Negation Quotes

1. "Nowadays, no one believes in evil. It is considered, at most, a mere negation of good. Evil, people say, is done by those who know no better - who are undeveloped - who are to be pitied rather than blamed. But, M. Poirot, evil is real! It is a fact! I believe in Evil as I believe in Good. It exists! It is powerful! It walks the earth!' He stopped. His breath was coming fast. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and looked suddenly apologetic. 'I'm sorry. I got carried away."
Author: Agatha Christie

2. "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."
Author: Anna Kavan

3. "Panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations."
Author: Charles Hartshorne

4. "A cross is not where you go to work out, as if to build up what is already there. A cross is where you go to die, which is the final negation of the sin-riddled nature we inherit from Adam."
Author: Dan Phillips

5. "Madness? Categories such as that do not exist – as far as I'm concerned, everything is healthy, except for fruit and vegetables. In art, too, madness comes in handy, in the art of the insane, and soon there will no doubt be artists who inflict wounds upon themselves, they will be the most modern of all modern artists. For example, you're injured and you go for a walk along the street and display your injury to a police inspector, calling it a work of art, he does not understand this, and the gulf between him and the artist (who is at one and the same time his own work of art) becomes immeasurable, never to be crossed. Submission to something you didn't preach yourself is no good, I quote. Because Man must burst his ridiculous bonds, which consist of what is supposedly current reality with a prospect of a future reality of scarcely any greater value. Quote: Each and every full minute bears within it the negation of centuries of lame, broken history. End of quote."
Author: Elfriede Jelinek

6. "Naive enough to set off in pursuit of Truth, I had explored - to no avail - any number of disciplines. I was beginning to be confirmed in my skepticism when the notion occurred to me of consulting, as a last result, Poetry: who knows? perhaps it would be profitable, perhaps it conceals beneath its arbitrary appearances some definitive revelation ... Illusory recourse! Poetry had outstripped be in negation and cost me even my uncertainties ..."
Author: Emil Cioran

7. "It is this outer reach of existential abnegation – the moment where subjective identity deserts itself and becomes enslaved without consciousness of its subjugated condition – that Mirbeau consistently sought to decry with horror."
Author: Emily Apter

8. "Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself."
Author: Fredric Jameson

9. "What then is death? If it be a stopping of life, then that is which cannot be. But it may be only a change in the form of life that looks like a stopping, and is not! If Death be stronger than Life, so that he stops life, how then was Life able so to flout him, that he, the thing that was not, arose from the antenatal sepulchre on which Death sat throned in impotent negation of entity, unable to preclude existence, and yet able to annihilate it? Life alone is: nothingness is not; Death cannot destroy; he is not the antagonist, not the opposite of life."
Author: George MacDonald

10. "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."
Author: Godfrey Reggio

11. "Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal."
Author: Gustave Courbet

12. "It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence."
Author: Haruki Murakami

13. "It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spell--so unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious--all the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what night he had made of it."
Author: Henry James

14. "...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."
Author: Italo Calvino

15. "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."
Author: Ivan Illich

16. "A ruler who discerning justice refuseth to it the sanction of law, demanding abnegation of rights and self-sacrifice, will not drive his subjects to these virtues, virtuous only if free, but by unnaturally making justice unlawful, will drive them rather to rebellion against all law."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

17. "Patronage of NegationI am constantly confronted by other people's worksThat I could have created myself.And I am constantly disappointed by them.Sadly, I have to recognize themFor what they are: inferior versionsOf what I could have doneIf I'd been insecure enough in my abilitiesTo do anything."
Author: John Tottenham

18. "An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself."
Author: Jose Ortega Y Gasset

19. "In the cross of Christ God is taking man dead-seriously so that he may open up for him the happy freedom of Easter. God takes upon himself the pain of negation and the God forsakenness of judgement to reconcile himself with his enemies and to give the godless fellowship with himself.~ Theology of Play, p.33"
Author: Jürgen Moltmann

20. "He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn't evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares."
Author: Karl Marlantes

21. "Both died, ignored by most; they neither sought nor found public favour, for high roads never lead there. Laurent and Gerhardt never left such roads, were never tempted to peruse those easy successes which, for strongly marked characters, offer neither allure nor gain. Their passion was for the search for truth; and, preferring their independence to their advancement, their convictions to their interests, they placed their love for science above that of their worldly goods; indeed above that for life itself, for death was the reward for their pains. Rare example of abnegation, sublime poverty that deserves the name nobility, glorious death that France must not forget!"
Author: Laurent

22. "At one time, a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conceptions of religion, law and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed... In the old days, you see, if a man - a Frenchman, for instance- wished to get an education, he would have set to work to study the classics, the theologians, the tragedians, historians and philosophers- and you can realize all the intellectual labour involved. But nowadays he goes straight for the literature of negation, rapidly assimilates the essence of the science of negation, and thinks he's finished."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

23. "At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything -- in other words, utter savages."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

24. "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."
Author: Matthew Scully

25. "All the seemingly positive valuations and judgments of ressentiment are hidden devaluations and negations."
Author: Max Scheler

