Negation Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

  Emile M. Cioran

  People, Life And Death, Overcoming

  "Tears and Saints". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1937.

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• 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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• Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed and governed their passions or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory.

  William Blake

  Passion, Reality, Men

  William Blake (1977). “The Portable William Blake”, p.454, Penguin

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• He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.

  Karl Marlantes

  Caring, Men, Evil

  Karl Marlantes (2010). “Matterhorn”, p.264, Atlantic Books Ltd

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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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• Factory farming isn't just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them.

  Matthew Scully

  Animal, Evil, Needs

  Matthew Scully (2011). “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy”, p.289, Souvenir Press

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• In contrast to the knowledge that keeps man in a passive quietude, Desire dis-quiets him and moves him to action. Born of Desire, action tends to satisfy it, and can do so only by the 'negation,' the destruction or at least the transformation, of the desired object: to satisfy hunger, for example, the food must be destroyed or, in any case, transformed. Thus all action is 'negating'.

  Alexandre Kojeve

  Moving, Men, Desire

  Alexandre Kojève (1980). “Introduction to the Reading of Hegel”, p.4, Cornell University Press

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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 no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body.

  Derrick Jensen

  Disrespect, Culture, Arbitrary

  Derrick Jensen (2012). “The Derrick Jensen Reader: Writings on Environmental Revolution”, p.19, Seven Stories Press

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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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