Absolutes Quotes - Page 18

• Outstanding people have one thing in common: an absolute sense of mission

  Zig Ziglar

  Inspirational, Leadership, People

  "Created for Excellence : 12 keys to Godly Success". Book by Kevin Baerg (p. 25), 1996.

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• The question occurred to me: Well, if that's so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what's the big deal? Why all this bother? The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It's the language the soul understands.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Spiritual, Soul, Needs

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• Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.

  Truman Capote

  Reading, Two, Orange

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• What you and I might rate as an absolute disaster, God may rate as a pimple-level problem that will pass. He views your life the way you view a movie after you've read the book. When something bad happens, you feel the air sucked out of the theater. Everyone else gasps at the crisis on the screen. Not you. Why? You've read the book. You know how the good guy gets out of the tight spot. God views your life with the same confidence. He's not only read your story...he wrote it.

  Max Lucado

  Inspirational, Book, Air

  Max Lucado (2014). “One God, One Plan, One Life: A 365 Devotional”, p.171, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• You know, 'power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely'? It's the same with powerlessness. Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Einstein said everything had changed since the atom was split, except the way we think. We have to think anew.

  Studs Terkel

  Thinking, Atoms, Splits

  "Voice of America". Interview with Oliver Burkeman, www.theguardian.com. March 1, 2002.

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• The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.

  Harold Pinter

  Law, Iraq, Invasion

  Harold Pinter (2015). “Death etc.”, p.9, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.

  James A. Baldwin

  Splendor, Desolation, Fearful

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• Meet your obligations. But obligations never prevented anyone from following their dreams. Remember that you are a manifestation of the absolute, and do only those things in your life that are worth the effort. Only those who do that will understand the great transformations that are yet to be seen.

  Paulo Coelho

  Dream, Effort, Transformation

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• the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Depression, Giving Up, Believe

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• Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

  George Santayana

  Change, Children, Persistence

  George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.172, MIT Press

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• No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

  Shirley Jackson

  Dream, Wall, Reality

  Shirley Jackson (2006). “The Haunting of Hill House”, p.19, Penguin

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• For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean?

  D. H. Lawrence

  Girl, Mean, Perfect

  D. H. Lawrence (2013). “The Essential D.H. Lawrence”, p.1590, Simon and Schuster

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• The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life - freedom.

  Erich Fromm

  Men, Essence, Quality

  Erich Fromm (2011). “The Heart of Man”, p.29, Lantern Books

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• War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Peace, War, Damnation

  Lois McMaster Bujold (1990). “Vorkosigan's Game”

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• Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Children, Childhood, Adults

  Chuck Palahniuk (2011). “Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey”, p.62, Random House

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• An ad that pretends to be art is - at absolute best - like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

  David Foster Wallace

  Lonely, Art, Confused

  "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". Essay by David Foster Wallace, February 1, 1997.

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• The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

  Wallace Stevens

  Old Things, People, Life And Death

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• Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Loneliness, Believe, Discovery

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• Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

  Annie Dillard

  People, Church, Cheerful

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.173, Canongate Books

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• Imagine a person who comes in here tonight and argues 'no air exists' but continues to breathe air while he argues. Now intellectually, atheists continue to breathe - they continue to use reason and draw scientific conclusions [which assumes an orderly universe], to make moral judgments [which assumes absolute values] - but the atheistic view of things would in theory make such 'breathing' impossible. They are breathing God's air all the time they are arguing against him.

  Greg L. Bahnsen

  God, Religious, Atheist

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• How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

  Ian Mcewan

  Atheist, Imagination, Forgiving

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• That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Fashion, Science, Oddities

  Edgar Allan Poe, Stuart Levine, Susan Levine (1976). “The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition”, p.226, University of Illinois Press

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• Once war becomes a clash of absolutes, there is no breathing room for mercy. Absolute truth is blind truth.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, War, Breathing

  Deepak Chopra (2008). “The Third Jesus: How to Find Truth and Love in Today's World”, p.229, Random House

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• I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.

  Martin Buber

  Knowledge, Learning, Adventure

  "Martin Buber: An Intimate Portrait". Book by Aubrey Hodes, 1971.

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• Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  School, Knowledge, Suggestions

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