Antithesis Quotes - Page 4

• Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness

  Eckhart Tolle

  Happiness, Consciousness, New Earth

  Eckhart Tolle (2008). “Oneness With All Life: Inspirational Selections from A New Earth”, p.12, Penguin

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• We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and he fear and dread and splendor and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, beacuse it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshiped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory and pitiless.

  Robertson Davies

  Giving, World, Splendor

  Robertson Davies (1976). “World of wonders”, Penguin Books, 1977

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• Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.

  Primo Levi

  Later In Life, Perfect, Joy

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

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• Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off.

  Jon Krakauer

  Spiritual, Religious, Atheist

  Jon Krakauer (2013). “Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith”, p.18, Pan Macmillan

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• Say she rail; why, I'll tell her plain She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. Say that she frown; I'll say she looks as clear As morning roses newly wash'd with dew. Say she be mute and will not speak a word; Then I'll commend her volubility, and say she uttereth piercing eloquence.

  William Shakespeare

  Morning, Rose, Dew

  'The Taming Of The Shrew' (1592) act 2, sc. 1, l. 171

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• The various elements of truth stand in perpetual antithesis, sometimes requiring us to believe apparent opposites while we wait for the moment when we shall know as we are known.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Believe, Opposites, Waiting

  Aiden Wilson Tozer (1965). “The Knowledge of the Holy”, p.41, Fig

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• What I'm saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Morning, Justice, Brotherhood

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• Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Communication, Science, Prose And Poetry

  "Definitions of Poetry" (1811)

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• The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.

  Michael Shermer

  Atheist, Believe, Facts

  Michael Shermer (2003). “How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God”, p.407, Macmillan

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• A “fraternity” is the antithesis offraternity. The first (that is, the order or organization) is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.

  E. B. White

  Ideas, Perspective, Feelings

  "In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers".

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• Whatever is fine and permanent in human achievement has been realised through individuals courageously facing the circumstances of their being; and a society is civilised to the extent to which it makes this possible. Terrorism, which aims at putting out thespiritual light, is the antithesis of civilisation.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Light, Achievement, Society

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• Free will appears unfettered, deliberate; it is boundlessly free, wandering, the spirit. But fate is a necessity; unless we believe that world history is a dream-error, the unspeakable sorrows of mankind fantasies, and that we ourselves are but the toys of our fantasies. Fate is the boundless force of opposition against free will. Free will without fate is just as unthinkable as spirit without reality, good without evil. Only antithesis creates the quality.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Dream, Believe, Fate

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• Communism--the first expression of the social nature--is the first term of social development--the thesis; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term--the antithesis. When we have discovered the third term, the synthesis, we shall have the required solution.

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Expression, Development, Synthesis

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (2011). “Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology”, p.130, AK Press

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• In science , all conclusions are provisional, subject to new evidence and better arguments, the very antithesis of religious faith.

  Michael Shermer

  Faith, Religious, Argument

  Michael Shermer (2010). “Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown”, p.197, Macmillan

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• Like 'real', 'free' is only used to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses. As 'truth' is not a name of a characteristic of assertions, so 'freedom' is not a name for a characteristic of actions, but the name of a dimension in which actions are assessed.

  J. L. Austin

  Real, Names, Dimensions

  "Philosophical Papers". Book by J. L. Austin, edited by James Opie Urmson, Geoffrey James Warnock, p. 180, 1979.

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• You become a serious programmer by going through a stage where you are fully aware of the degree to which you know the specification, meaning both the explicit and the tacit specification of your language and of your problem. "Hey, it works most of the time" is the very antithesis of a serious programmer, and certain languages can only support code like that.

  Erik Naggum

  Support, Degrees, Hey

  "Implementational Portability". Usenet discussion groups, groups.google.com. August 23, 1999.

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• By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization.

  Robert Kuttner

  Home, Nursing, Class

  "The Economic Illusion". Book by Robert Kuttner, 1984.

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• Certain things are complete superstition and have no validity at all in the Bible. Yeah. They're just the antithesis of everything that is correct intellectually.

  Lenny Bruce

  Atheism, Superstitions, Yeah

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• My son, I do not say these are foals and those asses, these little monkeys and those great baboons, as you would have me do. As I told you from the first, I regard them as earth's heroes. But I do not wish to believe them without cause, nor to accept those propositions whose antitheses (as you must have understood if you are not both blind and deaf) are so compellingly true.

  Giordano Bruno

  Believe, Hero, Son

  Giordano Bruno (1962). “Cause, Principle, and Unity: Five Dialogues”

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• There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to understand the common antithesis of a good writer and a bad man.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Character, Men, Judging

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.5

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• Young people are dazzled by the brilliancy of antithesis, and employ it. Matter-of-fact men, and those who like precision, naturally fall into comparisons and metaphor. Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied even with hyperbole. As for the sublime, it is only great geniuses and those of the very highest order that are able to rise to its height.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Fall, Men, Order

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• The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Education, Adequate, Liberal Education

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Aims of Education”, p.48, Simon and Schuster

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• A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.

  Thomas Sowell

  Ideas, Moral, Monopoly

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• War is not just the business of death, it is the antitheses of life.

  Joss Whedon

  War

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• New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.

  Italo Calvino

  New York, America, Horror

  Italo Calvino (2014). “Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings”, p.86, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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