Absolute And Relative Quotes & Sayings

Philosophy has been described as thinking about thinking, and all Christians should do that. The term comes from two Greek words, philia ("love") and sophia ("wisdom"), thus "loving wisdom." Nothing anti-Christian appears in that definition. Problems arise if we seek wisdom apart from God, or elevate human reason above Him, but according to Proverbs 4:5-7, God's people should love and seek wisdom.
Formal philosophy is divided into three major areas-incidentally, all core Christian issues: (1) Metaphysics,
which asks questions about the nature of reality: "What is real?" "Is the basic essence of the world matter, or spirit, or something else?" (2) Epistemology, which addresses issues concerning truth and knowledge: "What do we know?" "How do we know it?" "Why do we think it's true?" (3) Ethics, which considers moral problems: "What is right and wrong?" "Are moral values absolute or relative?" "What is the good life, and how do we achieve it? — Rick Cornish

The trouble with institutional investors is that their performance is usually measured relative to their peer group and not by an absolute yardstick. This makes them trend followers by definition. — George Soros

A belief in moral absolutes should always make us more, not less, critical of both sides in any conflict. This doesn't mean that both sides are equally wrong; it means that since we all fall short of moral perfection, even the side whose cause is truly righteous may commit terrible acts of violence in defense of that cause
and, worse, may feel quite justified in committing them. That is the difference between being righteous and being self-righteous. Moral standards are absolute; but human fidelity to them is always relative. — Joseph Sobran

From Memorial Day to Labor Day, you may wear white shoes. Not before and not after. As a command, the White Shoe Edict should be clear and simple enough. Do not violate it. In a society in which everything else has become relative, a matter of how it makes you feel, a question between you and your conscience, and an opportunity for you to be really you, this is an absolute. — Judith Martin

Use-values exist in the physical material world of things that can be described in Newtonian and Cartesian terms of absolute space and time. Exchange-values lie in the relative space-time of motion and exchange of commodities, while values can be understood only in terms of the relational space-time of the world market. (The immaterial relational value of socially necessary labor times comes into being within the evolving space-time of capitalist global development.) But as Marx has already convincingly shown, values cannot exist without exchange-values, and exchange cannot exist without use-values. The three concepts are dialectically integrated with one another. — David Harvey

If you have the goods, life's too short to wait. Hidden gold is lost gold. The world should not be denied an opportunity to touch the collective imagination. To those who deny both the world and themselves, their larder deserves absolute obscurity. For those who share, obscurity is relative and a spark remains to keep the embers warm. — Edward C. Patterson

If you do something to benefit one person, that is an absolute gain, and its relative insignificance in the wider scheme is irrelevant. Benefit two people without concomitant harm to others - or a village, tribe, city, class, nation, society or civilisation - and the benefits are scalable, arithmetic. There is no excuse beyond fatalistic self-indulgence and sheer laziness for doing nothing. — Iain Banks

Stillness and action are relative, not absolute, principles. It is important to find a balance of yin and yang, not just in qigong, but in everyday life. In movement, seek stillness and rest. In rest, be mindful and attentive. — Ken Cohen

If you could buckle your Bugs Bunny wristwatch to a ray of light, your watch would continue ticking but the hands wouldn't move. That's because at the speed of light there is no time. Time is relative to velocity. At high speeds, time is literally stretched. Since light is the ultimate in velocity, at light-speed time is stretched to its absolute and becomes static. Albert Einstein figured that one out. — Tom Robbins

The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative. — Benito Mussolini

In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute but relative both to the observer and the thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects will become. We can never accelerate ourselves to the speed of light, and the harder we try(the faster we go) the more distorted we become, relative to an outside observer. — Bill Bryson

More and more, I have come to realize how thoughts and concepts are all that block us from always being ... in the absolute ... When the view is there, thoughts are seen for what they truly are: fleeting and transparent, and only relative ... You do not cling to thoughts and emotions or reject them, but welcome them all within the vast embrace of Rigpa. — Sogyal Rinpoche

