Vicarious Quotes

• The central ideas of Christianity, an angry God and vicarious atonement, are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present stage of enlightenment, absurd, preposterous, and blasphemous propositions.

  Virchand Gandhi

  Heart, Ideas, Enlightenment

  "Christian Missions: A Triangular Debate, Before the Nineteenth Century Club of New York". The Monist: A Quarterly Magazine 5 (2), pp. 268-273, 1895.

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• Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Attitude, Real, Campaigns

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.271, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.

  Alan Hirsch

  Sports, Lying, Adventure

  Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch (2011). “The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage”, p.110, Baker Books

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• The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

  John Dos Passos

  Book, Writing, Reality

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience.

  Albert Bandura

  Reality, Experience, Our Actions

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• Vicarious living is only slightly less impossible than vicarious eating.

  Mason Cooley

  Life, Impossible, Eating

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• Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

  George Santayana

  Children, Memories, Parent

  George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.33, 谷月社

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• If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

  Roger Ebert

  Two, Numbers, People

  Interview With Matthew Rothschild, progressive.org. August 1, 2003.

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• Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.

  Lewis Mumford

  Sports, Order, Skills

  "Technics and Civilization" by Lewis Mumford, Ch. 6, (sct. 11), 1934.

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• I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

  Elon Musk

  Inspirational, Thinking, Earth

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

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• Napster's only alleged liability is for contributory or vicarious infringement. So when Napster's users engage in noncommercial sharing of music, is that activity copyright infringement? No.

  David Boies

  Napster, Infringement, Music Is

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• All action is vicarious faith.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Action

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1997). “Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays”, p.338, Macmillan

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• I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems of death.

  Clive Barker

  Thinking, Fiction, Way

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• Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.

  Lewis Mumford

  Meaningful, Spiritual, Revenge

  "The Conduct Of Life" by Lewis Mumford, Ch. 1, 1951.

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• It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Thinking, Slumber, Lasts

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• Mind you, Mount Rushmore isn't exactly the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel either. After the naïve daftness of the Crazy Horse monument, I find the pompous idiocy of those four presidents somehow more risible still. Wishing to show respect or feel a vicarious thrill of admiration and pride, I can only giggle. For which I am very sorry. Any loyal American reading this who feels outraged and insulted is free to explode with derisive snorts of laughter at any British equivalent.

  Stephen Fry

  Horse, Sorry, Laughter

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• The vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men, and that the faculty of action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only as one of the many and manifold forces of human community.

  Hannah

  Responsibility, Men, Community

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• You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models.

  Charlie Munger

  Investing, Models, Direct

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• Just as our Redeemer gave His life as a vicarious sacrifice for all men, and in so doing became our Savior, even so we, in a small measure, when we engage in proxy work in the temple, become as saviors to those on the other side.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Sacrifice, Men, Sides

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• History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

  Hilary Mantel

  History, Giving, Events

  "Booker winner Hilary Mantel on dealing with history in fiction" by Hilary Mantel, www.theguardian.com. October 16, 2009.

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• There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness.

  David Rakoff

  Sadness, Cleansing, Reassuring

  David Rakoff (2010). “Half Empty”, p.198, Anchor

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• No sane man is unafraid in battle, but discipline produces in him a form of vicarious courage.

  George S. Patton

  Military, War, Men

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• History at its best is vicarious experience.

  Edmund Morgan

  History

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• There is no such thing as vicarious experience.

  Mary Parker Follett

  Inspirational

  Attributed in "The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault" by Michele Barrett (p. 189), 1991.

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• People's conceptions about themselves and the nature of things are developed and verified through four different processes: direct experience of the effects produced by their actions, vicarious experience of the effects produced by somebody else's actions, judgments voiced by others, and derivation of further knowledge from what they already know by using rules of inference

  Albert Bandura

  People, Four, Different

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