Condition That Turns Quotes & Sayings

For the world is - allow us the homely figure - the human being turned inside out. All that moves in the mind is symbolized in Nature. Or, to use another more philosophical, and certainly not less poetic figure, the world is a sensuous analysis of humanity, and hence an inexhaustible wardrobe for the clothing of human thought. Take any word expressive of emotion - take the word 'emotion' itself - and you will find that its primary meaning is of the outer world. In the swaying of the woods, in the unrest of the "wavy plain" the imagination saw the picture of a well-known condition of the human mind; and hence the word 'emotion'.
The man who cannot invent will never discover.
Wisdom as well as folly will serve a fool's purpose; he turns all into folly. — George MacDonald

The ideal of toleration sounds like a formal condition allowing all flowers to bloom, but it turns out on examination to adumbrate a determinate form of life no less intrusive than the Sharia or "fundamentalist" Christianity. — Kenneth Minogue

A great deal of the joy of life consists in doing perfectly, or at least to the best of one's ability, everything which one attempts to do. There is a sense of satisfaction, a pride in surveying such a work, a work which is rounded, full, exact, complete in all its parts-which the superficial man, who leaves his work in a slovenly, slipshod, half-finished condition can never know. It is this conscientious completeness which turns work into art. The smallest thing, well done, becomes artistic. — William Matthews

Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition. — Michel De Montaigne

For it is beyond doubt that there is nothing which more shocks our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has rendered guilty those, who, being so removed from this source, seem incapable of participation in it. This transmission does not only seem to us impossible, it seems also very unjust. For what is more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally an infant incapable of will, for a sin wherein he seems to have so little a share, that it was committed six thousand years before he was in existence? Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. The knot of our condition takes its twists and turns in this abyss, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man. — Blaise Pascal

For years I was an undiagnosed anorexic, suffering from a little-known variant of the disease, where, freakishly, the appetite turns in on itself and demands more and more food, forcing the sufferer to gain several stones in weight and wear men's V-necked pullovers. My condition has stabilised now, but I can never stray too far from cocoa-based products and I keep a small cracknel-type candy in my brassiere at all times. Fortunately, I wear a 'D' cup so there is plenty of room for sweetmeats ... — Victoria Wood

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself. — Tony Judt

Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the "national interest" as a whole is defined and pursued ... America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive. — Samantha Power

The effectiveness of an author turns chiefly upon his getting the reputation that he should be read. But by practicing various arts, by the operation of chance, and by certain natural affinities, this reputation is quickly won by a hundred worthless people: while a worthy writer may come by it very slowly and tardily. The former possess friends to help them; for the rabble is always a numerous body which holds well together. The latter has nothing but enemies; because intellectual superiority is everywhere and under all circumstances the most hateful thing in the world, and especially to bunglers in the same line of work, who want to pass for something themselves. This being so, it is a prime condition for doing any great work
any work which is to outlive its own age, that a man pay no heed to his contemporaries, their views and opinons, and the praise or blame which they bestow. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Still, even without the country or a lake, the summer was a fine thing, particularly when you were at the beginning of it, looking ahead into it. There would be months of beautifully long, empty days, and each other to play with, and the books from the library. — Edward Eager

Unfortunately, while free time might be a necessary condition for happiness, by itself it is not sufficient to guarantee it. Learning how to use it beneficially turns out to be more difficult than expected. Nor does it seem that more of a good thing is necessarily better; as is true of so many other things, what enriches life in small quantities might impoverish it in larger doses. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The human condition comprehends more than the condition under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers. — Hannah Arendt

You can take them in a wheelchair and put them in a pool, so they can move their arms and legs. In a pool disabled people can do things that they can't normally do otherwise. — Jack LaLanne

I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hallowness,
the futility of the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd
seemingly the leading actor of the piece ;
but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.
I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.
He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of sahib.
For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives", and so in every crises he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. — George Orwell

I love being able to create characters, give them problems, and make sure everything turns out right in the end. Writing gives me limitless opportunity to study the human condition, and a love story with a positive ending always lifts my spirits and warms my heart. — Jennie Adams

It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we're surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish can feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. — Ian McEwan

I found that in a perverse way our culture and parents are far more comfortable talking about girls' vicitimization than girls' sexual agency. — Peggy Orenstein

Discontent by itself does not invariably create a desire for change. Other factors have to be present before discontent turns into disaffection. One of these is a sense of power. Those who are awed by their surroundings do not think of change, no matter how miserable their condition. When our mode of life is so precarious as to make it patent that we cannot control the circumstances of our existence, we tend to stick to the proven and the familiar. We counteract a deep feeling of insecurity by making of our existence a fixed routine. We hereby acquire the illusion that we have tamed the unpredictable. — Eric Hoffer

These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them that you're lying, they'll tell the world even if you prove you're telling the truth. Because it's the kind of lie they want to hear ... — Ralph Ellison

Their relationship would continue to grow, to change. There would always be pain, and they would be tested... Their triad had the shakiest of foundations, based as it was on mistrust, jealousy, and deception. But ships didn't need pillars pounded into the earth; no, they needed strong, protective hulls that could carry them over the ever-changing waves of an uncaring sea. With trust, hope... love--all things they had built together--they could weather anything. — Bey Deckard

I know from my constituency what is going on. Doctors that are told, begged, by mothers, 'Please don't write down that my child as asthma. Please lie and say it's bronchitis, because if you write down asthma, when my child turns 18 or 20 and has to get his or her own insurance, it will be a pre-existing condition.' — Barbara Boxer

What does it matter if it's an illness, then?' he decided, at last, 'what does it matter that it's an abnormal tension, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation, recalled and examined in a condition of health, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony and beauty, yields a hitherto unheard-of and undreamed-of sense of completeness, proportion, reconciliation and an ecstatic, prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When the ethical problem presents itself essentially as the question of my own being good and doing good, the decision has already been made that the self and the world are the ultimate realities. All ethical reflection then has the goal that I be good, and that the world - by my action - becomes good. If it turns out, however, that these realities, myself and the world, are themselves embedded in a wholly other ultimate reality, namely, the reality of God the Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer,[5] then the ethical problem takes on a whole new aspect. Of ultimate importance, then, is not that I become good, or that the condition of the world be improved by my efforts, but that the reality of God show itself everywhere to be the ultimate reality. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer