Thing In Itself Quotes

#1. A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

Irving Penn

#2. When poets - write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.

Joyce Carol Oates

#3. I don't know that I ever wanted greatness on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something - or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip.

Roger Zelazny

#4. Technological change can become 'fetishized' as a 'thing in itself', as an exogenous guiding force in the history of capitalism.

David Harvey

#5. Because appearance remains appearance and does not become thing in itself.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#6. The banknote without a signature at the bottom is nothing but a worthless piece of paper. A few strokes of a pen confer on it all its value. The prayer of a poor child of Adam is a feeble thing in itself, but once endorsed by the hand of the Lord Jesus it accomplishes much.

J.C. Ryle

#7. The photo is a thing in itself. And that's what still photography is all about.

Garry Winogrand

#8. Get married, in any case. If you happen to get a good mate, you will be happy; if a bad one, you will become philosophical, which is a fine thing in itself.

Socrates

#9. Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

Susan Sontag

#10. Being published is not a necessary validation or a path everyone wants to take with their work. Writing - and finishing - a novel is a great thing in itself, whether or not the book is published, or becomes widely-read or not.

Garth Nix

#11. I do not portray the thing in itself. I portray the passage; not a passing from one age to another, or, as the people put it, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute.

Michel De Montaigne

#12. It was one of those times when the unsatisfactory complexity of the world fades far enough into the distance for the moment to become a thing in itself.

William Shaw

#13. Playing scales is like a boxer skipping rope or punching a bag. It's not the thing in itself; it's preparatory to the activity

Barney Kessel

#14. Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved.

C.S. Lewis

#15. Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

Terry Eagleton

#16. Performing is a thing in itself, a distinct skill, different from making recordings. And for those who can do it, it's a way to make a living.

David Byrne

#17. Clouds of flavors and savors float around the thing-in-itself.

Mason Cooley

#18. Happiness ain't a thing in itself - it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant.

Mark Twain

#19. Evil, and evil spirits, devils and devil possession, are the outgrowth of man's inadequate consciousness of God. We must avoid thinking of evil as a thing in itself - a force that works against man or, against God, if you will.

Eric Butterworth

#20. Transcendence implies the surpassing of two things, and the consequent attainment of a third thing. But there are no 'things' in reality, of any kind whatever: there is only the thing-in-itself, its suchness, which is Reality, revealed when the illusory dualism of inexistent qualities is dissolved.

Wei Wu Wei

#21. Believe me that in every big thing or achievement there are always obstacles-big or small- and the reaction one shows to such obstacles is what counts, not the obstacle itself.

Bruce Lee

#22. To feel the grace of God in a painting of the dear, quiet commonness of a domestic interior, or in a landscape, seascape, cityscape, trains us to feel the grace of God in the thing itself in situ.

Susan Vreeland

#23. The name of peace is sweet, and the thing itself is beneficial, but there is a great difference between peace and servitude. Peace is freedom in tranquillity, servitude is the worst of all evils, to be resisted not only by war, but even by death.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#24. There is no such thing as an "atrocity" in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.

Sydney J. Harris

#25. There is a shortage of hard R. It was the story and the character. He's never played a character like this and so that was the thing that really won him over. The story itself, on the surface - Patrick and I love actors almost in a geeky kind of way.

Todd Farmer

#26. In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.

Neil Postman

#27. For me, the only ego that needs serving in putting together a film is the story's, the ego of the story and it's the piece itself that you want to bring out the voice of the piece. You're really serving that and that's the thing that you have a basic understanding of.

Julia Ormond

#28. The crucial thing about an education is the opportunity tat it brings, the doors it opens, because otherwise knowledge, in and of itself, is a blind alley

David Nicholls

#29. Hardly any one is able to see what is before him, just as it is in itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through the veil of his preconception, he criticizes before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself.

Arthur Symons

#30. A sixth sense is a miraculous thing, which in itself suggests a supernatural order. The human intellect, however, for all its power and triumphs, is largely formed by this world and is therefore corruptible.

Dean Koontz

#31. I think people who come into my home feel comfortable and welcome and loved. And the biggest thing in my living room (the fireplace) is in and of itself an expression of love.

Julia Roberts

#32. The thing that has always interested me in the kinds of shows that I do have more to do with the consequences of behavior than the behavior itself. Pulling a trigger and shooting somebody, or dismembering somebody.

Steven Bochco

#33. Don't feel sad. The only certain thing in life ... is death itself. She's free from her body and her soul is ready to take on another new life, so she can continue on until she becomes light, just like the stars.

Grace Fiorre

#34. Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.

Charles Baxter

#35. In storytelling you kind of put your nightmares up there, you put your dreams up there and people can see them better because they can stand outside of it and look at it and recognize themselves inside it. So I feel that that in and of itself is a spiritual thing.