26. "In place of practising wholesome self-abnegation, we ever make the wish the father to the thought: we receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense."
Author: Michael Faraday

27. "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."
Author: Mikhail Bakunin

28. "What he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-powering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!"
Author: Milan Kundera

29. "The opposite of self-assertiveness is self-abnegation--abandoning or submerging your personal values, judgment, and interests. Some people tell themselves this is a virtue. It is a "virtue" that corrodes self-esteem."
Author: Nathaniel Branden

30. "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."
Author: Richard Phillips

31. "I am always sorry for the Puritan, for he guided his life against desire and against nature. He found what he thought was comfort, for he believed the spirit's safety was in negation, but he has never given the world one minute's joy or produced one symbol of the beautiful order of nature. He sought peace in bondage and his spirit became a prisoner."
Author: Robert Henri

32. "He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path."
Author: Salman Rushdie

33. "Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned."
Author: Samuel Beckett

34. "We could decide simply to remain absorbed in the mysterious, unformed, free-play of reality. This would be the choice of the mystic who seeks to extinguish himself in God or Nirvana—analogous perhaps to the tendency among artists to obliterate themselves with alcohol or opiates. But if we value our participation in a shared reality in which it makes sense to make sense, then such self-abnegation would deny a central element of our humanity: the need to speak and act, to share our experience with others."
Author: Stephen Batchelor

35. "It's part of our overall Body Negation Program."
Author: Sue Monk Kidd

36. "And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation."
Author: Umberto Eco

37. "Relief is a great feeling.It's the emotional and physical reward we receive from our bodies upon alleviation of pain, pressure and struggle. A time to bask in the lack of the negative.And yet, think about it—relief is really the status quo, a negation of the suffering, a nothing in itself. It is the way things were before the pressure and struggle began.So, is it a step back? A regression?Or is it an opportunity to regroup, start over, and move in a different direction?Use your moment of relief well."
Author: Vera Nazarian

38. "I'm not abnegation, I'm not dauntless, I am Divergent"
Author: Veronica Roth

39. "I am better off doing as abnegation taught me: turning away from myself, projecting always outward, and hoping that in whatever is next, I will be better than I am now."
Author: Veronica Roth

40. "Dauntless,' he says. 'I was born for Abnegation. I was planning on leaving Dauntless, and becoming factionless. But then I met her, and...I felt like maybe I could make something more of my decision.' Her. For a moment, it's like I'm looking at a different person, sitting in Tobias's skin, one whose life is not as simple as I thought. He wanted to leave Dauntless, but he stayed because of me. He never told me that."
Author: Veronica Roth

41. "So now we all know, says Four, quietly, that you are afraid of a short, skinny girl from Abnegation. His mouth curls in a smile."
Author: Veronica Roth

42. "Whoa there, Tobias," says the man to my left. "Weren't you raised a Stiff? I thought the most you people did was... graze hands or something.""Then how do you explain all the Abnegation children?" Tobias raises his eyebrows."They are brought into being by sheer force of will," the woman on the arm of the chair interjects. "Didn't you know that, Tobias?""No, I wasn't aware." He grins. "My apologies."
Author: Veronica Roth

43. "Your Abnegation is showing,"
Author: Veronica Roth

44. "I look at myself head-on again. For the first time, the idea of leaving my Abnegation identity behind doesn't make me nervous; it gives me hope."
Author: Veronica Roth

45. "This is how we came by our factions: Candor, Erudite, Amity, Abnegation and Dauntless." Max smiles. "In them we find administrators and teachers and counselors and leaders and protectors. In them we find our sense of belonging, our sense of community, our very lives."
Author: Veronica Roth

46. "Those who blamed aggression formed Amity.'…‘Those who blamed ignorance became the Erudite.'…‘Those who blamed duplicity created Candor.'…‘Those who blamed selfishness made Abnegation.'…‘And those who blamed cowardice were the Dauntless."
Author: Veronica Roth

47. "I settle into their pace. The uniform pounding of feet in my ears and the homogeneity of the people around me makes me believe that I could choose this. I could be subsumed into Abnegation's hive mind, projecting always outward."
Author: Veronica Roth

48. "Tris: Wait. So you have no idea what my aptitude is?Tori: Yes and No. My conclusion is that you display equal aptitude for Abnegation, Dauntless and Erudite. People who get this kind of result are..are called...Divergent."
Author: Veronica Roth

49. "There are well established and easily understood historical reasons why every legitimate influence should be brought to bear on the removal of this roadblock from the pathway of normal human advancement. This must be done for the sake of the Homo-Marxian as well as the rest of humanity. He is the victim of a man-made experiment, trapped in his own self-perpetuating cycle of human negation. As long as free men are the prevailing majority in the earth there is a very good chance of breaking this cycle. To do so, however, free men must achieve an intelligent and dynamic solidarity at least as strong as the illusory but firmly fixed purposes of Homo-Marxian."
Author: W. Cleon Skousen

50. "Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed and governed their passions or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory."
Author: William Blake

Negation Quotes Pictures