Quotes About Distinction

The greatest gifts given to man are his ability to think in terms of abstraction and his ability of transcendence. From these he derives his imaginative power. These are part of his major distinction from the lower animals. Although we need our moments of hearts and flowers, we need also to see the other side of the universal fence.

I am incapable of mediocrity.

Sugar and sand may be mixed together, but the ant rejects the sand and goes off with the sugar grain; so pious men lift the good from the bad.

For Emerson, the value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this swerving and rolling away from acute definition. All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists.

Pus can be distinguished from mucus, wrote Dr. Samuel Cooper in his 1823 Dictionary of Practical Surgery, by its "sweetish mawkish" taste and a "smell peculiar to itself." To the doctor who is still struggling with the distinction, perhaps because he has endeavored to learn surgery from a dictionary, Cooper offers this: "Pus sinks in water; mucus floats.

Her hair was the brightest living gold, and despite the poverty of her clothing, seemed to set a crown of distinction on her head. Her brow was clear and ample, her blue eyes cloudless, and her lips and the moulding of her face so expressive of sensibility and sweetness, that none could behold her without looking on her as of a distinct species, a being heaven-sent, and bearing a celestial stamp in all her features.

To distinguish between the curved and the straight. —Horace (ca. 30 B.C.)

Le problème au milieu d'une telle panique financière et dans une économie capitaliste moderne, c'est qu'il était impossible de faire la distinction entre les bonnes et les mauvaises entreprises, ou de ne châtier que les irresponsables et les crapuleux. Que cela nous plaise ou non, nous étions tous dans le même bateau.

People like to say the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group.

Tiresias of these two worlds that the distinction is less important than people would have you believe. Guilt is what happens when there isn't a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity—if the group doesn't care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.

Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.

There is also an important distinction to be made between "upward" and "downward" counterfactuals. Upward counterfactuals are imagined states that are better than what actually happened, and downward counterfactuals are imagined states that are worse.

We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

But it is not easy to distinguish between someone truly wanting and needing help and someone who is merely exploiting a willing helper.

A faith pure and simple distinguishes itself from superstition as a flame from the smoke and music from noise.

that envy and a sense of injustice are not always that easily distinguished, let alone extricated, one from the other.

course, the dis tinction between the divine potestas auctoritatis and the theandric potestas excellentiae must always be kept in mind. The former is incommunicable, while the latter may, to a certain limited extent, be bestowed upon crea tures. 31

Debería ver la tele más a menudo. Me relaja de un modo agradable. No distingo bien entre mis propios pensamientos y los que proceden de la tele.

The antithesis served the Anonymous, it is true, to observe very strictly the inherent difference between the God and the king; but it served him also to blur that line of distinction and to show where the difference between "God by nature" and "god by grace" ended; that is, in the case of potestas , of power. Essence and substance of power are claimed to be equal in both God and king, no matter whether that power be owned by nature or only acquired by grace.

I remember an interesting little paper by Max Planck on the topic 'The Dynamical and the Statistical Type of Law' ('Dynamische und Statistische Gesetzmässigkeit'). The distinction is precisely the one we have here labelled as 'order from order' and 'order from disorder'.

There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks

Insight isn't informational; it is transformational. It is a knowing event. A change transpires. Understanding this distinction makes a big difference to all our knowing ventures. The moment of insight transforms the knower, the known, and the knowing.

We are separate - utterly separate. We do not even share the same space or time with others.