Quotes About Negation

Real renunciation is not self-deprivation or asceticism. If it were, many masochists would qualify as spiritual people. True spirituality is an affirmation of life and not a negation of it. The main point is to have equal love for all.

Suma unui milion de zerouri nu face nici m?car unu.

I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it springs, I think, from a negation of death, as if by summoning and arranging these subjective images one were in some way cheating the objective fact. It is, I believe, an entirely instinctive process, and the distress it brings with it is an incidental, a by-product, rather than a masochistic end.

The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.

Canadians have been accustomed to define themselves by saying what they are not.

For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke humanity. If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.

We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It

It is those possessed by sublime madness who keep alive another way of being. W. H. Auden captured the solitude and even futility of such a life at the end of his poem "September 1, 1939." 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.32 ———

The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The former embraces absolute power, provided it is used to protect and promote the patient's mental health. The latter rejects absolute power, regardless of its aim or use.

A stick is not only wood but the negation of wood. It is the meeting in space of wood and no-wood. A stick is finite and unextended wood, a fact determined by its own denial.

that no matter how valid, how vital, one's belief system might be, one undermines that system and ultimately negates it when one gets rigid and dogmatic in one's adherence to it.

Death is the ultimate negative.

Lauren: "Can I ask you a question?" Angie: "Generally that's a question one should say no to. Often hell no.

the filmmaker must always seek a new tension with reality and constantly negate himself in order to continue to create a new artistic involvement. (?shima 1992: 48, translated by Dawn Lawson)

Wait, does that mean I can watch Melrose or not? The double negative confused—" "Jesus Christ, will you just go!" Lassiter was muttering as he got to his feet. "How many times do I have to tell you that is not my name." "I need a drink.

The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.

The leaders of the church know perfectly well that prayer is not intended to gratify the devout. So that, every time they accept a donation in return for some petition, they are accepting a gross negation of their faith: a faith that depends on the passive acceptance of the devout and not on their making demands for betterment

who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis. And how grateful we should be to those of our predecessors who repudiated this utter negation of human freedom.

And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation.

You can't prove a negative. I can't prove there are no such thing as vampires any more than you can prove you're not a lesbian.

The only way love can be shown in this world is by sacrifice —namely, the surrender of one thing for another. Love is essentially bound up with choice, and choice is a negation, and negation is a sacrifice. When a young man sets his heart upon a young woman and asks her to marry him, he is not only saying "I choose you"; he is also saying "I do not choose, I reject, all others. I give them all up for you." Apply this to the problem of lust.

That is to say that at the heart of existence is that double negation, "one can not, not.

Let's begin all over again. Let's begin by affirming that poetry has died. And that I'm not a poet. And I'll never, ever be one. I'm not interested in poetry. I don't like life. I detest men. I hate children. I hate the sea.

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.