Quotes About Abstention

#1. If we consider closely our so-called generous actions, there is none which, from some aspect, is not blameworthy an even harmful, so that we come to regret having performed it - so that we must choose, finally, between abstention and remorse.

Emil Cioran

#2. I have not had a moment's peace or happiness in respect to electromagnetic theory since November 28, 1846. All this time I have been liable to fits of ether dipsomania, kept away at intervals only by rigorous abstention from thought on the subject.

Lord Kelvin

#3. Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.

Jose Saramago

#4. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

Ambrose Bierce

#5. [Justice] demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.

Hannah Arendt

#6. But in practice, neither believed in friendship or loyalty. They believed in passion, they believed in a hybrid form of social or public happiness (both voted Socialist, albeit with the occasional abstention), they believed in the possibility of self-realization.

Roberto Bolano

#7. An element of abstention, of restraint, must enter into all finer joys.

Vida Dutton Scudder

#8. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

G.K. Chesterton

#9. 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

#10. After the German abstention at the UN, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle commented that Germany doesn't always have to stand on the side of its traditional allies. Berlin can look for new partners all over the world.

Donald Rumsfeld

#11. Abstention from labor is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing.

Thorstein Veblen

#12. I spent years studying the teachings of Patanjali, and he reminded us several thousand years ago that when we are steadfast - which means that we never slip in our abstention of thoughts of harm directed toward others - then all living creatures cease to feel enmity in our presence.

Wayne Dyer

#13. To assign to everybody his proper place in society is the task of the consumers. Their buying and abstention from buying is instrumental in determining each individual's social position.

Ludwig Von Mises

#14. Abstention, self-control, self-inflicted pain: these are forms of power - about the only kind you can have when you're a fourteen-year-old girl, by the way.

Meg Howrey

#15. Nonviolence is not just abstention from war, fighting, or animal flesh. It is abstention from negative thoughts and negative speech.

Nathaniel Altman

#16. Anything boost spiritual potency and greatness like sexual abstention.

Anyaele Sam Chiyson

#17. When you are steadfast in your abstention of thoughts of harm directed toward yourself and others, all living creatures will cease to feel fear in your presence.

Patanjali

#18. Complete abstention may be much easier than moderation.

Marjorie Pay Hinckley

#19. War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.

Anatole France

#20. To use legal or financial constraint to compel either abstention or submission, is entirely horrible, unnatural and absurd.

Aleister Crowley

#21. Sabbath rest is more than mere abstention from physical work; and, therefore, must include worship and Scripture-reading

Joseph Hertz

#22. Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure short of total abstention.

Penelope Fitzgerald

#23. An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#24. Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: 'Oh, I should tweet about this.'

George Saunders

#25. A teenage taste of beer aside, Mitt Romney does not consume alcohol. Which begs the question, will total abstention put his candidacy, perhaps even this great nation in jeopardy?

Martin Bashir

#26. Capital is not a free gift of God or of nature. It is the outcome of a provident restriction of consumption on the part of man. It is created and increased by saving and maintained by the abstention from dissaving.

Ludwig Von Mises

#27. A wonderful emotion to get things moving when one is stuck is anger. It was anger more than anything else that had set me off, roused me into productivity and creativity.

Mary Garden

#28. My old geography professor once told his class how the music, paintings, sculptures, and books of the world are mirror in which people see versions of themselves.

Simon Van Booy

#29. George Vida braced his hands on the table before taking his seat, his gaze strafing the room with the discernment of a leathery old goat sniffing for something to nibble on.

Lisa Wingate

#30. When I sit down I write very fast ... if I haven't finished a book in two or three months then I think it's not going well.

Michael Morpurgo

#31. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, grass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness ...

H.P. Lovecraft

#32. Making art for me is not fun in the sense of la, la, la, la, but it's something that I find very absorbing and very satisfying.

Nell Irvin Painter

#33. At best, love is simply the slipping of a hand in another's, of knowing you are where you belong at last, and of exchanging through the eyes that all-consuming regard which ignores everybody else on earth.

Laurie Lee

#34. A very dear friend of mine great actress named Wendy Rich Stetson was very active in the theater department at Amherst and I went to all the plays she was in, and it became very clear to me that what she was doing was something I wanted to be doing.

John Cariani

#35. A married man is a man with a past, while a bachelor is a man with a future.

George Bernard Shaw

#36. I don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck. At least i can fucking think.

Ian MacKaye

#37. According to the classic liberal-arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms, or liberation to act on our desires-it is, rather, liberation from slavery to those desires, from slavery to self.

Robert P. George

#38. You have two choices, to control your mind or to let your mind control you.

Paulo Coelho

#39. The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object transformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness.

Michel De Certeau

#40. The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of globalization. [ ... ] The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces.

Thomas Friedman

#41. If there is one path above all others to war, it is the path of weakness and disunity.

John F. Kennedy

#42. Heaven would never be heaven without you.

Richard Matheson