Relative Quotes - Page 15

• What then is to be the lot of Rossetti's fame and influence? 'An amateur who failed in two arts', it is true; yet it hardly harms Rossetti or touches his standing. On the contrary, it defines both very brilliantly. The small word 'failed' is a small word and little more to artists who are forever going on until they give up over a game that must be lost. Every artist, when confronted by the immensities of art, which is life, must confess to failure. A failure is a thing very relative.

  Ford Madox Ford

  Art, Giving Up, Games

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• The hostility perpetually exercised between one man and another, is caused by the desire of many for that which only few can possess. Every man would be rich, powerful, and famous; yet fame, power, and riches, are only the names of relative conditions, which imply the obscurity, dependence, and poverty of greater numbers.

  Samuel Johnson

  Powerful, Men, Numbers

  Samuel Johnson (1784). “The Rambler: In Four Volumes..”, p.125

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• Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly and by another name is called duration. Relative, apparent, and common time is any sensible and external measure (precise or imprecise) of duration by means of motion; such as a measure-for example, an hour, a day, a month, a year-is commonly used instead of true time.

  Isaac Newton

  Time, Mean, Science

  Sir Isaac Newton (2014). “Newton: Philosophical Writings”, p.84, Cambridge University Press

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• Israel has legitimate concerns about its security relative to Iran. I mean, you have a large country with a significant military that has proclaimed that Israel shouldn't exist, that has denied the Holocaust, that has financed Hezbollah, and as a consequence, there are missiles that are pointed towards Tel Aviv. There are very good reasons why Israelis are nervous about Iran's position in the world generally.

  Barack Obama

  Country, Military, Mean

  News Conference on Iran Deal, edition.cnn.com. July 15, 2015.

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• If you go from the USA - which, relative to the rest of the world, is in pretty good shape in terms of biodiversity and sustainability - to the tropics, everything gets worse. You have Indonesia, which is destroying its own forest. In West Africa there's no control whatsoever. It's a global situation. For that reason it ties in clearly with the needs and relationships of low-income countries.

  E. O. Wilson

  Country, World, Sustainability

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• In this life of ours we remain directed toward the relative utopia of a better world, and sensibly this can be the only model for our action.

  Gustav Heinemann

  World, Our Actions, Utopia

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• An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for astrict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Faithful, Special, Evaluation

  Willard Van Orman Quine, Patricia Smith Churchland, Dagfinn Follesdal (2013). “Word and Object”, p.200, MIT Press

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• It is clear that the building of models is not a purely mechanical process but requires skill of a high order - not merely mathematical skill but a sensitivity to the relative importance of different factors and a critical, almost an artistic, faculty in the selection of behaviour equations which are reasonable, tentative hypotheses in explaining the behaviour of actual economies.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Order, Skills, Different

  "The Skills of the Economist". Book by Kenneth Ewart Boulding, pp. 16-17, 1958.

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• Effort is the key in the relative; effortlessness is the key to the Absolute.

  Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

  Keys, Effort, Absolutes

  Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (2014). “Celebrating Silence”, p.188, Arktos

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• but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. In my mind, here was the best kind of art-the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries; hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few

  Laird Barron

  Art, Mean, Eye

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• I honestly feel that most young women out there are feminists - they just don't know that the word "feminism" describes the things they believe in. I wants to show young women that while feminists of the past did incredible work and that while the relative equality we experience now is due to their hard work, we still have a ways to go. We still have to fight for our rights and be vigilant in terms of keeping the rights we do have.

  Julie Zeilinger

  Believe, Hard Work, Fighting

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• The personal computer was a disruptive innovation relative to the mainframe because it enabled even a poor fool like me to have a computer and use it, and it was enabled by the development of the micro processor. The micro processor made it so simple to design and build a computer that IB could throw in together in a garage. And so, you have that simplifying technology as a part of every disruptive innovation. It then becomes an innovation when the technology is embedded in a different business model that can take the simplified solution to the market in a cost-effective way.

  Clayton Christensen

  Technology, Simple, Design

  Source: bigthink.com

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• There's an evidence from a number of studies which show that where you grow up and the age at which you move to the suburbs or to a neighborhood that in general seems to have better conditions can really affect a child's outcomes. The kids who moved at young ages are dramatically better as adults. They're earning 30 percent more, they're 27 percent more likely to go to college, relative to the kids who stayed in the high poverty public housing projects. And so there's clear scientific evidence that you can change kids' outcomes just based on where they grow up.

  Raj Chetty

  Growing Up, Moving, Kids

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Well, I don't like the UK. I haven't ever been a fan of the pound (sterling),
  and even though they are taking some steps in the right direction - more so than the US - in addressing some of their problems, I still think they're doing it much too slowly. So, I think that the pound will continue to lose value relative to some of these other currencies. I ultimately expect the pound to rise against the dollar, but that's not the best way to take advantage of dollar weakness.

  Peter Schiff

  Thinking, Weakness, Fans

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• A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.

  Emile Durkheim

  Environment, Relation, Autonomy

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• I wish that some way could be found to add up all the staggering costs imposed on millions of ordinary people, just so a relative handful of self-righteous environmental cultists can go around feeling puffed up with themselves.

  Thomas Sowell

  Self, People, Feelings

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• I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

  A. S. Byatt

  Writing, And Love, Want

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• The laws are, and ought to be, relative to the constitution, and not the constitution to the laws. A constitution is the organization of offices in a state, and determines what is to be the governing body, and what is the end of each community. But laws are not to be confounded with the principles of the constitution; they are the rules according to which the magistrates should administer the state, and proceed against offenders.

  Aristotle

  Law, Organization, Office

  Aristotle, Hugh Griffith (2009). “Aristotle”, p.273, Collector's Library

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• What we often take to be family values--the work ethic, honesty, clean living, marital fidelity, and individual responsibility--are in fact social, religious, or cultural values. To be sure, these values are transmitted by parents to their children and are familial in that sense. They do not, however, originate within the family. It is the value of close relationships with other family members, and the importance of these bonds relative to other needs.

  David Elkind

  Religious, Children, Honesty

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• Our perception of space-time can be thought of in terms of event coordinates relative to our current state of consciousness.

  Wayne Gerard Trotman

  Space, Perception, Events

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• Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Past, Ideas, Feelings

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1974). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”, Harvard University Press

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• The rule seems to be that there are no absolutes, that what is rare is prized. Thus, in times of relative affluence, thin models become dominant.

  Charles Jencks

  Affluence, Models, Absolutes

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• Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.

  Dan Chaon

  Suffering, Maybe Love

  Dan Chaon (2009). “Among the Missing”, p.89, Ballantine Books

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• The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Poetry, Attention, Definitions

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1835). “Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge: In Two Volumes”, p.214

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• Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat

  Lionel Shriver

  Size, Fats, Ifs

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