What we are going to do is continue to grow our content spend on original programming, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of our total spending, because it's been working. It's been helping grow the brand; and more importantly, it's been driving viewing hours relative to how else we would spend the money. — Ted Sarandos

When you talk and think of the Absolute, you have to do it in the relative; so all these logical arguments apply. — Swami Vivekananda

You can't relate to an absolute or it wouldn't be absolute, it would be relative. On an intellectual level, that's easy. However, you hear theologians in the theistic traditions talk about absolute God, and I saw God, or God spoke; speaking, being seen, these are all relational things. So what is absolute about such a being, wouldn't actually be absolute. — Robert Thurman

Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The less you demand total fulfillment from relationships, the more you can appreciate them for the beautiful tapestries they are, in which absolute and relative, perfect and imperfect, infinite and finite are marvelously interwoven. You can stop fighting the shifting tides of relative love and learn to ride them instead. And you come to appreciate more fully the simple, ordinary heroism involved in opening to another person and forging real intimacy. — John Welwood

Motion is always a relative thing. I move in relation to something else. Any particle in this universe can change in relation to any other particle; but take the whole universe as one, and in relation to what can it move? There is nothing besides it. So this infinite Unit is unchangeable, immovable, absolute, and this is the Real Man. — Swami Vivekananda

The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute. The Catholic fiction writer is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees. — Flannery O'Connor

Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute. — Alfred Stieglitz

Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of "good" and "evil" as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter. Depending on circumstances and the political situation, any act, including murder, even the killing of hundreds of thousands, could be good or could be bad. It all depends on class ideology. And who defines this ideology? The whole class cannot get together to pass judgment. A handful of people determine what is good and what is bad. But I must say that in this respect Communism has been most successful. It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil. Today, many people apart from the Communists are carried away by this idea. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it's a chimera, there's no such thing, everything is relative, one man's absolute belief is another man's fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants. — Salman Rushdie

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side. — Jodi Picoult

Recognizing Nothing as one's true nature, following the guidance of our conscience - having a clear distinction between absolute and relative values, and using the Earth as the external absolute scale that matches the internal absolute truthfulness. — Ilchi Lee

Everything is relative; and only that is absolute. — Auguste Comte

The fifth leading division of names is into relative and absolute, or let us rather say, relative and non-relative; for the word absolute is put upon much too hard duty in metaphysics, not to be willingly spared when its services can be dispensed with. — John Stuart Mill

Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God's creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather then relative terms. — Rousas John Rushdoony

There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things. — Giordano Bruno

My personal view is that such total planning by the state is an absolute good and not simply a relative good ... I do not myself think of the attitude I take as deriving from Marx - though this undoubtedly will be suggested - but from Fichte and Hegel. — John Grierson

It bears repeating that the human penis is the longest and thickest of any primate's - in both absolute and relative terms. — Christopher Ryan

Allah is in Himself the non-being and the being, the inexistent and the existent. He is at the same time that which we designate by absolute non-being and by absolute being; or by relative non-being and relative being ... All these designation come back to God alone, for there is nothing which we can perceive, know, write or say which is not Him. — Abdelkader El Djezairi

After half a millennium of dominance, the West is being eclipsed in the global era, the United States as the lead society in the West stands on the verge of relative if not absolute decline, and much of the Christian Church in both Europe and North America is in a sorry state of weakness, confusion, unfaithfulness and cultural captivity. — Os Guinness

Of course, there are different truths on different levels. Things are true relative to other things; "long" and "short" relate to each other, "high" and "low," and so on. But is there any absolute truth? Something self-sufficient, independently true in itself? I don't think so. — Dalai Lama

What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favorite aunt in our favorite poker parlor) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favorite poker in our favorite aunt). I knew that my sampler was absolutely right in Elsie Norris's front room, but absolutely wrong in Mrs. Virtue's sewing class. Mrs. Virtue should either have had the imagination to commend me for my effort in context, or the farsightedness to realize there is a debate going on as to whether something has an absolute as well as a relative value; given that, she should have given me the benefit of the doubt.
As it was, she got upset and blamed me for her headache. — Jeanette Winterson

