Arbitrary Quotes - Page 15

• Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of its nature and characteristics : Externally – or – inwardly.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Two, Way, Characteristics

  Wassily Kandinsky, Hilla Rebay (1947). “Point and Line to Plane”, p.17, Courier Corporation

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• Democracy is about non-arbitrary decisions. Democracy is about spreading decisions; it is not about destroying processes.

  Rahul Gandhi

  Decision, Democracy, Process

  Times Now Interview with Arnab Goswami, www.hindustantimes.com. January 28, 2014.

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• The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language, which some real languages reflect more perfectly than others. Plato was brilliant for his time but reality is not expressable in terms of arbitrary visions of perfection, and furthermore, one programmer's ideal is often another's hell.

  Paul Vixie

  Plato, Real, Errors

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• A lot of my movies were completely destroyed by the censors, who can be pretty arbitrary. They're not completely fair with how they treat one person vs. another.

  Amy Heckerling

  Treats, Persons, Fairs

  Interview with Noel Murray, film.avclub.com. March 20, 2008.

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• Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Memories, Believe, Autumn

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• It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue.

  Julien Offray de La Mettrie

  Vices, Rewards, Merit

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• I use color in a completely arbitrary way in order to express myself powerfully.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Order, Color, Use

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• Although other animals cannot reason nor speak the way humans do, this does not give us the right to do with them as we like. Even though our supposed possession of a soul and superior intelligence are used to create an arbitrary dividing line over rights, the fact remains that all animals have the capacity to experience pain and suffering, and in suffering they are our equals.

  Nathaniel Altman

  Pain, Animal, Rights

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• Languages exist by arbitrary institutions and conventions among peoples; words, as the dialecticians tell us, do not signify naturally, but at our pleasure.

  Francois Rabelais

  Language, Pleasure, Institutions

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• Pity on the person who has become accustomed to seeing in necessity something arbitrary, who ascribes to the arbitrary some sort of reason, and even claims that following that sort of reason has religious value.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Religious, Chance, Pity

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• That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.

  William James

  Independent, Mean, Reality

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.27, 谷月社

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• The grand principles of virtue and honor, however they may be distorted by arbitrary codes, are the same the world over: and wherethese principles are concerned, the right or wrong of any action appears the same to the uncultivated as to the enlightened mind.

  Herman Melville

  Honor, Mind, Principles

  Herman Melville (1968). “Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life”, p.201, Northwestern University Press

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• Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.

  Herman Melville

  Men, Catholic, Mind

  Herman Melville (1963). “Works: Billy Budd, and other prose pieces, edited by R. W. Weaver”

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• The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.

  Raymond Chandler

  Loneliness, Heart, Essence

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.120, Univ of California Press

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• I sit at my desk
  each night with no place to go,
  opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo,
  the whole U.S.,
  its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones,
  through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

  Anne Sexton

  Night, Time Zones, Veins

  Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.74, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

  Ezra Pound

  Art, Poetry, Sound

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• Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.

  Jane Jacobs

  Life, Art, Order

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• In Russia, whatever be the appearance of things, violence and arbitrary rule is at the bottom of them all. Tyranny rendered calm by the influence of terror is the only kind of happiness which this government is able to afford its people.

  Marquis de Custine

  Russia, Government, People

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• One sees a trend in our political and legal cultures toward treating religious beliefs as arbitrary and unimportant, a trend supported by a rhetoric that implies that there is something wrong with religious devotion.

  Stephen L. Carter

  Christian, Religious, Political

  Stephen L. Carter (1993). “The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion”, Basic Books

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• The arbitrary division between church and state... is used, as an easily identifiable rallying point, to subdue the opinions of that vast body of citizens who represent those with religious convictions.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Christian, Religious, Rallying Point

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• It is not an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Men, Soul

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Self-Reliance, the Over-Soul, and Other Essays”, p.63, Coyote Canyon Press

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• Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.

  Harold Bloom

  Literature, Determined, Life Is

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• Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of things that are. People think that they can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to their wills, as though the earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which human beings can indeed develop but must not betray.

  Pope John Paul II

  Thinking, People, Purpose

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• The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.

  William J. Brennan

  Law, Punishment, Administration

  "McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279". Dissenting opinion, 1987.

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• We shall never want to serve God in our real and secret hearts if He looms in our subconscious mind as an arbitrary Dictator or a Spoil-sport, or as one who takes advantage of His position to make us poor mortals feel guilty and afraid. We have not only to be impressed by the "size" and unlimited power of God, we have to be moved to genuine admiration, respect, and affection, if we are ever to worship Him.

  John Bertram Phillips

  Sports, Real, Heart

  John Bertram Phillips (1964). “Your God is too small”, Scribner Paper Fiction

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