Negation Quotes - Page 3

• Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it.

  Pope John Paul II

  Commitment, Self, Denial

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• The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.

  Mikhail Bakunin

  Practice, Ideas, Justice

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• Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.

  Emma Goldman

  Atheist, Men, Atheism

  Emma Goldman (1983). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”, Schocken

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• Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.

  Fredric Jameson

  Winning, Degrees, Machines

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• As long as this great army of workers is scattered among so many craft unions, it will be impossible for them to unite and act in harmony together. Craft unionism is the negation of solidarity. The more unions you have, the less unity.

  Eugene V. Debs

  Army, Long, Unity

  "Class Unionism". Eugene V. Debs' speech in South Chicago (November 24, 1905), later published in Eugene V. Debs "Debs, His Life, Writings and Speeches: With a Department of Appreciations", 1908.

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• I discovered that joy is not the negation of pain, but rather acknowledging the presence of pain and feeling happiness in spite of it.

  Lupita Nyong'o

  Pain, Joy, Feelings

  Interview with T. Cole Rachel, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 5, 2013.

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• Indeed, the term body (jism), organs ('arad), extent (mutahayyiz) and their like are all newly-invented terminologies. We have mentioned many a time before that the Salaf and the Imaams have not spoken about such things, neither by way of a negation nor by way of affirmation. Rather, they declared those who spoke about such matters to be innovators and went to great lengths to censure them.

  Ibn Taymiyyah

  Body, Matter, Way

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• Words and ideas are a description of reality, silence is a negation of reality. What is the reality itself?

  John Daido Loori

  Reality, Ideas, Silence

  John Daido Loori (2009). “The True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen's Three Hundred Koans”, p.222, Shambhala Publications

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• My work...is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself.

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Writing, Men, Sake

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• And here we come to the vital distinction between the advocacy of temperance and the advocacy of prohibition. Temperance and self-control are convertible terms. Prohibition, or that which it implies, is the direct negation of the term self-control. In order to save the small percentage of men who are too weak to resist their animal desires, it aims to put chains on every man, the weak and the strong alike. And if this is proper in one respect, why not in all respects? Yet, what would one think of a proposition to keep all men locked up because a certain number have a propensity to steal?

  Felix Mendelssohn

  Strong, War, Animal

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• The student should bear in mind that the very essence of consciousness is constantly to identify itself with the Not-Self, and as constantly to re-assert itself by rejecting the Not-Self. Consciousness, in fact, consists of this alternating assertion and negation - "I am this" - "I am not this." Hence consciousness is, and causes in matter, the attracting and repelling that we call a vibration.

  Arthur E. Powell

  Spiritual, Self, Essence

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• Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason.

  Mikhail Bakunin

  Common Sense, Sound, Christianity

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• What is it in fact, this learning to fly? To be precise, it is 'to learn NOT to fly wrong.' To learn to become a pilot is to learn - not to let oneself fly too slowly. Not to let oneself turn without accelerating. Not to cross the controls. Not to do this, and not to do that. . . . To pilot is negation.

  Henri Mignet

  Flying, Pilots, Facts

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• My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away for my eyes restores me as a complete image for the unreal eye to which I deny all images. A complete image with reference to a world devoid of image which imagines me in the absence of any imaginable figure. The being of a nonbeing of which I am the infinitely small negation which it instigates as its profound harmony. In the night shall I become the universe?

  Maurice Blanchot

  Eye, Night, Views

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• Far too many girls' and women's romantic relationships are formed around a negation of their own worth and attributes rather than a confirmation of them.

  Mariella Frostrup

  Girl, Confirmation, Attributes

  "I enjoy the freedom of being single - but should I be looking for a partner?" by Mariella Frostrup, www.theguardian.com. December 22, 2013.

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• There is no virtue in being uncritical; nor is it a habit to which the young are given. But criticism is only the burying beetle that gets rid of what is dead, and, since the world lives by creative and constructive forces, and not by negation and destruction, it is better to grow up in the company of prophets than of critics.

  Richard Livingstone

  Education, Growing Up, Creative

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• I believe it safe to say that all progress must lead, not to further progress, but finally to the negation of progress, a return to the point of departure.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Believe, Progress, Departure

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• Panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations.

  Charles Hartshorne

  Doctrine, Arbitrary, Deism

  "Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism" by Charles Hartshorne, (p. 348), 1941.

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• The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworhtiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way.

  Otto Weininger

  Race, Two, Choices

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• All the seemingly positive valuations and judgments of ressentiment are hidden devaluations and negations.

  Max Scheler

  Judgment, Valuation

  Max Scheler, Harold J. Bershady (1992). “On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing: Selected Writings”, p.132, University of Chicago Press

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• Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.

  Werner Heisenberg

  Lying, Suffering, Despair

  Werner Heisenberg (1990). “Across the frontiers”, Ox Bow Pr

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• But when I fell in love with black, it contained all color. It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Because black encompasses all colors. Black is the most aristocratic color of all.... You can be quiet and it contains the whole thing.

  Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

  Acceptance, Color, Black

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• Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.

  Theodor Adorno

  Running, Positivity, Being Positive

  Theodor Adorno (2003). “Negative Dialectics”, p.19, Routledge

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• Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.

  Arthur Koestler

  Creativity, Self, Empathy

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• Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality.

  James A. Garfield

  Reality, Liberty, Tangible

  Garfield, James A. (1882). “The works of James Abram Garfield. Volume 1”, p.108, Best Books on

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