Holly Hunter

#36. Luck, like life itself, is no certain thing, but a loveliness which may alight upon my shoulder but more often seems to be some unknown brilliant quantity in motion.

William T. Vollmann

#37. Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.

Walter Isaacson

#38. For in this worldof ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind, still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely, grief.

Marcel Proust

#39. In the game of life the most important thing is not the game itself but the PLAYER.
Because the player who does not know himself will never understand his game.

Maria Pelisek

#40. The important thing is neither your nationality nor the religion you professed, but how your faith translated itself in your life.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#41. A good Christian is bound to relinquish not only goods and children, but life itself, for the glory of his Redeemer: therefore I am resolved to sacrifice every thing in this transitory world, for the sake of salvation in a world that will last to eternity.

John Foxe

#42. Like any group that has endured much, African Americans have created a strong and mutually reinforcing sense of group identity. That's not a bad thing in and of itself.

J. C. Watts

#43. Most powerful of all powers in its holy insinuation is _being_. _To be_ is more powerful than even _to do_. Action _may_ be hypocrisy, but being is the thing itself, and is the parent of action.

George MacDonald

#44. We delight in one knowable thing, which comprehends all that is knowable; in one apprehensible, which draws together all that can be apprehended; in a single being that includes all, above all in the one which is itself the all.

Giordano Bruno

#45. A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on to canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing.

William Dobell

#46. Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

#47. Later, he was to decide that Andrew's life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.

Neal Stephenson

#48. We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

#49. The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

Jorge Luis Borges

#50. A timely benefit, -though thing of little worth,
The gift itself, -in excellence transcends the earth

Thiruvalluvar

#51. For one thing, to predict the advent of big business was considering the conditions of Marx's day an achievement in itself.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

#52. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.

Daniel Burnham

#53. Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.

John Wayne

#54. All change is change for the better. There is no such thing as "change for the worse." Change is the process of Life Itself, and that process could be called by the name 'evolution.' And evolution moves in only one direction: forward, and toward improvement.

Neale Donald Walsch

#55. To the extent that it remains true to itself, the historical method not only has to investigate the biblical word as a thing of the past, but also has to let it remain in the past.

Pope Benedict XVI

#56. The chemotherapy was very peculiar, something that makes you feel much worse than the cancer itself, a very nasty thing. I used to go to treatment on my own, and nearly everybody else was with somebody. I wouldn't have liked that. Why would you want to make anybody sit in those places?

Maggie Smith

#57. If there is any method in the way I take pictures, I believe it lies in this: See the subject first. Do not try to force it to be a picture of this, that or the other thing. Stand apart from it. Then something will happen. The subject will reveal itself.

Bill Brandt

#58. It was the sweetest, kindest, most selfless thing anyone has done for me in a long time and that in and of itself scared the shit out of me.

Sawyer Bennett

#59. Before the sacred, people lost all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my - conscience.

Max Stirner

#60. This grace of God is a very great, strong, mighty and active thing. It does not lie asleep in the soul. Grace hears, leads, drives, draws, changes, works all in man, and lets itself be distinctly felt and experienced. It is hidden, but its works are evident.

Martin Luther

#61. Poetry! Indeed, verses are the only thing that your letter lacks, Makar Alexievitch. And what tender feelings I can read in it - what roseate-coloured fancies! To the curtain, however, I had never given a thought. The fact is that when I moved the flower-pots, it LOOPED ITSELF up. There now!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#62. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

Hunter S. Thompson

#63. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.

Jane Hirshfield

#64. Bodily pleasure is not in itself a bad thing. But when it is exalted to a necessity and we become dependent upon it, then we are slaves of our body and its feelings. Only misery lies ahead.

Dallas Willard

#65. As far as career goes, make sure you're in it for the right reasons - and make sure that the work itself is the most important thing.

Clive Owen

#66. The unknown, our own true nature, has the capacity to wake itself up when you start to fall in love with letting go of all the mental structures you hold onto. Contemplate this: there is no such thing as a true belief.

Adyashanti

#67. Experience was static in the valley; it was older than time itself, for time was a thing of but two generations, dated by moons and ending with the day in which he found himself.

Peter Matthiessen

#68. It's a fallacy to believe that age in itself brings wisdom, but one thing it infallibly brings is experience.

Gillian Linscott

#69. Government seems to me to be a part of religion itself - a thing sacred in its institutions and ends.

William Penn

#70. Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

William Hazlitt

#71. The first and the most important thing is to know that life is one and immortal. Only the forms, countless in number, are transient and brittle. The life everlasting is independent of any form but manifests itself in all forms. Life then does not die ... but the forms are dissolved.

Sri Aurobindo

#72. Every living thing is both a whole system in and of itself as well as an essential part of other systems.

Meredith L. Young-Sowers

#73. The more one needs God the more perfect he is. To need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself. It is the saddest thing in the world if a human being goes through life without discovering that he needs God!

