Instrumentally Quotes & Sayings

Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others. — Samuel Johnson

One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase "looking for life, destroying life," Then he explained, "It's an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies." I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world's errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the "erasing" of people, the "hiding away" of suffering. "My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember. — Tracy Kidder

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts. — Blaise Pascal

It won't hurt, said her other father. Coraline knew that when grown-ups told you something wouldn't hurt it almost always did. She shook her head. — Neil Gaiman

With the rationalization of culture, and the corresponding disenchantment of religious ideas and beliefs, the modern world is ordered increasingly upon instrumentally rational grounds, and hence organizes itself less and less according to value-rational principles. This leads in turn to a world in which social action is separated increasingly from the sphere of (ethical) meaning, as particular (often technical) means are employed to realize specific ends regardless of the ethical significance or meaning of such action. — Nicholas Gane

Faith raises us above our circumstances. Faith enables us to be content even when life doesn't make sense. Faith is the bulwark that keeps us strong even when we're assailed by agonizing thoughts about what might happen or by what has happened. — Linda Dillow

pastors throughout the countryside around Rome had reminded their parishioners that Jesus was a Jew in order to coax them into opening their doors. Catholic guilt was a powerful tool, — Amy Harmon

There are two ways to get rich. Either get more, or want less. — Thor Duffin

If you're a psychologist, you can instrumentally change peoples' lives for the better. — T. J. Miller

Junk is the ideal product ... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy. — William S. Burroughs

It remains to be seen, for example whether China can continue to develop as a market economy while still retaining an authoritarian communist political system. — Peter Dicken

Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives come to more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more. — Robert Nozick

I changed my mindset and figured, Why not try to be really entertaining instrumentally? — Brad Paisley

I like Stallone, because he writes. He sits down with a blank page and comes up with another Rambo movie. That isn't very easy for anybody. He's made it successful on top of that. — Dolph Lundgren

To truly know what is good in life you must experience the bad as well. — Various

Don't use language instrumentally — Jordan B. Peterson

What is an intellectual? In general, someone seriously devoted to what used to be called the "life of the mind": thinking pursued not instrumentally, for the sake of practical goals, but simply for the sake of knowing and understanding. — Gary Gutting

"Teachers" ... treat students neither coercively nor instrumentally but as joint seekers of truth and of mutual actualization. They help students define moral values not by imposing their own moralities on them but by positing situations that pose hard moral choices and then encouraging conflict and debate. They seek to help students rise to higher stages of moral reasoning and hence to higher levels of principled judgment. — James MacGregor Burns

Just because you can speak louder than me does not make you more right! — Mark W. Boyer

There are ideologies of control lying behind the insistence on the need for instrumentally rational tools and techniques. In reflecting these ideologies, some believe that without the tools and techniques organizations would not be able to produce success; indeed, they would be ungovernable. Others believe that without the tools and techniques it would be impossible to improve the human condition or take action to sustain the planet. There is a very powerful belief that 'we' must be able to improve whole organizations intentionally. For some, these beliefs are impervious to reason, perhaps because it is too disappointing to accept the humbler realization that success and failure, sustainability and destruction, all emerge across populations through myriad local interactions and all anyone can do is participate as meaningfully and as influentially as possible, acting on practical judgment, in these local interactions. — Ralph D. Stacey

I look upon the giving away of a religious tract as only the first step for action not to be compared with many another deed done for Christ; but were it not for the first step we might never reach to the second, but that first attained, we are encouraged to take another, and so at the last There is a real service of Christ in the distribution of the gospel in its printed form, a service the result of which heaven alone shall disclose, and the judgment day alone discover. How many thousands have been carried to heaven instrumentally upon the wings of these tracts, none can tell — Charles Spurgeon

After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, 'That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which they will pray us all to death. It is meant to kill us. — Sarah Vowell

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event. — David Pearce

The death of Christ is their meritorious cause; the Spirit of God and his effectual grace their efficient, working instrumentally with power by the word and ordinances. — John Owen

We are to take no counsel with flesh and blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes; to know that we know nothing, that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not what it seems, that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above, and say, "It is good and wise,
God is great! Though He slay me, yet I trust in Him." Islam means, in its way, denial of self. This is yet the highest wisdom that heaven has revealed to our earth. — Thomas Carlyle

Brute force never changes people. People need to change themselves. — Jeff Stone