Renounce Quotes - Page 3

• I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

  Mark Twain

  Science, Animal, Men

  Mark Twain (1973). “What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings”, p.81, Univ of California Press

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• But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Firefly, Saws, Infinite

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• Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies." (Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)

  Voltaire

  Men, Good Man, Enemy

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• ...life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.

  Julian Barnes

  Philosophical, Thinking, Decision

  Julian Barnes (2011). “The Sense of an Ending”, p.48, Random House

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• Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus.

  Glen Duncan

  Focus, Achieve, Demonic

  Glen Duncan (2011). “The Last Werewolf (The Last Werewolf 1)”, p.85, Canongate Books

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• There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.

  Anais Nin

  Powerful, Artist, Two

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• Pain, loss and separation are inevitable on the path of love, and the only way of avoiding them is by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you have to renounce love.It was like putting out your own eyes in order not to see the bad things in life.

  Paulo Coelho

  Pain, Eye, Loss

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• As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

  Emile M. Cioran

  Girl, Philosophical, Fighting

  "On the Heights of Despair". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1934.

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• I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

  Albert Camus

  Light, Able, Pleasure

  ALBERT CAMUS (1971). “NOBEL PRIZE LIBRARY”

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• Isn't strength the ability to renounce every lie in your heart?

  Bisco Hatori

  Lying, Heart, Ability

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• Alaska is what happens when Willy Wonka and the witch from Hansel and Gretel elope, buy a place together upstate, renounce their sweet teeth, and turn into health fanatics.

  Sloane Crosley

  Sweet, Alaska, Together

  Sloane Crosley (2010). “How Did You Get This Number”, p.65, Penguin

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• We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Character, Ideas, Order

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.183, A&C Black

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• I myself will perhaps cry out with all the rest, looking at the mother embracing her child's tormentor: 'Just art thou, O Lord!' but I do not want to cry out with them. While there's still time, I hasten to defend myself against it, and therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to 'dear God' in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Mother, Art, Children

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• Are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life--a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them?

  George Eliot

  Work, Struggle, Men

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.2423, Delphi Classics

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• He who wholly renounces himself, and relies not on mere human reason, will make good progress in the Scriptures; but the world comprehends them not, from ignorance of that mortification which is the gift of God's word.

  Martin Luther

  Ignorance, Progress, World

  Martin Luther (1848). “The table talk or familiar discourse of Martin Luther, tr. by W. Hazlitt”, p.4

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• The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Happiness, Fate, Grace

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1984). “Notebooks, 1914-1916”, p.71, University of Chicago Press

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• The reward of renunciation is some good greater than the thing renounced. To renounce with no vision of such a good, from fear or in automatic obedience to a formula, is to weaken the springs of life, and to diminish the soul's resistance to this world.

  Hugh Kingsmill

  Spring, Soul, Vision

  Hugh Kingsmill (1949). “The Progress of a Biographer”

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• Students of the Way must not study Buddhism for the sake of themselves. They must study Buddhism only for the sake of Buddhism. The key to this is to renounce both body and mind without holding anything back and to offer them to the great sea of Buddhism.

  Dogen

  Buddhism, Keys, Sea

  "Things Overheard at the Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma". Book by Dogen translated by Reiho Masunaga, June 1975.

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• We are not to renounce our senses and experience, nor (that which is the undoubted Word of God) our natural Reason. For they are the talents which he hath put into our hands to negotiate, till the coming again of our blessed savior, and therefore not to be folded up in the napkin of an implicate faith, but employed in the purchase of justice, peace, and true religion. For though there be many things in God's Word above Reason--that is to say, which cannot by natural reason be either demonstrated or confuted--yet there is nothing contrary to it.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Blessed, Hands, Justice

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• Pessimism negates the existing world. Yet its negating is ambiguous. It can simply will decay and nothingness, but it can also renounce what exists and thus open a path for a new formation of the world.

  Martin Heidegger

  Decay, World, Path

  Martin Heidegger (1987). “Nietzsche”

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• There are people who say that "Gül can't be my president". These people don't have good manners for and they should renounce their Turkish citizenship foremost this man will be chosen democratically by the people.

  Recep Tayyip Erdogan

  Men, People, Good Man

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• As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Reality, Consistency, Fiction

  Slavoj Žižek (1993). “Tarrying with the negative: Kant, Hegel, and the critique of ideology”, Duke University Press Books

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• In order effectively to liberate oneself from the grip of existing social reality, one should first renounce the transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to it.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Reality, Order, Firsts

  Slavoj Žižek (2001). “The Fragile Absolute Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?”, p.149, Verso

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• We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.

  Jennifer Michael Hecht

  Believe, Judging, Personality

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• The higher life begins for us ... when we renounce our own will to bow before a Divine law.

  George Eliot

  Law, Bows, Willpower

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.1907, ShandonPress

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