Fashion Calling Absolutes Notion Odd Comprehension Legion Oddities

Book:The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition

Source: The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition

“In the final, the positive, state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws - that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge. What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of facts is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts.”