Negation quotes:

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  • Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us. -- Emile M. Cioran
  • An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself. -- Jose Ortega y Gasset
  • Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal. -- Gustave Courbet
  • No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation. -- Knut Hamsun
  • Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false. -- Charles Caleb Colton
  • The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation. -- Simone Weil
  • Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals. -- Ivan Illich
  • 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. -- Godfrey Reggio
  • Practice rather than preach. Make of your life an affirmation, defined by your ideals, not the negation of others. Dare to the level of your capability then go beyond to a higher level. -- Alexander Haig
  • 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. -- W. H. Auden
  • An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things. -- Salvatore Quasimodo
  • Consensus is the negation of leadership. -- Margaret Thatcher
  • Government is essentially the negation of liberty. -- Ludwig von Mises
  • Disease may ... be thought of as the negation of the normal. -- William Thomas Councilman
  • Peace is not a passive but an active condition, not a negation but an affirmation. -- Mary Roberts Rinehart
  • It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth -- Niels Bohr
  • Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned. -- Samuel Beckett
  • That knowledge which purifies the mind and heart alone is true Knowledge, all else is only a negation of Knowledge. -- Ramakrishna
  • But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation. -- Karl Marx
  • The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one's will. -- Douglas Coupland
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  • Far too many girls' and women's romantic relationships are formed around a negation of their own worth and attributes rather than a confirmation of them. -- Mariella Frostrup
  • Art, unlike the trades in the artistic capacity of fashion and food, can literally be anything. It can be the negation of itself and conceptually not present. -- Richard Phillips
  • Humanism involves far more than the negation of supernaturalism. It requires an affirmative philosophy . . . translated into a life devoted to one's own improvement and the service of all mankind. -- Corliss Lamont
  • When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant. -- Octavio Paz
  • Art for Duchamp, all the arts, obey the same law: meta-irony is inherent in their very spirit. It is an irony that destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative. -- Octavio Paz
  • The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. -- Mikhail Bakunin
  • A bad or mediocre meal is more than just an unpleasant taste, it is an unnecessary negation of one of life's pleasures - a wasted chance to refine our palates, learn about the world, and share a rewarding experience. -- Tyler Cowen
  • A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two. -- William Hazlitt
  • The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworhtiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way. -- Otto Weininger
  • Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out. -- Octavio Paz
  • Is not virtue a negation of becoming? -- Jiddu Krishnamurti
  • Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality. -- James A. Garfield
  • Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason. -- Mikhail Bakunin
  • Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it. -- Terry Eagleton
  • I despise simplicity. It is the negation of all that is beautiful. -- Norman Hartnell
  • Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death. -- Robert E. Howard
  • I consider Western Christianity in its practical working a negation of Christ's Christianity. -- Mahatma Gandhi
  • Imperialism is a negation of God. It does ungodly acts in the name of God. -- Mahatma Gandhi
  • Entertaining is one method of avoiding people. It is very often the negation of hospitality. -- Elizabeth Bibesco
  • Accepting the nonexistence of being,when the absence of existence means the negation of being. -- Marieta Maglas- Eschatological Regression
  • When affirmation and negation came into being, Tao faded. After Tao faded, then came one-sided attachments. -- Zhuangzi
  • The Buddhist message is a message not of the negation of life, but one of affirmation. -- Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell
  • Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate. -- Albert Camus
  • What Marxism calls atheism is basically the negation of an idol, which sometimes bears the name of God. -- Ernesto Cardenal
  • The only "definitive truth" for Buddhism is the absolute negation of any one truth as the Definitive Truth. -- Dalai Lama
  • Words and ideas are a description of reality, silence is a negation of reality. What is the reality itself? -- John Daido Loori
  • That knowledge which purifies the mind and heart alone is true Knowledge, all else is only a negation of Knowledge. -- Ramakrishna
  • Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware. -- Arthur Koestler
  • My paintings cannot be a negation of what has always been and always will be necessary - drawing and search for values. -- Theodore Robinson
  • We avoid sensuousness, only by resorting to simple negation. We come at last to define spirit by saying that it is not matter. -- Albert Pike
  • Art for me...is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society. -- Emile Zola
  • I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet. -- Vladimir Nabokov
  • Self-negation is noble, self-culture beneficent, self-possession is manly, but to the truly great and inspiring soul they are poor and tame compared with self-abuse. -- Pope Julius II
  • A healthy society is life-affirming. Homosexuality is the metaphysical negation of life. Incapable of reproduction (giving life), it can replenish its numbers only by seduction. -- Don Feder
  • To doubt has more of faith ... than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it. -- Pope John Paul II
  • Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it. -- Pope John Paul II
  • There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken. -- Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty. -- Emma Goldman
  • For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men. -- Albert Camus
  • I believe it safe to say that all progress must lead, not to further progress, but finally to the negation of progress, a return to the point of departure. -- Eugene Delacroix
  • Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other -- James Thurber
  • Ibsen is at heart an optimist. He could not close his life's work with a note of negation. When We Dead Awaken is a clear, ringing call to the future. -- Jeanette Lee
  • The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality. -- Charlotte Bronte
  • I no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body. -- Derrick Jensen
  • 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. -- Theodor Adorno
  • Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals. -- Aleksandar Hemon
  • What the fundamentalists are doing is a total negation of their own faith - encouraging and lionizing suicide bombers and killing women and children, hardly in keeping with the teachings of Prophet Mohammed. -- Alexander Haig
  • Social justice is collectivism. Social justice is the rights of a group. It denies individual responsibility. It's a negation of individual responsibility, so social justice is totally contrary to the Word of God. -- Ted Cruz
  • Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object, which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured... anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object. -- Paul Tillich
  • My work...is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself. -- Miguel de Unamuno
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