Negation Quotes - Page 4

• There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Creative, Deities, Spirit

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat (2004). “The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.263, JHU Press

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• Evil denotes the lack of good. Not every absence of good is an evil, for absence may be taken either in a purely negative or in aprivative sense. Mere negation does not display the character of evil, otherwise nonexistents would be evil and moreover, a thing would be evil for not possessing the goodness of something else, which would mean that man is bad for not having the strength of a lion or the speed of a wild goat. But what is evil is privation; in this sense blindness means the privation of sight.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Taken, Character, Mean

  Saint Thomas Aquinas (1951). “Philosophical Texts”, London : Oxford University Press

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• I wrote The Philosophy of Disenchantment, which is, I think, the gloomiest and worst book ever published. Out of sheer laziness, I then produced a history of atheism, The Anatomy of Negation, which has been honored by international dislike. Need I state that of all my children it is the one that I prefer?

  Edgar Saltus

  Children, Philosophy, Book

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• The Buddhist message is a message not of the negation of life, but one of affirmation.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhist, Messages, Affirmation

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• It is simply that in all life on earth as in all good agriculture there are no short-cuts that by-pass Nature and the nature of man himself and animals, trees, rocks and streams. Every attempt at a formula, a short-cut, a panacea, always ends in negation and destruction.

  Louis Bromfield

  Cutting, Animal, Men

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• Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object, which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured... anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object.

  Paul Tillich

  Anxiety, Phrases, Paradoxical

  Paul Tillich (1968). “The Courage To Be”

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• The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it.

  Glenn Gould

  Void, Doe, Forget

  "Glenn Gould Reader". Book by Glenn Gould, p. 5, 1984.

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• ...there ... remains a huge following [of Ayn Rand's philosophy] of those who ignore the indiscretions, infidelities, and moral inconsistencies of the founder and focus instead on the positive aspects of her philosophy. There is much in it to admire, if you do not have to accept the whole package... Criticism of the founder or followers of a philosophy does not, by itself, constitute a negation of any part of the philosophy... Criticism of part of a philosophy does not gainsay the whole.

  Michael Shermer

  Philosophy, Thinking, Focus

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• I consider Western Christianity in its practical working a negation of Christ's Christianity.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Christianity, Western, Practicals

  Mahatma Gandhi (1924). “Young India: 1919-1922”

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• To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions-between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, cooperativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation.

  Norman Cousins

  Men, Essence, Optimism

  Norman Cousins (1953). “Who Speaks for Man?”, New York : Macmillan

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• All rejection and negation indicates a deficiency in fertility: fundamentally, if only we were good plowland we would allow nothing to go unused, and in every thing, event, and person we would welcome manure, rain, or sunshine.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Rain, Creativity, Sunshine

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• How cold the vacancy
  When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
  First sees reality. The mortal no
  Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

  Wallace Stevens

  Reality, Vacancy, Gone

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.331, Vintage

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• Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windowsthe displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcitymimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Delicacy, Landscape, Affluence

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• Somehow the body keeps life going despite the ravaging negations of the mind.

  Mason Cooley

  Life, Mind, Body

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• Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the way, that any other field of human endeavour does: the extent of the negation of man's corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Sleep, Men, Self

  Stanislaw Lem (1984). “His Master's Voice”, p.20, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form of Divine revelation and scientific authority. But the same question stands open from the days of Socrates and Pilate down to our own age of wholesale negation: is there such a thing as absolute truth in the hands of any one party or man?

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Spiritual, Party, Men

  Lucifer Magazine, February 1888.

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• Ibsen is at heart an optimist. He could not close his life's work with a note of negation. When We Dead Awaken is a clear, ringing call to the future.

  Jeanette Lee

  Heart, Notes, Optimist

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• We avoid sensuousness, only by resorting to simple negation. We come at last to define spirit by saying that it is not matter.

  Albert Pike

  Simple, Matter, Lasts

  Albert Pike (2013). “Morals and Dogma”, p.57, Simon and Schuster

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• The only "definitive truth" for Buddhism is the absolute negation of any one truth as the Definitive Truth.

  Dalai Lama

  Buddhism, Absolutes

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Imperialism is a negation of God. It does ungodly acts in the name of God.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  God, Names, Doe

  Mahatma Gandhi (1949). “Communal Unity”

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• Schools of science and physics replacing each other at a faster and faster rate. Just the nature of our world is constant revision, constant...negation of previous beliefs, and so...the whole world is a twist ending. Every week is a twist ending.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  School, Our World, Revision

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• My personal view is that nobody should stand between an employer and employee when it comes to employment contract negations. Not the government and not meddlesome third parties. This includes the ability for individuals to bargain collectively with their employers.

  Mark Noble

  Party, Government, Views

  Source: www.columbusunderground.com

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• What Marxism calls atheism is basically the negation of an idol, which sometimes bears the name of God.

  Ernesto Cardenal

  Idols, Names, Atheism

  Source: www.crisismagazine.com

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• Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

  James Thurber

  Sex, Shadow, Lines

  1961 Of English. Lanterns and Lances,'Such a Phrase as Drifts Through Dreams'.

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• To doubt has more of faith ... than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Feelings, Doubt, Church

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Nelson Coleridge, Kathleen Coburn, Bart Keith Winer, Carl Woodring (1990). “Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Table Talk (2 v.)”, Bollingen Foundation

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