Absolute values are the things that are important whether you like them or not. Relative values depend on social contexts and personal preferences and conditions of life. Our current market system pursues relative transient values at the cost of absolute lasting values. — Ilchi Lee

I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common. — Isaac Newton

Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing, in order to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it. If there is a way of grasping a reality in absolute rather than relative terms, of entering into it rather than taking up positions on it, of seizing hold of it without any translation or symbolism, then that way is metaphysics itself. — Henri Bergson

Do we say that one must never willingly do wrong, or does it depend upon the circumstances? Is it true, as we have often agreed before, that there is no sense in which wrongdoing is good or honourable? Or have we jettisoned all our former convictions in these last few days? Can you and I at our age, Crito, have spent all these years in serious discussions without realizing that we were no better than a pair of children? Surely the truth is just what we have always said. Whatever the popular view is, and whether the alternative in pleasanter than the present one or even harder to bear, the fact remains that to do wrong is in every sense bad and dishonourable for the person who does it. — Socrates

It is not given to man to know the whole Truth. His duty lies in living up to the truth as he sees it, and in doing so, to resort to the purest means, i.e., to non-violence. God alone knows absolute truth. Therefore, I have often said, Truth is God. It follows that man, a finite being, cannot know absolute truth. Nobody in this world possesses absolute truth. This is God's attribute alone. Relative truth is all we know. Therefore, we can only follow the truth as we see it. Such pursuit of truth cannot lead anyone astray. — Mahatma Gandhi

I often point out to hedge fund proponents that their industry used to claim it was targeting absolute returns, with the promise that they'd make money over any reasonably long holding period and were uncorrelated with other major asset classes such as stocks or bonds. The 2008 crash showed how unattainable this was, and hedge fund proponents quietly adopted different descriptions of their objectives. These included generating attractive Relative Returns, and more recently when even this more modest objective proved to be beyond their collective ability the term Uncorrelated Returns gained favor. Since hedge funds have in recent years been worse than just about anything else it's been a good choice. — Simon A. Lack

One of the various theories proposed to explain the negative result of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment with light waves (conceived to measure the absolute space), was based on the ballistic hypothesis, i.e. on postulating that the speed of light predicted by Maxwell's equations was not given as relative to the medium but as relative to the transmitter (firearm). Had that been the case, the experiment negative results would have not caused such perplexity and frustration (as we shall see in forthcoming sections). — Felix Alba-Juez

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess. — Alain De Botton

I needed to remind myself that good news and bad news are often relative to your expectations, not anything absolute. — Will Schwalbe

Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937. — Charles Proteus Steinmetz

Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or measure of the absolute spaces, which our senses determine by its position to bodies, and which is vulgarly taken for immovable space. — Isaac Newton

My recommendation instead, however, is that we do not surrender questions of value, whether absolute matters of truth, goodness, and beauty or relative judgment of more or less truth, goodness, and beauty. With those questions to the fore, in fact, we can interrogate various other traditions and truly learn something that can improve our own. Perhaps the Presbyterians really do know more than we do about due process in church government. Perhaps the Orthodox really do know some things we do not about iconography. Perhaps the Mennonites really can teach us the meaning of 'enough.' Perhaps the Pentecostals can help liberate us from dull and disembodied worship. Baptists who have learned to improve their procedures from Presbyterians, their art from the Orthodox, their finances from the Mennonites, and their worship from the Pentecostals do not therefore become worse Baptists but better ones. And so around the ecumenical circle, no? — John G. Stackhouse Jr.

