Quotes About Universality

It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.

There is an almost universal experience in physicists, at least of my generation, which is home-made pyrotechnics.

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.

Whether that coherence obtains universally is a question that need not be answered here since only those parts where the coherence has actually been found become part of Science.

You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.

Everyone has bad days, and when you're having a bad day, you think, 'Here I am being singled out by a hostile, malicious universe that is picking exclusively on me.' And then you read a book about bad days and realize they happen to everyone, not just tormented, persecuted you.

God made this world, but he didn't make it to suit everybody did he.

For hundreds of years, the human race has dreamt of a world where knowledge could be shared universally, where every human being on the planet could have access to our storehouse of knowledge. Because knowledge is power, and shared knowledge is a superpower. Now, after centuries, we have it within our grasp to realize one of our most beautiful dreams.

Four Noble Truths: the truth of the universality of suffering, the truth of the origin of suffering, the truth of the cessation of suffering, and the truth of the path leading to its cessation.

All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it, They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, The insignificant is as big to me as any, (What is less or more than a touch?)" -from Song of Myself

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them. And I know I am solid and sound, To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. And I know I am deathless. I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass, I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.

No specification is necessary—to add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned, white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope of it for ever.

The Singapore School of Thought, as some began to call it, emphasised the lack of universality of many Western political norms...Singapore's own view emphasised economic and social rights which tended to be downplayed by some advocates of political ad civil liberties.

Getting older brings the comforting knowledge that the things we consider most shameful and weird about ourselves are actually pretty universal—or if not, that other folks have their own shameful and weird stuff. This growing realization that we're not so unique makes it easier to share who we really are and how we got there.

The wrong way to go about this is to say: Well, researchers have 'proved' that animals only understand fifty words or something similarly absurd. Or that communication with other species is an illusion. Communication is not the preserve of humans; it is the one thing that is truly universal.

Communication is not the preserve of humans; it is the one thing that is truly universal.

Nipples are a fact of life. We all have them.

I don't know that there's a division between American and British, European, South American, Asian sensibilities when it comes to rock n' roll or, really, any form of music. Songs travel, and people take them into their lives in all different kinds of unpredictable and really untraceable ways.

During my study of happiness, I noticed something that surprised me: I often learn more from one person's highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal principles or cite up-to-date studies.

Rather than asserting an essence of femininity that society must value and protect, Beauvoir's move here is the opposite: she wants to demolish feminine identity in order to assert women's participation in universality. Identity is an obstacle to overcome rather than a foundation from which to base one's politics. Clinging to a particular identity cannot possibly be the source of emancipation since it clearly functions as the driving force for female subjugation.

A sense of immediacy prevails in the society of enjoyment to such an extent that events seem meaningless—as if they occur outside of any context that might allow us to decipher them. What is lacking is a sense of universality that would mediate particular events and render them comprehensible.

An actual turn to universality requires a break from conservatism and even from liberalism.

Universality is the nonbelonging that becomes evident when a structure runs up against an external barrier as it strives to reproduce itself.

If there's one thing I don't have, it's an insular bone.