Constituting Quotes

#1. Life everywhere is in vast and endless variety. So it is with life eternal, that gift of God, constituting, in its length and breadth and height and depth, the reward of the righteous. The penitent, dying thief is not going into heaven like the triumphant, dying Paul.

Herrick Johnson

#2. The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.

James Lovelock

#3. The difference between structuralism and existentialism is simple: the world-constituting 'I' of existentialism is displaced by the linguistic relation between signifier and signified.

Stephen Trombley

#4. MISDEMEANOR, n. An infraction of the law having less dignity than a felony and constituting no claim to admittance into the best criminal society.

Ambrose Bierce

#5. My disappointments, instead of converging toward a center and constituting if not a system at least an ensemble, are scattered, each supposed itself unique and thereby wasted, lacking organization.

Emil M. Cioran

#6. Insofar as the genocide embodied in residential schooling arises as an integral aspect of colonialism, then colonialism must be seen as constituting that source ... To be in any way an apologist for colonialism is to be an active proponent of genocide.

Ward Churchill

#7. There is no ground for supposing that matter and energy existed before [the Big Bang] and were suddenly galvanized into action. For what could distinguish that moment from all other moments in eternity? It is simpler to postulate creation ex nihilo-Divine will constituting Nature from nothingness.

E. T. Whittaker

#8. The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body

Baruch Spinoza

#9. When a painter is working he is aware of the means which are available to him - these include his materials, the style he inherits, the conventions he must obey, his prescribed or freely chosen subject matter - as constituting both an opportunity and a restraint.

John Berger

#10. Syria has a strategic position in the region, I don't deny her role, her alliance with the resistance or our friendship with her although that many Lebanese pretended to have forgotten that there is an enemy called Israel which is still targeting us and constituting a danger to the Lebanese people.

Hassan Nasrallah

#11. Sorrow has the fortunate peculiarity that it preys upon itself. It dies of starvation. Since it is essentially an interruption of habits, it can be replaced by new habits. Constituting, as it does, a void, it is soon filled up by a real horror vacuum.

August Strindberg

#12. The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.

Michel De Certeau

#13. Promiscuous reading is necessary to the constituting of human nature. The attempt to keep out evil doctrine by licensing is like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to keep out the crows by shutting the park gate.

John Milton

#14. A system is in equilibrium when the forces constituting it are arranged in such a way as to compensate each other, like the two weights pulling at the arms of a pair of scales.

Rudolf Arnheim

#15. There is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.

Michel Foucault

#16. The alcoholic retains the ability to condemn his addiction and advise those not subject to it to avoid succumbing to the liquid poison. But the cocaine addict likes proselytizing; thus, instead of constituting a tangible warning, every victim of the drug acts as a source of infection.

Pitigrilli

#17. The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.

Jean Piaget

#18. The life or lives of man may be regarded as constituting a curve - an arc of time-experience subtended by the duration of the individual Will to Life.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#19. Remember: white men constitute just 31 percent of the American population. There is no situation in which they should be constituting the majority of the room.

Jessica Bennett

#20. We are a pattern that changes slowly but has stability and continuity, even though the stuff constituting the pattern changes quickly.

Ray Kurzweil

#21. Agreeable society is the first essential in constituting the happiness and of course the value of our existence.

Thomas Jefferson

#22. It is always easier to take the words of a Jesus, a Gandhi, a Marx, or a Confucius as constituting Holy Writ. This involves less reading, less study, less thought, less conflict, and less independent searching, but it also means less growth toward maturity.

William Coperthwaite

#23. Tradition is tending the flame, not worshiping the ashes.

Gustav Mahler

#24. I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.

Sam Walton

#25. A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

Eric Hoffer

#26. I just try to remember my lines most of the time.

Zachary Levi

#27. I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.

W.G. Sebald

#28. When you approach middle age, lots of stuff happens. Your body is aging, you're watching people around you get sick, you're watching people die, your mortality becomes very present at that point in your life.

Charlie Kaufman