Whole idea of progress - that presence is based on the past, that future generations are going to improve our achievements, and that man will be always moving forward - obviously negate the idea of some absolute measure. Everything became relative, just like in Hume's subjectivism. Man's current criterion was left for future generations to improve it. After a while, people realized that this is philosophy of continuous change, continuous moving. Then, a soul became upset. It felt there is no peace, there is no safety. — Seraphim Rose

There is no top or bottom, no absolute
positioning in space. There are only positions that are relative to the others.
There is an incessant change in the relative positions throughout the universe
and the observer is always at the centre. — Giordano Bruno

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself. — T. S. Eliot

The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple indeterminate, relative ones. — Robert M. Pirsig

When you put relative and absolute truth together and they become one unit, it becomes possible to make things workable. You are not too much on the side of absolute truth, or you would become too theoretical. You are not too much on the side of relative truth, or you would become too precise. When you put them together, you realize that there is no problem. — Chogyam Trungpa

Jesus was contemplative and activist, mystic and prophet, Spirit and form, God and human, absolute and relative, Creator and creature, existing for eternity and existing in time. — Amos Smith

Failure to recognize one's own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value. — Vladimir S. Soloviev

It does not take the constant barrage of bourgeois propaganda to reinforce the thinking among native-born white male workers that a woman, black, or migrant worker is a threat to his job security and wages. He already knows the competitive conditions of his class and the means by which his job and his wages are to be secured. He is King Rat, the guy who is going to survive in the middle of an all-sided struggle no matter how conditions deteriorate for the class as a whole in the open-air concentration camp of class society. His measure of success is not how he is doing in absolute terms, but how he is doing relative to other wage slaves. — Anonymous

If one were to just understand the worldly life and what it is, he would attain liberation [moksha]. The worldly life is 'relative'. And "All these relatives are temporary adjustments". — Dada Bhagwan

If beauty is relative, then any and everything when compared to the beauty of God is absolutely hideous. — Criss Jami

The risks in antiques fraud are relative. Other criminals risk the absolute. You've never heard of a fraudster involved in a shoot-out, of the "Come and get me, copper!" sort. Or of some con artist needing helicopter gunships to bring him. No, we subtle-mongers do it with the smile, the promise, the hint. And we have one great ally: greed. And make no mistake. Greed is everywhere, like weather. — Jonathan Gash

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments. — Richard Rorty

A modern theory of knowledge which takes account of the relational as distinct from the merely relative character of all historical knowledge must start with the assumption that there are spheres of thought in which it is impossible to conceive of absolute truth existing independently of the values and position of the subject and unrelated to the social context. — Karl Mannheim

We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. Health is maintained only through work. And as it is with all life so it is with science. We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute. — Max Planck

Monotheism and an absolute God define one another.

The absolute is a mental construct, an abstract mental model.
The absolute, whether it is a purest abstract essence or an extreme abstract measure, only exists in our minds as an abstraction.

Furthermore, the absolute will only lead to the abandon of all measure and blind us to the relative interdependence of all things.
The measure of knowledge of life is the knowledge of the measure of this relative interdependence. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams. — Oscar Wilde

Those wretches tainted with the error of Indifferentism and Modernism hold that dogmatic truth is not absolute, but relative: that is, that it must adapt itself to the varying necessities of the times and the varying dispositions of souls, since it is not contained in an unchangeable revelation, but is, by its very nature, meant to accommodate itself to the life of man. — Pope Pius XI

To the extent that we are trapped by the overvaluing, idealizing tendency, we are not free fully to celebrate the limited but real goods of creation. Idolatry by definition is not an accurate assessment of creaturely goods, but an overvaluing of them so as to miss the richness of their actual, limited values. If I worship my tennis trophies, my Mondrian, my family tree, my Kawasaki, or my bank account, then I do not really receive those goods for what they actually are - limited, historical, and finite - goods which are vulnerable to being taken away by time and death. When I pretend that a value is something more than it is, ironically I value it less appropriately than it deserves. Biblical psychology invites us to relate ourselves absolutely to the absolute and relatively to the relative. — Thomas C. Oden

