Top 100 Negation Of Quotes
#1. What Marxism calls atheism is basically the negation of an idol, which sometimes bears the name of God.
Ernesto Cardenal
#2. Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Ayn Rand
#3. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.
Christopher Hitchens
#4. the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle's essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life - a negation that has taken on a visible form.
Guy Debord
#5. 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
#7. 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
#8. What is truth? The negation of lies? Or the statement of a fact? And if the fact is a lie, what then is the truth?
Andrzej Sapkowski
#9. 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
#10. Schools of science and physics replacing each other at a faster and faster rate. Just the nature of our world is constant revision, constant ... negation of previous beliefs, and so ... the whole world is a twist ending. Every week is a twist ending.
Chuck Palahniuk
#11. 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
#12. A stick is not only wood but the negation of wood. It is the meeting in space of wood and no-wood. A stick is finite and unextended wood, a fact determined by its own denial.
Thomas Wolfe
#13. But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.
Karl Marx
#14. 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
#15. I know I've got a death wish. I've never enjoyed my life, I've never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be.
Anna Kavan
#16. It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.
Liam O'Flaherty
#17. Imperialism is a negation of God. It does ungodly acts in the name of God.
Mahatma Gandhi
#18. 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
#19. Odd how the impossible negation of death - the sudden absence of life where once there was promise - can stimulate an early philosophical bent.
Bruce Duffy
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#26. But even though catastrophic oppression brought about a process of objectification and dehumanization, the absolute negation of humanity was not possible because a damaged human spirit seeks to resurrect and reconstruct itself; it also seeks self-consciousness.
Clovis E. Semmes
#27. Nobility is only in the negation of existence, in a smile that surveys annihilated landscapes.
Emil Cioran
#28. As Hegel defines it: "Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us." ... Reason is the negation of the negative ... Reason, and Reason alone, contains its own corrective.
Herbert Marcuse
#29. Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
Arthur Koestler
#30. Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of negation of it." "You are very philosophical. 'A negation' is profound talking.
Thomas Hardy
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. My paintings cannot be a negation of what has always been and always will be necessary - drawing and search for values.
Theodore Robinson
#36. If there is one thing for which we stand in this country, it is for complete religious freedom, and it is an emphatic negation of this right to cross-examine a man on his religion before being willing to support him for office.
Theodore Roosevelt
#37. The phrase 'I can't' is the most powerful force of negation of the human psyche.
Paul R. Scheele
#38. This third step Hegel called the Negation of the Negation. With the continued operation of the negation, a new thing or being comes into existence.
Anonymous
#39. The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The former embraces absolute power, provided it is used to protect and promote the patient's mental health. The latter rejects absolute power, regardless of its aim or use.
Thomas Szasz
#40. For love to be replaced by resentful contempt between husband and wife, or for that matter between parent and child, or colleague and colleague, is a negation of holiness, whatever stuff one may display in books or relay from pulpits and platforms.
J.I. Packer
#41. Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.
Samuel Beckett
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. We tend to misunderstand the colour black, seeing it as evil, or negation of life. Rather, black means all things being possible, infinite energy of life before consciousness has constructed any boundaries. When we fear blackness or darkness we fear the deep unconscious source of life itself.
Rachel Pollack
#46. 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
#47. The sanctification of political power by Christianity is blasphemy; it is the negation of Christianity.
Leo Tolstoy
#48. The direction we are going in at this moment is the negation of material goods as being important and the great importance of spiritual values and sensations. Permissiveness, if you will. There is tremendous talk of sex and bi-sexuality.
Emilio Pucci
#49. That knowledge which purifies the mind and heart alone is true Knowledge, all else is only a negation of Knowledge.
Ramakrishna
#50. The advanced education in Tantra obviously has to do with the entrance into samadhi, the negation of the self. That is what the path of negation means, not the negation of life, but the negation of anything that is not enlightenment.
Frederick Lenz
#51. Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
Gustave Courbet
#52. Words and ideas are a description of reality, silence is a negation of reality. What is the reality itself?
John Daido Loori
#54. If we ask what poetry is
we may say in general that it is
a victory over the world;
it is through a negation of the
imperfect actuality
that poetry opens up
a higher actuality
Soren Kierkegaard
#55. As long as this great army of workers is scattered among so many craft unions, it will be impossible for them to unite and act in harmony together. Craft unionism is the negation of solidarity. The more unions you have, the less unity.
Eugene V. Debs
#56. 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
#57. The girl was not specifically religious; [...] yet although her faith was nameless her way of living was somehow an affirmation of life rather than a negation of it.
