Determinations Quotes & Sayings

These arguments on each side (and many more might be produced) are so plausible, that I am apt to suspect, they may, the one as well as the other, be solid and satisfactory, and that reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions. — David Hume

A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions. — William Godwin

How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy! In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age we are looking backward to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day when we have time. — Charles Caleb Colton

Were I to personify Justice, instead of presenting her blind, I would denominate her the goddess of fire ... Of unbending integrity Justice should feel, hear and see; but truth alone should be the polar star by which she should shape her movements, and equity only should constrain her determinations. — Judith Sargent Murray

Let us become thoroughly sensible of the weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason: Let us duly consider its uncertainty and endless contrarieties, even in subjects of common life and practice ... When these topics are displayed in their full light, as they are by some philosophers and almost all divines; who can retain such confidence in this frail faculty of reason as to pay any regard to its determinations in points so sublime, so abstruse, so remote from common life and experience? — David Hume

Someone has said that planning is the place where man shows himself most like God. Nothing is more godlike than the planner, the thinker, the organizer. He is the one who draws the blueprint for success. He is the one who builds the roadway on which accomplishment will travel. It is likely that our greatest opportunity is to have a good set of definitely worked-out objectives that are fully believed in and about which firm determinations have been made. — Sterling W. Sill

True science is at length disencumbered of the empirical determinations which had accumulated in the course of many centuries. — Franz Cumont

To begin with clear and self-evident principles, to advance by timorous and sure steps, to review frequently our conclusions, and examine accurately all their consequences; though by these means we shall make both a slow and a short progress in our systems; are the only methods, by which we can ever hope to reach truth, and attain a proper stability and certainty in our determinations. — David Hume

Resolve is what makes a man manifest. Not puny resolve; not crude determinations; not errant — Napoleon Hill

In all determinations of morality, this circumstance of public utility is ever principally in view; and wherever disputes arise, either in philosophy or common life, concerning the bounds of duty, the questions cannot, by any means, be decided with greater certainty, than by ascertaining, on any side, the true interests of mankind. If any false opinion, embraced from appearances, has been found to prevail; as soon as farther experience and sounder reasoning have given us juster notions of human affairs, we retract our first sentiment, and adjust anew the boundaries of moral good and evil. — David Hume

These three classes of problems-determinations of significant fact, matching facts with theory, and articulation of theory-exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical. — Thomas S. Kuhn

Fear is the underminer of all determinations; and necessity, the victorious rebel of all laws. — Philip Sidney

The meditation of inceptual thinking concerns us (ourselves) and yet does not. It does not concern us so as to bring out from us the prescriptive determinations; but it does concern us as historical beings and concerns us specifically in the plight of the abandonment by being (at first, decline in the understanding of being, and then forgetting of being). It concerns us, who thus are initially posited in our exposure amid beings; it concerns us in this manner in order that we find our way beyond ourselves to selfhood. — Martin Heidegger

Our knowledge of circumstances has increased, but our uncertainty, instead of having diminished, has only increased. The reason of this is, that we do not gain all our experience at once, but by degrees; so our determinations continue to be assailed incessantly by fresh experience; and the mind, if we may use the expression, must always be under arms. — Carl Von Clausewitz

Sex taken violently under threat is an emotional train wreck that derails not only the law but, more importantly, the sanctity of the soul. Rape strips its victim of her power to make determinations about perhaps the single most intrinsic value in her existence: the right to share intimacy. That loss of control and power of self-determination is a scar on the soul, a pox on the spirit. (58) — Howard Swindle

All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that standard. — David Hume

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold the principles received by me when I was sane, not mad
as I am now. Laws and principles are not for times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth
so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane
quite insane, with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations are all I have at this hour to stand; there I plant my foot. — Charlotte Bronte

Sometimes you're a psychiatrist and sometimes you're a group therapist. The dynamics in between people and the misgivings sometimes that artists have when they get into the studio because they're under a different level of scrutiny. A lot of them can be insecure about it. My job is not simply to make musical determinations but sometimes to just keep people from flipping out during the process. — Todd Rundgren

We descend upon you and all things - we arrest you all;
We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids;
Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality;
Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves.
You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside - we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not - we love you - there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul. — Walt Whitman

The determinations of Providence are always wise, often inscrutable; and, though its decrees appear to bear hard upon us at times, is nevertheless meant for gracious purposes. — George Washington

The Constitution does not trust judges to make determinations of criminal guilt. — Antonin Scalia

It is when subjective consciousness maintains its independence of everything, that it says, 'It is I who through my educated thoughts can annul all determinations of right, morality, good, &c., because I am clearly master of them, and I know that if anything seems good to me I can easily subvert it, because things are only true to me in so far as they please me now.' This irony is thus only a trifling with everything, and it can transform all things into show: to this subjectivity nothing is any longer serious, for any seriousness which it has, immediately becomes dissipated again in jokes, and all noble or divine truth vanishes away or becomes mere triviality. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

God was alone when He made His decrees, and His determinations were influenced by no external cause. He was free to decree or not to decree, and to decree one thing and not another. This liberty we must ascribe to Him who is Supreme, Independent, and Sovereign in all His doings. — Arthur W. Pink

To the passionate language of Parmenides, Plato replies in a strain equally passionate:
What! has not Being mind? and is not Being capable of being known? and, if this is admitted, then capable of being affected or acted upon?
in motion, then, and yet not wholly incapable of rest. Already we have been compelled to attribute opposite determinations to Being. And the answer to the difficulty about Being may be equally the answer to the difficulty about Not-being. — Plato

Faithfulness in the performance of small duties gives us strength to adhere to difficult determinations that life will someday force us to make. — Paramahansa Yogananda

[Marx] explicates ideology as socially determined, [Stirner] as psychologically determined: both accuse it of remaining oblivious to its own determinations. — John Carroll

The duty of criticism is neither to depreciate nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate — Samuel Johnson

If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do. He will be interested in possibility rather than probability. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves - whether they know clearly what it is they act upon or not. — Flannery O'Connor

Currently under FCC policy, indecency determinations hinge on two factors. First, material must describe or depict sexual or excretory organs or activities. Second, the material must be patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium. — Doug Ose

There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have ... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes
continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations
when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered. — Michel Foucault

The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. — Georg Simmel