Soren Kierkegaard

#74. It's all like me; and any song for this would just be bullshit. This is a thing, where they stopped trying, they deserted it, and desertion itself is the only possible song.

Alice Notley

#75. In fiction there can be no appeal to any authority outside the book itself ... the thing has to look true, and that is all. It is not made to look true by simple statement.

Percy Lubbock

#76. Everyone wants to put people on, I think. And get away with it! That's the thing: put people on and get away with it! That's a science in itself.

Dizzy Gillespie

#77. But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously ...

Julio Cortazar

#78. In no way can it be uttered, as can other things, which one can learn. Rather, from out of a full, co-existential dwelling with the thing itself - as when a spark, leaping from the fire, flares into light - so it happens, suddenly, in the soul, there to grow, alone with itself.

Martin Heidegger

#79. He could cut a Trolloc in half with a gateway at three hundred paces, and summon fire from inside Dragonmount itself, and he still wanted to carry a sword. It was, she decided, a male thing.

Robert Jordan

#80. I would have told her then she was the only thing that I could
love in this dying world but the simple word "love" itself already died and went away.

Marilyn Monroe

#81. The effort to lift one's self into perfect enlightenment is a profound thing. It has nothing to do with individual will. It's a refraction of the cosmos. The cosmos delights in itself.

Frederick Lenz

#82. No. You should take pleasure in following the Lethani. If you fight well, you should take pride in doing a thing well. For the fighting itself you should feel only duty and sorrow. Only barbarians and madmen take pleasure in combat. Whoever loves the fight itself has left the Lethani behind.

Patrick Rothfuss

#83. Simplicity is a thing beautiful in itself, like clear light.

Julia McNair Wright

#84. Pierrot knew that everything in the world was alive. Everything was composed of molecules that shook and vibrated and hummed. There was no such thing as permanence. Even the most stalwart object - such as a statue in the park - was struggling to keep itself together.

Heather O'Neill

#85. I've filled my whole life trying to preserve the memory of living, in the fight against dying. Perhaps the only thing I've done, since stopping death is impossible, is to show this fight. The fight itself does not satisfy us either.

Christian Boltanski

#86. Always questioning your motivations is a healthy thing, but fearing your capacity for doing the wrong thing so that you retreat from many aspects of life is a terrible error in itself.

Dean Koontz

#87. The sad and poignant thing for Johnson, however, was not his anti-intellectualism in itself but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#88. If the original essence of the thing which we fear could confidently lodge itself within us by its own authority it would be the same in all men. For all men are of the same species and, in varying degrees, are all furnished with the same conceptual tools and instruments of judgement.

Michel De Montaigne

#89. Yet now leaning here, till the gate prints my arm, I feel the weight that has formed itself in my side. Something has formed ... some hard thing.

Virginia Woolf

#90. The loveliest, sweetest flower that bloomed in paradise, and the first that died, has rarely blossomed since on mortal soil. It is so frail, so delicate, a thing, it is gone if it but look upon itself; and she who ventures to esteem it hers proves by that single thought she has it not.

Elizabeth Fry

#91. And if all could with one voice be asked whether they wished to be happy, there is no doubt they would all answer that they would. And this would not be possible unless the thing itself, which we call "happiness", were held in memory.

Augustine Of Hippo

#92. The Republican Party may be forever reconstituted and changed, which may not be a bad thing either, in and of itself.

Rush Limbaugh

#93. Well-being and need are purely relative concepts. There is no such thing as poverty in itself, suffering in itself, unhappiness in itself. All is relative.

Alan Lightman

#94. The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

Seamus Heaney

#95. Do the thing itself. Don't pay much mind to critics or what anyone says about it. Just do it, in any form possible, and watch others doing it. Take it in viscerally, get it by osmosis. Don't ever read your own reviews, certainly not the good ones.

Holland Taylor

#96. Children surrender nothing when faced with the world: it is the world that gives up, over and over again. By so giving up, of course, it renews itself - that is the secret. Dying in order to live, that sort of thing.

Gregory Maguire

#97. There can be no such thing as Superiority when We Are All One. A thing cannot be superior to itself. All things are One Thing, and there is nothing else. When you understand this, you begin experiencing life - and treating each other - in a new way.

Neale Donald Walsch

#98. I'm not claiming that football is the nation's salvation in this area, but it's one of them, one little thing that apparently has captured the imagination of a large sector of our society. But when football can't be a relatively pure outlet, a fun thing, then it hurts itself.

Pete Rozelle

#99. I've come to realize one thing, that stories are always bigger than we are, they happen to us and we are their protagonists without realizing it, but in the stories we live, we aren't the true protagonists, the true protagonist is the story itself.

Antonio Tabucchi

#100. Acting is a general thing; it's not like being a primary artist like a painter or writer which stands the test of time. I don't think acting stands the test of time, but it can capture the mood of the moment, which is in itself very exciting, but it rarely lasts.

Tom Hollander