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Arbitrary Quotes

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Arbitrary Quotes

“There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.”

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Author:Elizabeth Berg
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“It's so hard to believe in anything anymore, you know what I mean? It's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, 'cause it seems so mythological, and seems so arbitrary; and then on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn't believe in anything if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.”

IfsBelieveMeanHardHumorHandsSeemsFunnyScienceWatchesVirtuePureLuckyMethodMoodMetaphysicsArbitraryAstrologyHard To BelieveEmpiricism
Author:Steve Martin
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“Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.”

MenWayWould BeWorkExistenceDestinyMassIdealsTasksGenuineFlightConformityVocationArbitrarySynchronicityEvasion
Author:Hermann Hesse
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“For half of the world's population, roughly three billion people around the world living on less than two dollars a day, an election is at best a means, not an end; a starting point, not deliverance. These people are looking less for an "electocracy" than for the basic elements that for most of us define a decent life--food, shelter, electricity, basic health care, education for their children, and the ability to make their way through life without having to endure corruption, violence, or arbitrary power.”

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Book:The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
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“I don't expect Christians to see God as a metaphor, but that's what he is. Perhaps it might be clearer to call him a character in fiction, and a very interesting one too: one of the greatest and most complex villains of all - savage, petty, boastful and jealous, and yet capable of moments of tenderness and extremes of arbitrary affection - for David, for example. But he's not real, any more than Hamlet or Mr Pickwick are real. They are real in the context of their stories, but you won't find them in the phone book.”

BookRealMomentsCharacterStoriesMightChristianInterestingFictionExampleCapableComplexesMetaphorPhonesAffectionExtremesJealousVillainTendernessSavagesPettyArbitraryVery Interesting
Author:Philip Pullman
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“Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”

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Book:Angels & Demons - Movie Tie-In: A Novel
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“Or is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region it takes place. The whole earth a point in space - and most of it uninhabited.”

PeopleLooksWholeHandsEarthSpacePraiseForgottenTinyEndlessReputationBotherEmptinessRegionsAbyssArbitraryCapriciousBothering YouEndless Time
Book:Meditations: A New Translation
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“Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression "a place in the sun" first come from? My rational thought process cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate.”

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Author:Frances Mayes
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“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing"- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense [...] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.”

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Author:Martin Heidegger
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“However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality.”

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Author:Yukio Mishima
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“He refused categorically all ideas of fidelity or serious commitments. He explained that they were arbitrary and sterile. From anyone else such views would have shocked me, but I knew that in his case they did not exclude tenderness and devotion - feelings which came all the more easily to him since he was determined that they should be transient.”

ShouldIdeasFeelingsViewsCasesSeriousCommitmentDeterminedDevotionTendernessShockedArbitraryFidelityTransient
Book:BONOUR TRISTESSE
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“Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.”

WritingDoeEndsEyeLyingPurposeSidesWaterCuttingCenturyStudentsWindPeriodsPaperAgreeWoodsDecadesLengthNeverthelessArbitraryFluidDotsPunctuationStasis
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium.”

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Book:Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist
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“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)”

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Book:the bell jar
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“There were those who loved liberty, who cried out to live their own lives, to strive, to rise above, to achieve, and those bent on the mindless equality of stagnation brought about through the enforcement of an artificial, arbitrary, gray uniformity--those who wanted to transcend through their own effort, and those who wanted others to think for them and were willing to pay the ultimate price.”

ThinkingWantedEffortPayLibertyAchieveWillingUltimateStriveGrayArtificialCriedBentEnforcementArbitraryRise AboveMindlessStagnationUniformity
Book:Faith of the Fallen
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“If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind.”

IfsMindHumansWarReligiousRaceDiseaseGainsPhilosopherHuman RaceArbitraryTangibleJihadHuman PsycheReligious WarsCorpusCredo
Author:Jack Vance
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“The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant ‘identity’ (‘this is your duty as an American’, ‘you must commit these acts as a Muslim’, or ‘as a Chinese you should give priority to this national engagement’) is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs).”

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Author:Amartya Sen
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“Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.”

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Book:The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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“No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the minds of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary.”

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Author:Caitlín R. Kiernan
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“Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can.”

MenMadeCountryGovernmentSchoolPoliticalOpinionRightsMovementIgnoranceMassBuiltPoliceInstitutionsPressesTortureUnlimitedArbitraryTheoreticalWhipsRefinedFreedom Of The PressProclamationMilitarismDogmatismGroaningChauvinismFuture HappinessInformers
Author:Arthur Koestler
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“Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way.”

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Author:Pope Benedict XVI
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“Marriage is not a natural phenomenon. It is artificial, arbitrary. And when it disappears you cannot do anything to bring it back. You can pretend, but that pretension makes you a hypocrite. And your pretension cannot deceive the woman, because she has known your love and the pretension cannot become the substitute. The only way is to separate - in friendship, because you have given each other so much.”

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Author:Rajneesh
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“The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny; flattery to treachery; standing armies to arbitrary government; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.”

StillsGovernmentInterestGloryStandingArmyPhilosopherTyrannyHeightPatriotismPopularityBeatenFlatteryArbitraryGlory Of GodClergyTreachery
Book:Sister Peg: A Pamphlet Hitherto Unknown by David Hume
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“Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.”

MayReasonAttitudeAcceptingAtheismAuthorityAimIndependentMethodLifestyleDefinedAssumptionEthicalCreedsOutlookArbitrarySupremacyScientific MethodMental Attitude
Author:Madalyn Murray O'Hair
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“What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.”

WorldHumansStoriesLife IsOrderHumilityReflectionLocalsRationalHuman LifeArbitrarySelectGlitterMomentaryHuman Knowledge
Author:Ursula K. Le Guin
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“Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.”

HumansTechnologyEnvironmentDutyConsequenceWesternProsperityAcceptedSurrenderInventionPrimitiveTechnologicalArbitraryImperativesNoveltyTabooSave Mother EarthWestern Society
Author:Lewis Mumford
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