Antecedent Quotes & Sayings

I have an investment in the signifying aspects of the material as well as an understanding of antecedent bodies of work. That informs the way I make marks and make decisions. — Rashid Johnson

A miracle is a supernatural event, whose antecedent forces are beyond our finite vision, whose design is the display of almighty power for the accomplishment of almighty purposes, and whose immediate result, as regards man, is his recognition of God as the Supreme Ruler of all things, and of His will as the only supreme law. — Abbott Eliot Kittredge

When the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature - those of his own nature as well as those of so-called "nature"? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolution - i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick - an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? — Karl Marx

True gratitude or thankfulness to God for his kindness to us, arises from a foundation laid before, of love to God for what he is in himself; whereas a natural gratitude has no such antecedent foundation. The gracious stirrings of grateful affection to God, for kindness received, always are from a stock of love already in the heart, established in the first place on other grounds, viz. God's own excellency. — Jonathan Edwards

If ... we choose a group of social phenomena with no antecedent knowledge of the causation or absence of causation among them, then the calculation of correlation coefficients, total or partial, will not advance us a step toward evaluating the importance of the causes at work. — Ronald Fisher

The purpose of revival is to fire the church with divine energy for her divine assignment. Revival will tear us away from our temporal pursuits to give ourselves for what really matters.Revival will not occur without prayer. Prevailing prayer is always antecedent to revival. — David Shibley

This spiritual light is not the suggesting of any new truths or propositions not contained in the word of God. This suggesting of new truths or doctrines to the mind, independent of any antecedent revelation of those propositions, either in word or writing, is inspiration; such as the prophets and apostles had, and such as some enthusiasts pretend to. But this spiritual light that I am speaking of, is quite a different thing from inspiration: it reveals no new doctrine, it suggests no new proposition to the mind, it teaches no new thing of God, or Christ, or another world, not taught in the Bible, — Jonathan Edwards

A pronoun, too, will aptly reflect the number of its antecedent: "they" does not refer to one person, no matter how many personalities she or he has, or how eager you are to skirt the gender frays. — Karen Elizabeth Gordon

For example, the difference between Pierre believes he is intelligent and He believes Pierre is intelligent is due to what are called relations of "command": co-reference is impossible if the pronoun is located "higher" in the phrase structure than its nonpronominal antecedent. Now in the second case Pierre is found in a subordinated position, thus "lower" than he, so that they cannot be co-referential in the relevant sense. — Noam Chomsky

The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people. — Alfred North Whitehead

Sail, sail thy best, ship of democracy,
Of value is thy freight, 'tis not the present only,
The past is also stored in thee,
Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not of the western continent alone,
Earth's resume entire floats upon thy keel, O ship, is steadied by thy spars,
With thee Time voyages in trust, the antecedent nations sink or swim with thee,
With all their ancient struggles , martyrs, heroes, epics, wars, thou bear'st the other continents,
Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant.. — Walt Whitman

The validity of all the Inductive Methods depends on the assumption that every event, or the beginning of every phenomenon, must have some cause; some antecedent, upon the existence of which it is invariably and unconditionally consequent. — John Stuart Mill

About Parlabane, Brookmyre says:
To fully acknowledge the extent of the debt I owe Douglas Adams - as a reader and a writer - would very possibly crash this server, so I will merely cite one significant example. I am frequently asked who was the inspiration for my investigative journalist Jack Parlabane; whether he has some real-life antecedent or represents some indulgent alter-ego of mine. The truth is that Parlabane was entirely inspired by Ford Prefect: I always adored the idea of a character who cheerfully wanders into enormously dangerous situations and effortlessly makes them much worse. — Christopher Brookmyre

[You have Rights] antecedent to all earthly governments: Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; Rights, derived from the Great Legislator of the universe. — John Adams

Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet. — Alfred North Whitehead

The republic, as I at least understand it, means association, of which liberty is only an element, a necessary antecedent. It means association, a new philosophy of life, a divine Ideal that shall move the world, the only means of regeneration vouchsafed to the human race. — Giuseppe Mazzini

Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment. — Henry Steele Commager

Either in or out of time, the decision of a personal agency to commit an action happens antecedent to the action itself. Even if the deciding and the acting happened simultaneously, it would still not be true that the acting was antecedent to the deciding. Imagine God saying, Oh, look! I just created a universe. Now I'd better decide to do it. — Dan Barker

When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behavior is the result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth, and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination ... When a motorcar fails to start, we do not attribute its annoying behavior to sin, we do not say, you are a wicked motorcar, and you shall not have any more gasoline until you go. — Bertrand Russell