Relativism reduces every element of absoluteness to relativity while making a completely illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself. Fundamentally it consists in propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing. In short, every idea is reduced to a relativity of some sort, whether psychological, historical, or social; but the assertion nullifies itself by the fact that it too presents itself as a psychological, historical, or social relativity. The assertion nullifies itself if it is true and by nullifying itself logically proves thereby that it is false; its initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility. — Frithjof Schuon

The theory of relativity worked out by Mr. Einstein, which is in the domain of natural science, I believe can also be applied to the political field. Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts - and not absolute and general. — Jiang Zemin

The Sufi must be able to alternate his thought between the relative and the Absolute, the approximate and the Real. — Idries Shah

Abstractionism exacerbated the problem but sustainability, if intelligently conceived, could heal the rift between garden, landscape and urban design. Absolute sustainability is not possible. But relative sustainability is a practical and desirable proposition. — Tom Turner

If you were far out in space, you would see that the sun neither rises nor sets, but that it shines continuously. And yet, even after realizing that, we can continue to speak of the sunrise or sunset, still see its beauty, paint it, write poems about it, even though we now know that it is a relative rather than an absolute truth. — Eckhart Tolle

Because of this false idea, they devised an aesthetic belief in making the exterior of an object a reflection of the practical functions of the interior and of the constructive idea. Yet these analyses of utility and necessity that, according to their beliefs, should be the basis for the construction of any object created by humanity become immediately absurd once we analyze all the object being manufactured today. A fork or a bed cannot come to be considered necessary for humanity's life and health, and yet retain a relative value.
They are 'learned necessities.' Modern human beings are suffocating under necessities like televisions, refrigerators, etc. And in the process making it impossible to live their real lives. Obviously we are not against modern technology, but we are against any notion of the absolute necessity of objects, to the point even of doubting their real utility.'
Asger Jorn — Tom McDonough

Relative truths can also be absolute.
Relative absolute truths are like two people looking at the same coin, from two different sides, each sees a different truth and presumes they are looking at the same coin, and yet neither side can see the third side. — Caesar J. B. Squitti

The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics argue that you can twist time and space, that something can appear out of nothing, and that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. This makes a mockery of our common sense, yet nobody seeks to protect innocent schoolchildren from these scandalous ideas. Why? The theory of relativity makes nobody angry, because it doesn't contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don't care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well, be my guest. Go ahead and bend them. What do I care? In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls — Yuval Noah Harari

To become aware of what is constant in the flux of nature and life is the first step in abstract thinking. The recognition of regularity in the courses of the heavenly bodies and in the succession of seasons first provides a basis for a systematic ordering of events, and this knowledge makes possible a calendar ... Simultaneously with this concept, a system of relationships comes into the idea of the world. Change is not something absolute, chaotic, and kaleidoscopic; its manifestation is a relative one, something connected with fixed points and a given order. — Hellmut Wilhelm

We need to learn how to live consciously and, trusting ourselves, purposefully on that inevitable balance point between form and emptiness, relative and absolute, being and non-being, self and non-self, time and eternity, the finite and infinite. It is between all such dichotomies and poles that our life actually flows. — Lama Surya Das

Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths. — Vladimir Lenin

This experience which we call things, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, forms, and weights is, in itself, no thing, no form, no number, no nothing - but at this moment we behold it. We are, then, beholding the God which traditional doctrines call the boundless, formless, infinite, eternal, undivided, unmoved, and unchanging Reality - the Absolute behind the relative, the Meaning behind thoughts and words.1 Naturally the Meaning is meaning-less because, unlike words, it does not have meaning but is meaning. — Alan W. Watts

The Theory of Relativity makes nobody angry because it doesn't contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don't care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well be my guest. ...In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls. If you really understand the Theory of Evolution, you understand that there is no soul. This is a terrifying thought, not only to devote Christians and Muslims, but also to many secular people who don't hold any clear religious dogma, but nevertheless, want to believe that each human possess an eternal, individual essence that remains unchanged throughout life and can survive even death intact. — Yuval Noah Harari

