Significance Quotes - Page 16

• The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories.

  Jacques Monod

  Science, Dna, Discovery

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• Without time,” the angel said, “you have only the bottomless, shapeless mire of eternity.” “FYI, philosophy bores me.” “Not philosophy. Reality. Time is what gives life significance.

  J.R. Ward

  Philosophy, Angel, Reality

  J.R. Ward (2009). “Lover Avenged: A Novel of the Black Dagger Brotherhood”, p.254, Penguin

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• The Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth just as the people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but in what it meant to them when we were born and how for them the world was never the same again, how their whole lives were changed with new significance.

  Frederick Buechner

  People, World, Facts

  Frederick Buechner (1981). “The hungering dark”

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• Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.

  Gregory David Roberts

  Play, Feelings, Action

  Gregory David Roberts (2004). “Shantaram: A Novel”, p.765, Macmillan

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• You can't ascribe great cosmic significance to a simple earthly event. Coincidence, that's all anything ever is, nothing more than coincidence...

  Scott Neustadter

  Summer, Simple, Events

  "500 Days of Summer". www.imdb.com. 2009.

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• The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wise, Horse, Children

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “Image and Imagination”, p.108, Cambridge University Press

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• An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. ... It is virtually impossible at this distance merely by reading, or listening, or even seeing photographs or motion pictures, to grasp at all the real significance of the situation. And yet the whole world of the future hangs on a proper judgment.

  George C. Marshall

  Military, Real, Distance

  The Marshall Plan, delivered 5 June 1947 at Harvard University

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• Teamwork requires that everyone's efforts flow in a single direction. Feelings of significance happen when a team's energy takes on a life of its own.

  Pat Riley

  Teamwork, Effort, Feelings

  Pat Riley (1993). “The winner within: a life plan for team players”, Putnam Adult

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• Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Music, Men, Jazz

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• The concept known as bal tashchit--'Do no destroy'--has a special significance in Jewish tradition...We are constantly being warned in our faith that the capricious, thoughtless, wasteful destruction of the elements and creatures of the earth is wrong...We should remind ourselves daily of our responsibility to all aspects of creation.

  David Geffen

  Nature, Responsibility, Animal

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• Our patriotism comes straight from the Romans. This is why French children are encouraged to seek inspiration for it in Corneille. It is a pagan virtue, if these two words are compatible. The word pagan, when applied to Rome, early possesses the significance charged with horror which the early Christian controversialists gave it. The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism.

  Simone Weil

  Christian, Children, Inspiration

  "Prelude to Politics (1943)". "The Simone Weil Reader". Book edited by George A. Panichas, p. 220, 1957.

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• It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance ... To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beauty, Hair, Vision

  Henry David Thoreau (2011). “The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861”, p.349, New York Review of Books

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• In achieving the depersonalization of childbirth and at the same time solving the problem of pain, our society may have lost more than it has gained. We are left with the physical husk; the transcending significance has been drained away.

  Sheila Kitzinger

  Pain, Parenting, May

  Sheila Kitzinger (1978). “Women as mothers”

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• Now to understand the significance of chastity within us, we have to know that chastity is the foundation of all dharmas. Unless and until you have sense of chastity you cannot have dharma.

  Nirmala Srivastava

  Love, Wisdom, Yoga

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• This work, though it deals only with eating and drinking, which are regarded in the eyes of our supernaturalistic mock-culture as the lowest acts, is of the greatest philosophic significance and importance... How former philosophers have broken their heads over the question of the bond between body and soul! Now we know, on scientific grounds, what the masses know from long experience, that eating and drinking hold together body and soul, that the searched-for bond is nutrition.

  Ludwig Feuerbach

  Drinking, Food, Eye

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• To be anthropocentric is to remain unaware of the limits of human nature, the significance of biological processes underlying human behavior, and the deeper meaning of long-term genetic evolution.

  E. O. Wilson

  Science, Long, Limits

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• The sceptic ultimately undermines democracy (1) because he can see no significance in death and such things of a literal equality; (2) because he introduces different first principles, making debate impossible: and debate is the life of democracy; (3) because the fading of the images of sacred persons leaves a man too prone to be a respecter of earthly persons; (4) because there will be more, not less, respect for human rights if they can be treated as divine rights.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Rights, Divine Right

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• The divinity of Jesus is not a dispensable extra that has no significance for our salvation. On the contrary, our salvation depends on it. We can be saved only by God Himself.

  Klaas Runia

  Christian, Jesus, Divinity

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• The central significance of prayer is not in the things that happen as results, but in the deepening intimacy and unhurried communion with God at His central throne of control in order to discover a sense of God's need in order to call on God's help to meet that need.

  Edward McKendree Bounds

  Prayer, Order, Needs

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• When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Couple, Justice, Diversity

  "The Second Sex". Book by Simone de Beauvoir, 1949.

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• Most of the time when "universal" is used, it's just a euphamism for "white"; white themes, white significance, white culture.

  Merle Woo

  White, Justice, Diversity

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• The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others.

  Grayson L. Kirk

  Education, Personality, Important

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• The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Destruction, Scales, Planets

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Memories, Emotional, Long

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.33, Harper Collins

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• In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Kids, Writing, Mean

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