Premises Quotes

• Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

  Samuel Butler

  Life, Wisdom, Art

  Notebooks "Life" (1912)

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• Essential to the theory of evolution is the premise that everything has come into being by itself.

  Unknown

  Aquariums, Theory Of Evolution, Essentials

  6 Copy quote

• All proofs rest on premises.

  Aristotle

  Proof

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• Those who hope for purity and righteousness always try and destroy that which disturbs them. They think the disturbance comes from outside themselves. This is a serious problem. Wars, suicide bombings, and all sorts of other nasty things start from the premise that we can destroy 'evil' outside ourselves without dealing with the evil within.

  Brad Warner

  Suicide, Hope, War

  Brad Warner (2010). “Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the True Dharma”, p.89, New World Library

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• Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

  Dorianne Laux

  Writing, Simple, Metaphor

  Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux (2010). “The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

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• In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Math, Ideas, Issues

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Adventures of Ideas”, p.72, Simon and Schuster

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• The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than your own.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Mistake, Book, People

  Daniel Kahneman (2011). “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, p.31, Macmillan

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• When we enter into any relationship with the premise that we are empty and the other person will fill us in, we are sure to fail. We can only win when we proceed from wholeness.

  Alan Cohen

  Relationship, Winning, Failing

  Alan Cohen (1987). “Healing of the Planet Earth: Personal Power and Planetary Transformation”, Dolphin Communications Co

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• All of the factors that make up a quality city - safe streets, high paying jobs, strong neighborhoods, etc. - emanate from a strong educational premise.

  Alan Autry

  Strong, Jobs, Educational

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

  Ayn Rand

  Thinking, Atlas, Literature

  Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.152, Hamilton Books

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• Unless you plan on making academia your life, all you need to know about postmodernism is that its premises are fundamentally wrong.

  Tucker Max

  Academia, Needs, Postmodernism

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• Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.

  John Updike

  Facts, Foolish, Scribbles

  "The Early Stories: 1953-1975".

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• The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

  Erich Fromm

  Art, Creation, Capacity

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• When your principles seem to be demanding suicide, clearly it's time to check your premises

  Nathaniel Branden

  Suicide, Principles, Checks

  11 Copy quote

• Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Thinking, Facts, Conclusion

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1835). “Specimens of the table talk”, p.12

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• Germany, I think, was first to substitute a Social Security program for its elderly based on this premise, that is, that we would tax workers to pay retirement benefits for those retired.

  John Shadegg

  Retirement, Thinking, Elderly

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• All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

  Aldo Leopold

  Animal, Land, Water

  Aldo Leopold (1968). “A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There”, p.178, Oxford University Press

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• What I want you to understand, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check - before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity - whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires.

  Ayn Rand

  Winning, Evil, Want

  Ayn Rand (1957). “Atlas Shrugged”

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• In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.

  Storm Jameson

  Grief, Loss, Thinking

  6 Copy quote

• If a person realized that everything people call happiness, love and joy was just a miscalculation based on a false premise, he'd feel a horrible emptiness inside. The only thing that could rouse him from his paralysis would be to gamble with his own face and the face of others. The person capable of that would be permitted anything.

  Vladimir Bartol

  People, Joy, Would Be

  5 Copy quote

• It is always difficult for a woman to be grateful for a form of chivalry that seems to be based on the premise that she is a moron.

  Alice Duer Miller

  Grateful, Chivalry, Form

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• the pyramids were built for pharaohs on the happy theory that they could take their stuff with them. Versailles was built for kings on the theory that they should live surrounded by the finest stuff. The Mall of America is built on the premise that we should all be able to afford this stuff. It may be a shallow culture, but it's by-God democratic. Sneer if you dare; this is something new in world history.

  Molly Ivins

  Kings, Shopping, Pyramids

  Molly Ivins (2010). “You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You”, p.94, Vintage

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• The Zen meditative approach has a simple, unstated premise: moods and attitudes shape—determine—what we think and perceive. If we feel happy, we tend to develop certain trains of thought. If we feel sad or angry, still others. But suppose, with training, we become nonattached to distractions and learn to dampen these wild, emotional swings on either side of equanimity. Then we can enter that serene awareness which is the natural soil for positive, spontaneous personal growth, often called spiritual growth.

  James H. Austin

  Happy, Spiritual, Attitude

  James H. Austin (1999). “Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness”, p.13, MIT Press

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• One can feel the immense joy of Amy Hill Hearth's engagement in her first novel. It radiates through every scene and through every page. Sometimes, an exceptional writer finds an exceptional premise, and the result is a truly exceptional book. Such is the case with Miss Dreamsville...The writing is brilliant, especially the dialogue through which the characters are defined.

  Philip K. Jason

  Book, Writing, Character

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• Ideologies - isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurence by deducing it from a single premise - are a very recent phenomenon ... Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of the ideologies discovered.

  Hannah Arendt

  Political, Isms, Satisfaction

  Hannah Arendt (1966). “The origins of totalitarianism”

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