Ultimate Quotes - Page 27

• Zazen is the ultimate practice. This is indeed the True Self. The Buddhadharma is not to be sought outside of this.

  Dogen

  Self, Practice, Excellence

  "Things Overheard at the Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma". Book by Dogen translated by Reiho Masunaga, June 1975.

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• The ultimate for me would be to do a feature that didn't require any narrative structure.

  Johnny Depp

  Narrative Structure, Would Be, Features

  "Going deep with rebel Johnny Depp" by Ron Dicker, articles.baltimoresun.com. July 8, 2003.

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• My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant, someone who disrupts the daily drag of life just enough to leave the victim thinking there's maybe more to it all than the mere hum-drum quality of existence.

  Elvis Costello

  Thinking, Quality, Life Is

  Interview with Nick Kent, 1978.

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• Marcus Aurelius appoints personal character and conscience the ultimate refuge of happiness-seekers: the only place where dreams of happiness, doomed to die childless and intestate anywhere else, are not bound to be frustrated.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Dream, Character, Frustrated

  Zygmunt Bauman (2013). “The Art of Life”, p.1992, John Wiley & Sons

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• Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is - both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology - of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Dog, Horse, Motivation

  Letter to James F. Morton (1929), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, (p. 483), 1996.

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• On the geometric level, we see certain physical elements repeated endlessly, combined in an almost endless variety of combinations. It is puzzling to realize that the elements, which seem like elementary building blocks, keep varying, and are different every time that they occur. If the elements are different every time that they occur, evidently then, it cannot be the elements themselves which are repeating in a building or town; these so-called elements cannot be the ultimate "atomic" constituents of space.

  Christopher Alexander

  Block, Space, Different

  "The Timeless Way of Building". Book by Christopher Alexander, 1979.

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• As we educate a child -- removing out of its path those obstacles over which we ourselves, in early days, have stumbled, and strengthening its mind with the aid of our own matured experience -- we, as it were, construct a new and better replica of ourselves, and thus enable the race to move slowly, but surely, forward towards the ultimate goal of existence -- towards perfection.

  Leonid Andreyev

  Children, Moving, Race

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• I paid a visit to Yasukuni Shrine to pray for the souls of those who had fought for the country and made ultimate sacrifices. I have made a pledge never to wage war again, that we must build a world that is free from the sufferings of the devastation of war.

  Shinzo Abe

  Country, War, Sacrifice

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• The public image of dinosaurs is tainted by extinction. It's hard to accept dinosaurs as a success when they are all dead. But the fact of ultimate extinction should not make us overlook the absolutely unsurpassed role dinosaurs played in the history of life.

  Robert T. Bakker

  Roles, Dinosaurs, Extinction

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• The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies.

  Tim Berners-Lee

  Goal, Support, World

  "Weaving the Web". Book by Tim Berners-Lee, 1999.

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• Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Religious, Philosophical, Hands

  Sydney J. Harris (1985). “Pieces of Eight Pa”, Mariner Books

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• The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal. Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite .

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  War, Men, Tasks

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1997). “Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays”, p.11, Macmillan

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• There is no man ... however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man -- so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise -- unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.

  Marcel Proust

  Wise, Wisdom, Memories

  Marcel Proust (2015). “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time”, p.481, Yale University Press

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• Mead's anthropology had many other red, white and blue- blooded virtues. One was the common anthropological conceit, out of which she made a career, to the effect that the ultimate value of studying other cultures was the use we could make of them to reconstruct our own - a heady kind of intellectual imperialism, as if the final meaning of others' lives was their significance for us.

  Margaret Mead

  Blue, Other Cultures, Careers

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• Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man.

  Isaac Asimov

  Wall, Men, Insecurity

  Isaac Asimov (2004). “Second Foundation”, p.100, Spectra

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• People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.

  Herbert Spencer

  Mistake, Mean, Men

  "The Principles of Ethics" by Herbert Spencer, New York, (§ 14, pp. 38-39), 1915.

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• The ultimate aim of politics is not politics, but the activities which can be practised within the political framework of the State. Therefore an effective statement of these activities - e.g. science, art, religion - is in itself a declaration of ultimate aims around which the political means will crystallise... a society with no values outside of politics is a machine carrying its human cargo, with no purpose in its institutions reflecting their care, eternal aspirations, loneliness, need for love.

  Stephen Spender

  Art, Loneliness, Mean

  "Life and the Poet". Book by Stephen Spender, 1942.

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• [Serialism] is like a sailless ship, driven out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination.…

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Home, Tired, Thinking

  "The Raw and the Cooked : Introduction to a Science of Mythology" translated by Doreen and John Weightman, (p. 113), 1975.

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• The police are not entrusted with a mission which differentiates them from those they serve. Being unconcerned with ultimate purposes, they are inseparable from the persons and interests of their masters, and shine with their reflected glory.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Shining, Police, Purpose

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.357, Penguin

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• Of all heroes , Spinoza was Einstein 's greatest. No one expressed more strongly then he a belief in the harmony , the beauty , and most of all the ultimate comprehensibility of nature.

  John Archibald Wheeler

  Hero, Belief, Spinoza

  "Albert Einstein". "Biographical Memoirs" Vol. 51, National Academy of Sciences, 1980.

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• War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.

  Don DeLillo

  War, Technology, Realization

  Don DeLillo (2011). “End Zone”, p.30, Pan Macmillan

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• Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?

  Leslie Stephen

  Angel, Men, Laughing

  Sir Leslie Stephen (1903). “An Agnostic's Apology, and Other Essays”

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• Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that isthe essence of ourbeing.None candefine its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.

  Vannevar Bush

  Essence, Understanding, Sake

  1967 Science is Not Enough.

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• For the judging of contemporary literature the only test is one's personal taste. If you much like a new book, you must call it literature even though you find no other soul to agree with you, and if you dislike a book you must declare that it is not literature though a million voices should shout you that you are wrong. The ultimate decision will be made by Time.

  Ford Madox Ford

  Book, Voice, Judging

  Ford Madox Ford (1938). “The March of Literature: From Confucius' Day to Our Own”, p.11, Dalkey Archive Press

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• Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.

  Martin Heidegger

  Philosophy, Understanding, Pseudo

  "Being and Time". Book by Martin Heidegger, translated by Macquarrie and Robinson, 1962.

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