Top 100 Quotes About Negation
#1. What Marxism calls atheism is basically the negation of an idol, which sometimes bears the name of God.
Ernesto Cardenal
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation ...
Northrop Frye
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.
Karl Marx
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality.
James A. Garfield
#22. Can an author create characters superior to himself? I would say no and in that negation include both the intellectual and the moral. I believe that from us cannot emerge creatures more lucid or more noble than our best moments.
Anonymous
#23. Imperialism is a negation of God. It does ungodly acts in the name of God.
Mahatma Gandhi
#24. 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
#25. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. 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
#31. There at least is a first affirmation, I mean negation, on which to build.
Samuel Beckett
#32. 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
#33. Peace is not a passive but an active condition, not a negation but an affirmation.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#34. That's what I fear: being subtracted from myself. Negation. Forced against my will to become a beast.
Nenia Campbell
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Nobility is only in the negation of existence, in a smile that surveys annihilated landscapes.
Emil Cioran
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.
Albert Camus
#41. 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
#42. Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
Arthur Koestler
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth
Niels Bohr
#47. 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
#48. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. All rejection and negation indicates a deficiency in fertility: fundamentally, if only we were good plowland we would allow nothing to go unused, and in every thing, event, and person we would welcome manure, rain, or sunshine.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#55. My paintings cannot be a negation of what has always been and always will be necessary - drawing and search for values.
Theodore Robinson
#56. 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
#57. ...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
#58. The phrase 'I can't' is the most powerful force of negation of the human psyche.
Paul R. Scheele
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Self-negation is noble, self-culture is beneficent, self-possession is manly, but to the truly great and inspiring soul they are poor and tame compared to self-abuse.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.
Samuel Beckett
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. You can't negate negation so how can being be?
Mike O'Connor
#70. 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
#71. When affirmation and negation came into being, Tao faded. After Tao faded, then came one-sided attachments.
Zhuangzi
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Factory farming isn't just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them.
Matthew Scully
#77. It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It's as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial.
Deirdre Madden
#78. The sanctification of political power by Christianity is blasphemy; it is the negation of Christianity.
Leo Tolstoy
#79. 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
#80. That knowledge which purifies the mind and heart alone is true Knowledge, all else is only a negation of Knowledge.
Ramakrishna
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others - all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the 'non-good for me.
Ayn Rand
#84. Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
Gustave Courbet
#85. Words and ideas are a description of reality, silence is a negation of reality. What is the reality itself?
John Daido Loori
#87. Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#88. The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it.
Glenn Gould
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. The very nature of the objective universe turns any spiritual faith and ideals into courageous acts of subjectivity, constantly vulnerable to intellectual negation.
Richard Tarnas
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.
Knut Hamsun
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. It's part of our overall Body Negation Program.
Sue Monk Kidd
#100. 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