He mused on this village of his, which had sprung up in this place, amid the stones, like the gnarled undergrowth of the valley. All Artaud's inhabitants were inter-related, all bearing the same surname to such an extent that they used double-barrelled names from the cradle up, to distinguish one from another. At some antecedent date an ancestral Artaud had come like an outcast, to establish himself in this waste land. His family had grown with the savage vitality of the vegetation, drawing nourishment from this stone till it had become a tribe, then the tribe turned to a community, till they could not sort out their cousinage, going back for generations. They inter-married with unblushing promiscuity. — Emile Zola

Death is the inseparable antecedent of life; the seed dies in order to produce the plant, and earth itself is rent asunder and dies at the birth of Dionusos. Hence the significancy of the phallus, or of its inoffensive substitute, the obelisk, rising as an emblem of resurrection by the tomb of buried Deity at Lerna or at Sais. — Albert Pike

In short: Write the way people think. Nike knew what it was doing when it coined the slogan "Just do it." Grammatically, this phrase makes no sense. Your high-school English teacher would scold the copywriter for not being clear about the antecedent for "it. — Gary Dahl

In the beginning God. Not "In the beginning matter," for matter is not self-causing. It requires an antecedent cause, and God is that cause. Not "In the beginning law," for law is but a name for the course which all creation follows. That course had to be planned, and the planner is God. Not "In the beginning mind," for mind also is a created thing and must have a creator behind it. But In the beginning God, the uncaused cause of matter, mind, and law. There we must begin. Adam — A.W. Tozer

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later. — Ezra Pound

Everywhere are scattered dreams, each its own antecedent; it's precedence in the possibility of its achievement. — Dew Platt

If the consequences are the same it is always better to assume the more limited antecedent, since in things of nature the limited, as being better, is sure to be found, wherever possible, rather than the unlimited. — Aristotle.

Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals. — Herbert Read

In the field of consciousness research-and also in physics and astronomy-we are breaking past the cause-and-effect, mechanistic way of interpreting things. In the biological sciences, there is a vitalism coming in that goes much further toward positing a common universal consciousness of which our brain is simply an organ. Consciousness does not come from the brain. The brain is an organ of consciousness. It focuses consciousness and pulls it in and directs it through a time and space field. But the antecedent of that is the universal consciousness of which we are all just a part. — Joseph Campbell

We live in a narcissistic age, which means that many want to have the praise that comes from having read, without the antecedent labor of actually reading. — Douglas Wilson

Freedom of conscience is a natural right, both antecedent and superior to all human laws and institutions whatever; a right which laws never gave and a right which laws can never take away. — John Goodwin

Nowadays he is best remembered for the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), in which each successive number is the sum of the previous two, and the ratio between a number and its immediate antecedent tends towards a 'golden mean' (around 1.618). It — Niall Ferguson

Inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well as in idea as in fact, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior than those of the Community and founded more immediately in nature. — Pope Leo XIII

The stars dehisce.
By "stars" I mean, of course, tradition,
and by "tradition" I mean nothing at all.
A pronoun disembowels his antecedent.
Stop me if you've heard this one before. — Ben Lerner

Indeed taking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no single historic incident better or more variously supported than the Resurrection of Christ. Nothing but the antecedent assumption that it must be false could have suggested the idea of deficiency in the proof of it. — Brooke Foss Westcott

Now, eternity is beyond all categories of thought. This is an important point in all of the great Oriental religions. We want to think about God. God is a thought. God is a name. God is an idea. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought. As Kant said, the think in itself is no things. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can't be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent ... That's why it's absurd to speak of God as of either this sex or that sex. The divine power is antecedent to sexual separation. — Joseph Campbell

Our thinking controls how we react towards our circumstances,therefore, never allow antecedent causes to necessitate your actions... — Christopher Ty

It is a mistake to assume that government must necessarily last forever. The institution marks a certain stage of civilization-is natural to a particular phase of human development. It is not essential, but incidental. As amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct. — Herbert Spencer

Duty, Tattycoram. Begin it early, and do it well; and there is no antecedent to it, in any origin or station, that will tell against us with the Almighty, or with ourselves. — Charles Dickens

They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds. — Cormac McCarthy

Ah, one doesn't give up one's country any more than one gives UP one's grandmother. They're both antecedent to choice - elements of one's composition that are not to be eliminated. — Henry James

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results. — William James

The Divine glory is an object only worthy of attention; and to display his holy character, was the design of God in creation' as there were no after beings existing antecedent therto, to attract the mind of Jehovah; and we are sure that God is pursing the same thing still, and always will. — Lemuel Haynes