We take a word, such as freedom, and dress it up to mean the ability to bear firearms, display flags, collect rainwater or grow clean food, but absolute freedom is not a relative construct. It is not there one minute or outlawed the next. It can never be seized or given. It is ever-lasting and omnipresent. — Anita B. Sulser PhD

Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. — Robert M. Pirsig

Humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly. — Dan Ariely

First and foremost I feel I am a child of God ... Today I think that everything matters, but like a nice game of relative importance and value, certainly not absolute like conversion. — Augusto De Luca

To our natural and human reason, I say that these terms 'large,' 'small,' 'immense,' 'minute,' etc. are not absolute but relative; the same thing in comparison with various others may be called at one time 'immense' and at another 'imperceptible. — Galileo Galilei

Hence, there is no such thing as an absolute objectivity of attitude. The most rigorously determined attitude of objectivity is, at best, relative. We are human; we are the slaves of our assumptions, of time and circumstance; we are the victims of our passions and illusions; and the most our critics can ask of us is this: Have you taken your passions, your illusions, your time, and your circumstance into account? — Richard Wright

People are, by and large, quite poor at judging correct absolute values but are astute about determining relative values. Psychologists call this coherent arbitrariness, which suggests that individuals are coherent when they compare prices on a relative basis but arbitrary when those prices are considered versus fundamental value. — Michael Mauboussin

Rich white people show up in a poor country to pursue their leisure-time fun, get served by black and brown people, and live in relative - or absolute - comfort. In the water, that situation can get turned on its head, though. Local kids learn to surf, know the breaks, and take most or all of the best waves, fuming turistas be damned. — William Finnegan

the Singularity who hides behind the mask of the deity's personality. Worship of deities really means appreciating them for the skill with which they play their roles in the cosmic drama. You can also worship the One directly, but the One is undifferentiated, unqualified and absolute, while the world a jyotishi lives in is relative, qualified and differentiated. — Hart Defouw

What most of us need, almost more than anything, is the courage and humility really to ask for help, from the depths of our hearts: to ask for the compassion of the enlightened beings, to ask for purification and healing, to ask for the power to understand the meaning of our suffering and transform it; at a relative level to ask for the growth in our lives of clarity, peace, and discernment, and to ask for the realization of the absolute nature of mind that comes from merging with the deathless wisdom mind of the master. — Sogyal Rinpoche

There was the goal of all those con men of library and classroom, who sold their revelations as reason, their "instincts" as science, their cravings as knowledge, the goal of all the savages of the non-objective, the non-absolute, the relative, the tentative, the probable - the savages who, seeing a farmer gather a harvest, can consider it only as a mystic phenomenon unbound by the law of causality and created by the farmers' omnipotent whim, who then proceed to seize the farmer, to chain him, to deprive him of tools, of seeds, of water, of soil, to push him out on a barren rock and to command: "Now grow a harvest and feed us! — Ayn Rand

In life, we chase things like money and status, but there things have no lasting value relative to the soul. Only the soul has absolute value, which is why I believe it should be at the center of everyone's life — Ilchi Lee

It is a strange misunderstanding to make Paul either a fatalist or a particularist; he is the strongest opponent of blind necessity and of Jewish particularism, even in the ninth chapter of Romans. But he aims at no philosophical solution of a problem which the finite understanding of man cannot settle; he contents himself with asserting its divine and human aspects, the religious and ethical view, the absolute sovereignty of God and the relative freedom of man, the free gift of salvation and the just punishment for neglecting it. Christian experience includes both truths, and we find no contradiction in praying as if all depended on God, and in working as if all depended on man. This is Pauline theology and practice. — Philip Schaff

Health is relative. There is no such thing as an absolute state of health or sickness. Everyone's physical, mental, and emotional condition is a combination of both. — Theodore Isaac Rubin

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute. — Walter Lippmann

The world in which we now live is a world whose outlook is so distorted that we absolutize what is relative (money-making, power, success) and relativize what is absolute (truth, moral values, and God). — Alice Von Hildebrand