Quotes About Absolutes

A Christian view of art thus stands in opposition to the postmodern assumption that there are no absolutes.

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

We are at a time when postmodernism defies certainty, truth, and meaning; when spiritualism dabbles in quantum theory; and when randomness has become the order of the day. Isn't it ironic that at the same time, the world is on the edge of financial bankruptcy because we have conducted our financial affairs in a random fashion, as if there are no absolutes?

If musicians and artists have no absolutes, they end up caring more about the way the thing is told than about the thing itself, and they slide deeper and deeper till it's their means rather than the ends that matter.

To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your "Core Attachments," means apologizing for your very existence.

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.

The four absolutes we all have in our minds: love, justice, evil, and forgiveness.

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

Some knowledge of the diversity of Christian religious experience and a sympathetic awareness of of non-Christian religious experience can help directors transcend their personal absolutes and open them to a greater sense of wonder toward the manifold experience of people with God.

If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.

Questions of absolute good and evil are much better not opened to public debate these days, when so few people are sure of their absolutes

History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.

Labeled apothecary bottles filled with raw material oils lined the risers: flowers, resins, leaves, woods, mosses, spices, herbs, seeds, grains, roots, bark, and fruit. From the animal kingdom came fixatives: civet, musk, and ambergris. The absolutes, the resinoids, the essential oils.

His anguished mind writhed with contradictions. He was a man of parts and halfs, in a time of wholes and absolutes.

Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.

Greene's passion for West Africa is not reducible, however, to a flight from marital troubles or an effort to stave off depression. As we have seen, he distrusted the veneers of a comfortable life and felt that reality was only knowable under conditions of privation. His quest for absolutes required such conditions, and if Greeneland, a term he disliked, has a central place it may just be the little house in Freetown, which he came to regard as home.18

One of Stevens's epigrams ran, 'Black is white with a bright ring around it.' The Orwellian tone of that statement is justified. Stevens knew only too well that you can get people to believe almost anything about their own perceptions with a little sleight of hand. Subjectively, there are no absolutes, only contrasts.

The arrogant elimination of the Djaouts of our world must nerve us to pursue our own combative doctrine, namely: that peaceful cohabitation on this planet demands that while the upholders of any creed are free to adopt their own existential absolutes, the right of others to do the same is thereby rendered implicit and sacrosanct. Thus the creed of inquiry, of knowledge and exchange of ideas, must be upheld as an absolute, as ancient and eternal as any other.

The inflamed sensitivity induced by radicalized democratic theory finally experiences any limit as arbitrary and tyrannical. There are no absolutes; freedom is absolute. Of course the result is that, on the one hand, the argument justifying freedom disappears and, on the other, all beliefs begin to have the attenuated character that was initially supposed to be limited to religious belief.

The death of Pope John Paul II led many of different faiths and of no faith to acknowledge their debt to the Roman Catholic Church for holding on to absolutes that the rest of us can measure ourselves against.

People are often ready to accept a false dilemma because few feel comfortable with complexity and nuanced distinctions. They like sweeping absolutes. They want clear and simple choices. So, those skilled in manipulating people, face them with false dilemmas (one alternative of which is the one the manipulator wants them to choose, the other alternative clearly unacceptable). They present arguments in black or white form.

Hank was full of absolutes, pronouncements like "Art has no utility" and "Warhol is irrelevant.

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

Once war becomes a clash of absolutes, there is no breathing room for mercy. Absolute truth is blind truth.