Significance Quotes - Page 17

• If one in twenty does not seem high enough odds, we may, if we prefer it, draw the line at one in fifty (the 2 per cent. point), or one in a hundred (the 1 per cent. point). Personally, the writer prefers to set a low standard of significance at the 5 per cent. point, and ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level. A scientific fact should be regarded as experimentally established only if a properly designed experiment rarely fails to give this level of significance.

  Ronald Fisher

  Science, Odds, Giving

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• I am personally convinced of the great power and deep significance of Christianity, and I won't allow any other religion to be promoted.

  Adolf Hitler

  Religion, Atheism, Christianity

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• Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Views, Names

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• Would you be willing to give your life to save the world if no one ever knew your name? If anonymity was the price you would have to pay for significance, would it be too great a price? To live a life of courage is not a guarantee of prestige or adulation. It only matters if you live and die fulfilling the mission you were born for.

  Erwin McManus

  Names, Giving, Pay

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• Cleaning is considered a vital part of the training process in all traditional Japanese disciplines and is a required practice for any novice. It is accorded spiritual significance. Purifying an unclean place is believed to purify the mind.

  Mineko Iwasaki

  Spiritual, Practice, Discipline

  Mineko Iwasaki, Rande Brown (2012). “Geisha Of Gion: The True Story Of Japan's Foremost Geisha”, p.83, Simon and Schuster

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• Love is the reflection of God's unity in the world of duality. It constitutes the entire significance of creation.

  Meher Baba

  Reflection, Love Is, Diversity

  Meher Baba (1979). “The Narrow Lane”

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• It would be something that another person had written down without understanding its significance; just a sentence or two that would be like a flash of light.

  Jeanne DuPrau

  Light, Two, Understanding

  Jeanne DuPrau (2016). “The City of Ember Complete Series”, p.93, Random House Books for Young Readers

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• Be brave and be patient. Have faith in yourself; trust in the significance of your life and the purpose of your passion. You are strong enough to sit in the space between spaces and allow divine inspiration to shed some light. When you put positive energy and productive effort into the world it will come back to you. Occasionally in ways you might not immediately understand and on a time frame you didn’t expect. Look. Listen. Learn. Stay open. Your destiny is awaiting you.

  Jillian Michaels

  Motivational, Strong, Inspiration

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• Now all my tales are based on the fundemental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.... To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Good Life, Hate, Real

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “The Classic Horror Stories”, p.445, OUP Oxford

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• The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation.

  Bell Hooks

  Sex, Struggle, Space

  bell hooks (2014). “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, p.52, Routledge

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• The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.

  Aldous Huxley

  Distance, Eye, Order

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Complete Essays: 1939-1956”, Ivan R Dee

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• There can be no reproach to pain unless we assume human dignity, there is no reason for restraints on pleasure unless we assume human worth, there is no legitimacy to monotony unless we assume a greater purpose to life, there is no purpose to life unless we assume design, death has no significance unless we seek what is everlasting.

  Ravi Zacharias

  Pain, Design, Purpose

  FaceBook post by Ravi Zacharias from Oct 16, 2016

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• A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.

  Edith Wharton

  Dramatic, Acquire, Frivolous

  Edith Wharton, Janet Beer (2002). “The House of Mirth”, p.15, Wordsworth Editions

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• This is the problem of all great revelations: their significance so often exceeds the frame of our comprehension. We understand only after, always after. Not simply when it is too late, but precisely because it is too late.

  R. Scott Bakker

  Too Late, Problem, Revelations

  R. Scott Bakker (2010). “The Darkness That Comes Before: Book 1 of the Prince of Nothing”, p.409, Hachette UK

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• Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.

  Carl Jung

  Letting Go, Ego, Midlife

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• These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.

  Marcel Proust

  Dream, Book, Philosophical

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.251, Modern Library

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• The significance of a fact is relative to [the general body of scientific] knowledge. To say that a fact is significant in science, is to say that it helps to establish or refute some general law; for science, though it starts from observation of the particular, is not concerned essentially with the particular, but with the general. A fact, in science, is not a mere fact, but an instance. In this the scientist differs from the artist, who, if he deigns to notice facts at all, is likely to notice them in all their particularity.

  Bertrand Russell

  Art, Knowledge, Science

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• For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.

  Alfred Stieglitz

  Giving, Personality, Special

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• No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack

  Zadie Smith

  Suicide, Beach, Ocean

  Zadie Smith (2000). “White teeth”

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• Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended it achieves significance only through its death.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Adventure, Order, Achieve

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• The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.

  Thomas Mann

  Adventure, Sadness, Men

  Thomas Mann (1999). “Death in Venice, Tonio Kroger, and Other Writings: Thomas Mann”, p.115, A&C Black

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• I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation.

  George C. Marshall

  Real, Distance, Men

  The Marshall Plan, delivered 5 June 1947 at Harvard University

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• It has been recognized that hydrogen bonds restrain protein molecules to their native configurations, and I believe that as the methods of structural chemistry are further applied to physiological problems it will be found that the significance of the hydrogen bond for physiology is greater than that of any other single structural feature.

  Linus Pauling

  Believe, Science, Molecules

  Linus Pauling (1960). “The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals: An Introduction to Modern Structural Chemistry”, p.450, Cornell University Press

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• We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

  Alain de Botton

  Views, Quality, Divergent

  Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.9, Vintage

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• In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

  Milan Kundera

  Book, Eye, Numbers

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