Supposing That Quotes - Page 2

• If you are walking backward, away from something you think is a mistake, you may be right in supposing it is a mistake, but for you to be walking backward is never right. You know what happens to people who walk backward.... We are meant to walk forward, not backward, and reaction is always a matter of walking backward.

  J. I. Packer

  Mistake, Thinking, People

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• It were better, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that divinity, the better.

  David Hume

  Order, Principles, Looks

  David Hume (1826). “The Philosophical Works: Including All the Essays, and Exhibiting the More Important Alterations and Corrections in the Successive Ed. Publ. by the Author”, p.463

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• I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

  Howard Zinn

  Past, Compassion, Warfare

  Howard Zinn (2013). “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress”, p.12, City Lights Books

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• "Failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.

  Mary Pickford

  Encouraging, Perseverance, Encouragement

  "Why Not Try God?". "St. Petersburg Times" Newspaper, sect. 2, (p. 3), January 25, 1936.

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• Life isn't long enough to do all you could accomplish. And what a privilege even to be alive. In spite of all the pollutions and horrors, how beautiful this world is. Supposing you only saw the stars once every year. Think what you would think. The wonder of it!

  Tasha Tudor

  Life, Beautiful, Appreciation

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• It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

  John B. S. Haldane

  Mind, Brain, Sound

  "Possible worlds, and other essays". Book by J. B. S. Haldane, 1927.

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• I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher.

  Jonathan Swift

  Littles, Sacred, Philosopher

  Jonathan Swift (1861). “The Works of Jonathan Swift ...: With Cop'ous Notes and Additions”, p.593

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• Some things you can't find out; but you will never know you can't by guessing and supposing: no, you have to be patient and go on experimenting until you find out that you can't find out.

  Mark Twain

  Goes On, Guessing, Patient

  Mark Twain (2007). “The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain”, p.209, Modern Library

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• Nearly everyone who is unemployed votes "Democrat." Nearly every immigrant, at least in the first generation, votes "Democrat." Nearly every non-white American votes "Democrat." The GOP know that so intellectually and financially bankrupt an administration should never have been re-elected - indeed, given the scale of electoral fraud practiced by the "Democrats," he may not actually have been re-elected (always supposing that he had the constitutional right to hold the office of president in the first place).

  Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

  White, Office, President

  "State Of Disunion: A 'Radical' Solution" by Christopher Monckton, www.wnd.com. January 28, 2014.

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• The chief difficulty of modern theoretical physics resides not in the fact that it expresses itself almost exclusively in mathematical symbols, but in the psychological difficulty of supposing that complete nonsense can be seriously promulgated and transmitted by persons who have sufficient intelligence of some kind to perform operations in differential and integral calculus.

  Celia Green

  Science, Theoretical Physics, Facts

  Celia Elizabeth Green (1976). “The decline and fall of science”, Hamish Hamilton

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• Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works.

  C. S. Lewis

  Years, Temptation, Asceticism

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “The Screwtape Letters: Annotated Edition”, p.9, Harper Collins

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• We must beware of falling into the fatally common error of supposing that what we see is all there is to see.

  Charles Webster Leadbeater

  Fall, Errors, Common

  Charles Webster Leadbeater (1996). “The Life After Death and How Theosophy Unveils It”, p.7, Health Research Books

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• When our thoughts revolve we are so often deceived into supposing that their violent movement is an indication of their vigorous originality, the upheaval of prejudice and fixed ideas, when all the time it is more likely that the machine which contains them is only an elaborate cement-mixer, and when the thinking is finished, those whirling thoughts are smoothed into the unchanged conventional mould and seeing them set solid enough to dance, to build, to travel upon, we would never dream of their first deceit, of the hope once roused by their apparently violent reorganisation.

  Janet Frame

  Dream, Thinking, Ideas

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• Even if there was such a thing as a half-price sale at the local Ming outlet shop, she would have to work ten lifetimes to make up such a sum. Always supposing that it wasn't one of a kind. Panic was no longer merely rearing. It was thundering through her at full throttle. There was only one thing to be done, she realized. The mature, responsible, adult thing to do. Hide the evidence.

  Alexandra Ivy

  Adults, Done, Half

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• There is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Interesting, Reason, Prove

  Isaiah Berlin (1991). “The crooked timber of humanity: chapters in the history of ideas”, Random House Inc

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• A simple woman down in Tyngsborough, at whose house I once stopped to get a draught of water, when I said, recognizing the bucket, that I had stopped there nine years before for the same purpose, asked if I was not a traveler, supposing that I had been traveling ever since, and had now come round again.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Simple, Years, Water

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.665, Simon and Schuster

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• the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is - I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid, when viewed in the light of their professed principles. ... They hardly know Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion.

  George Eliot

  Christian, Attitude, Lying

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• The Beauty of the Mountain is hidden for all those who try to discover it from the top, supposing that, one way or an other, one can reach this place directly. The Beauty of the Mountain reveals only to those who climbed it.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Trying, Mountain, Way

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• The Christian life is not just our own private affair. If we have been born again into God's family, not only has he become our Father but every other Christian believer in the world, whatever his nation or denomination, has become our brother or sister in Christ. But it is no good supposing that membership of the universal Church of Christ is enough; we must belong to some local branch of it. Every Christian's place is in a local church. sharing in its worship, its fellowship, and its witness.

  John Stott

  Christian, Brother, Father

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• Happiness, the goal to which we all are striving is reached by endeavoring to make the lives of others happy, and if by renouncing the luxuries of life we can lighten the burdens of others.... surely the simplification of our wants is a thing greatly to be desired! And so, if instead of supposing that we must become hermits and dwellers in caves in order to practice simplicity, we set about simplifying our affairs, each according to his own convictions and opportunity, much good will result and the simple life will at once be established.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Happiness, Opportunity, Simple

  Mahatma Gandhi (2012). “The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas”, p.62, Vintage

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• We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Thinking, Civilization, Weakness

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• People help each other through a crisis by each supposing that the other can handle it better than he himself can.

  Frank A. Clark

  People, Helping, Crisis

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• The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.

  William Kingdon Clifford

  Past, Giving, Events

  William Kingdon Clifford (1999). “The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays”, Pyr Books

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• Given the complexity of interpersonal relationships and institutions and the complexity of co-ordination of the actions of many people, it is enormously unlikely that, even if there were one ideal pattern for society, it could be arrived at in an a priori fashion. And even supposing that some great genius did come along with a blueprint, who could have the confidence that it could work

  Robert Nozick

  Fashion, People, Genius

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• There is no ground for supposing that matter and energy existed before [the Big Bang] and were suddenly galvanized into action. For what could distinguish that moment from all other moments in eternity? It is simpler to postulate creation ex nihilo-Divine will constituting Nature from nothingness.

  E. T. Whittaker

  Atheism, Bangs, Energy

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