Negation Quotes

• Practice rather than preach. Make of your life an affirmation, defined by your ideals, not the negation of others. Dare to the level of your capability then go beyond to a higher level.

  Alexander Haig

  Practice, Levels, Affirmation

  54 Copy quote

• Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Knowledge, Science, Two

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”, p.102

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Freedom, Long, Rejection

  9 Copy quote

• Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

  Gustave Courbet

  Artist, Essence, Transcendentalism

  27 Copy quote

• An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Life, Unemployment, Unemployed

  40 Copy quote

• But in fact if you look at film as a metaphor, only through the negative can you have the positive print. What I'm trying to get to is the positive value of negation.

  Godfrey Reggio

  Trying, Facts, Negative

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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.

  Salvatore Quasimodo

  Mean, Men, Mind

  7 Copy quote

• The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.

  Simone Weil

  Spiritual, Reality, Aggravation

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.129, Psychology Press

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organised to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

  Ivan Illich

  Humorous, Health, Doctors

  "Medical Nemesis". Book by Ivan Illich, 1976.

  63 Copy quote

  Show source

• No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.

  Knut Hamsun

  Fate, Men, Becoming

  Ernest Hemingway, Knut Hamsun, Hermann Hesse (1971). “Ernest Hemingway, Knut Hamsun [and] Hermann Hesse”

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• That knowledge which purifies the mind and heart alone is true Knowledge, all else is only a negation of Knowledge.

  Ramakrishna

  Heart, Mind, True Knowledge

  Ramakrishna (1960). “Sayings: The Most Exhaustive Collection of Them, Their Number Being 1120”

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

  Albert Camus

  Despair, Nihilism, Desire

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.57, Vintage

  35 Copy quote

  Show source

• But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.

  Karl Marx

  Law, Capitalist, Begets

  Karl Marx (2007). “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy - The Process of Capitalist Production”, p.837, Cosimo, Inc.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation.... The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Love, Integrity, Sacrifice

  "Our blood". Book by Andrea Dworkin, 1976.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Consensus is the negation of leadership.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Leadership, Consensus

  "Los Angeles Times Interview : Margaret Thatcher : The Lady's Not Made for Ducking a Tough Question". Los Angeles Times Interview, articles.latimes.com. November 28, 1993.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.

  William Hazlitt

  Silly, Men, Two

  7 Copy quote

• Defenceless under the night
  Our world in stupor lies;
  Yet, dotted everywhere,
  Ironic points of light
  Flash out wherever the Just
  Exchange their messages:
  May I, composed like them
  Of Eros and of dust,
  Beleaguered by the same
  Negation and despair,
  Show an affirming flame.

  W. H. Auden

  Lying, Night, Dust

  "September 1, 1939" l. 92 (1939) See George H.W. Bush 3

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

  Samuel Beckett

  Solitude, Proust, Humans

  Samuel Beckett (1931). “Proust”

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• "No" is a word that must never be negotiated, because the person who chooses not to hear it is trying to control you... Declining to hear "no" is a signal that someone is either seeking control or refusing to relinquish it.

  Gavin de Becker

  Choices, Abuse, Trying

  Gavin De Becker (1998). “The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence”, Dell Publishing Company

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• We tend to misunderstand the colour black, seeing it as evil, or negation of life. Rather, black means all things being possible, infinite energy of life before consciousness has constructed any boundaries. When we fear blackness or darkness we fear the deep unconscious source of life itself.

  Rachel Pollack

  Mean, Energy Of Life, Evil

  9 Copy quote

• It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.

  Niels Bohr

  Hallmark

  "Mind from Matter: An Essay on Evolutionary Epistemology". Book by Max Delbruck, March 5, 1986.

  40 Copy quote

  Show source

• In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Lying, Divorce, Enthusiasm

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1856). “Representative Men: Seven Lectures ...”, p.263

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Beautiful, War, Wish

  1882 Die fro« hliche Wissenschaft ( The Gay Science), section 276 (translated by WKaufmann).

  44 Copy quote

  Show source

• The advanced education in Tantra obviously has to do with the entrance into samadhi, the negation of the self. That is what the path of negation means, not the negation of life, but the negation of anything that is not enlightenment.

  Frederick Lenz

  Mean, Self, Enlightenment

  4 Copy quote

• The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.

  Thomas Love Peacock

  Reading, Class, Poetry

  Thomas Love Peacock, Herbert Francis Brett Brett-Smith (1921). “Four Ages of Poetry: Shelley's Defence of Poetry. Browning's Essay on Shelley. Edited by H.F.B. Brett-Smith”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source