R.D. Laing
#58. I discovered that joy is not the negation of pain, but rather acknowledging the presence of pain and feeling happiness in spite of it.
Lupita Nyong'o
#59. The law of love is the ultimate law because it is the negation of law; it is absolute because it concerns everything concrete. The paradox of final revelation, overcoming the conflict between absolutism and relativism, is love.
Paul Tillich
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. From these few observations we can already conclude that the real is never beautiful. Beauty is a value applicable only to the imaginary and which means the negation of the world in its essential structure.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#64. Buddha himself taught different teachings to different people under different circumstances. For some people, there are beliefs based on a Creator. For others, no Creator. The only "definitive truth" for Buddhism is the absolute negation of any one truth as the Definitive Truth.
Dalai Lama
#65. Social justice is group psychology, it's group rights, it's collectivisim, and it's a negation of individual responsibility, which is what the Bible teaches. Individual responsibility. And of course, social justice leads very quickly to socialism, and ultimately to communism.
Ted Cruz
#66. They did not know; nor did they know that the negation of everything is in itself a form of servitude and
that real freedom is an inner submission to a value which defies history and its successes.
Albert Camus
#67. 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
#68. Every man - in the development of his own personality - has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man's essential nature.
[Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (1963)]
Thomas I. Emerson
#70. I despise simplicity. It is the negation of all that is beautiful.
Norman Hartnell
#71. Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
Emil Cioran
#72. In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there's this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.
Geoff Dyer
#73. 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
#74. The Buddhist message is a message not of the negation of life, but one of affirmation.
Frederick Lenz
#75. Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason.
Mikhail Bakunin
#76. 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
#77. Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.
Robert E. Howard
#78. Entertaining is one method of avoiding people. It is very often the negation of hospitality.
Elizabeth Bibesco
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. One of the most effective ways for a system of authority to tout its virtues is not to speak of them directly, but to create a particularly vivid image of their absolute negation - of what it claims life would be like in the total absence of, say, patriarchal authority, or capitalism, or the state.
David Graeber
#82. I consider Western Christianity in its practical working a negation of Christ's Christianity.
Mahatma Gandhi
#84. We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America
as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.
D.H. Lawrence
#86. Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.
Werner Heisenberg
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. There's a path in enlightenment called the path of negation where we intentionally throw ourselves into experiences that are extremely transient. In other words, we do all the stuff you're supposed to normally avoid to become enlightened, intentionally.
Frederick Lenz
#90. When the mind is empty, silent, when it is in a state of complete negation - which is not blankness, nor the opposite of being positive, but a totally different state in which all thought has ceased - only then is it possible for that which is unnameable to come into being.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#91. Some popular quotations smell of airless closets. They exhale the stale imagination of the intellectual lower middle class. "Suspension of disbelief" has become one of them. Dressed up as a scintillating double negation, it serves the pedestrian notion of art as illusion.
Rudolf Arnheim
#92. The mistake we make is to turn upon our past with angry wholesale negation. ... The way of wisdom is to treat it airily, lightly, wantonly, and in a spirit of poetry; and above all to use its symbols, which are its spiritual essence, giving them a new connotation, a fresh meaning.
John Cowper Powys
#93. The same quality of making other standards non-existent by ignoring them. This attribute was common to most of Lily's set: they had a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception.
Edith Wharton
#94. It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth
Niels Bohr
#95. A little more fervor in my nihilism and I might - gainsaying everything - shake off my doubts and triumph over them. But I have only the taste of negation, not its grace.
Emil M. Cioran
#96. I must find Ecstasy in this Insanity
Freedom from their Slavery
The Truth in their Lies
Life in their Death
Beauty in their Homicidal Genocide
Peace in the War Whore's evil orgy of Death and Negation
Love amongst the Ruins
Pleasure in my own Pain.
Lydia Lunch
#97. ...passions, poetry and the ego have been seen as perpetual explosions? But if that's true, then so its its opposite; ever since that August when athe mushroom rose over cities reduced to a layer of ash, an age was born in which the explosion is symbolic only of absolute negation.
Italo Calvino
#98. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good.
Athanasius Of Alexandria
#99. It is simply that in all life on earth as in all good agriculture there are no short-cuts that by-pass Nature and the nature of man himself and animals, trees, rocks and streams. Every attempt at a formula, a short-cut, a panacea, always ends in negation and destruction.
Louis Bromfield
#100. Absolute faith is not the place of self-affirmation, but the place of self-negation. Life of faith is not limited to our spiritual life. What is important is how our spiritual sensitivity is applied to our relative environment.
Sun Myung Moon
