Notional Quotes & Sayings

Hit it! You have to hit it harder than that. Electrons are timid little things but notional; you have to let them know who's boss. — Robert A. Heinlein

In brief, I regard love as a more decisive focus of meaning than death. In terms of Heidegger's argument, this is because I think he misdescribes the importance of the deaths of others and focuses exclusively on my relation to my own death. But, in reality, the deaths of others have a more urgent and immediate impact on our lives than the purely notional knowledge that I too will one day die. — George Pattison

Of course for professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary - just as notional, just as easy come and easy go, as the points in a video game. Wage earners like Willing's mother thought money was real. Because the work was real, and the time was real, it seemed inconceivable that what the work and the time had converted into would be gossamer. — Lionel Shriver

These days, meals are more open to personal preferences. People like to serve themselves. — Yotam Ottolenghi

The internet's perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain't one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional "live audience" quickly conspire to create a "perfect storm" of perpetual bickering. — Charlie Brooker

We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes. — Donna Tartt

A book is not just a collection of words, it is a perception portrayed on blank sheets. You know, getting you the feelings of blowing winds and rains and sun and flowers around, the smiles, the tears, the notional links with the characters and make them all alive, while you read. And that's sure as hell a gruelling task ! — Syed Arshad

And death are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit. — Anonymous

Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself. — C.S. Lewis

The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong. — Tom Stoppard

With women, the best part is the discovery. There's nothing like the first time, nothing. You don't know what life is until you undress a woman for the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot sweet potato on a winter's night. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

So they were desperately in love and being desperately in love involves a desperate existence. — F Scott Fitzgerald

What no tourist bumf will tell you is that this inlet is suffused with an atmosphere of ineffable sadness. Partly a trick of the light and climatic factors, partly also the lingering residue of an historical tragedy which still resonates through rock and water down seven generations of fretful commemorative attempts and dissonant historical hermeneutics. Now think of grey shading towards gunmetal across an achromatic spectrum; think also of turbid cumulus clouds pouring down five centimeters of rainfall above the national average and you have some idea of the light reflected within the walls of this inlet. This is the type of light which lends itself to vitamin D deficiency, baseline serotonin levels, spluttering neurotransmitters and mild but by no means notional depression. It is the type of light wherein ghosts go their rounds at all hours of the day. — Mike McCormack

What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story? — Michael Cunningham

Wisdom is the booby prize given when you've been unwise. — Piet Pieterszoon Hein

That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors. — Kate Morton

My agents do not like my choice to work only in New York and Israel - it's not a good career move. — Mili Avital

Dropping out is not the answer; fucking-up is. — Valerie Solanas

The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value. — Ben Elton

There isn't a more important issue in the world than global warming. Even the Cold War and the Bay of Pigs crisis were a notional threat. — Simon Beaufoy

The system was afraid of Vaclav Havel. And so they either harassed him for put him in jail. — Judy Woodruff

Those who do not weep, do not see. — Victor Hugo

For whatever a man has, is in reality only a gift. — Christoph Martin Wieland

Notional is a production company with the DNA of an Internet company that makes content for everything. — Ricky Van Veen

It is easy to romanticise, say, tigers or lions and cats. We admire their magnificent beauty, strength and agility. But we would regard their notional human counterparts as wanton psychopaths of the worst kind. — David Pearce

Indeed, people are equal only in one thing: each of us is gifted a life, other differences are only notional; and what to do with one's own life is at everyone's discretion. The time has come to bestow upon us the most exalted gifts of serenity and joy. We silently trudged back upstairs. I fancied that I heard steps creaking and groaning throughout the entire stairway as if hundreds of invisible feet were stepping on them along with us. We were still alive but among the ghosts already. — Igor Eliseev

Not only is man, as a category, created in God's image; all individual men are also created in God's image. In this sense they are all equal. Nor is this equality notional; it is real in one all-important sense. All Israelites are equal before God, and therefore equal before his law. Justice is for all, irrespective of other inequalities which may exist. All kinds of privileges are implicit and explicit in the Mosaic code, but on essentials it does not distinguish between varieties of the faithful. All, moreover, shared in accepting the covenant; it was a popular, even a democratic, decision. — Paul Johnson

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. — Norman Schwarzkopf

The consolation of art comes in many forms ... For some it is making, for others it is having. — Michael Kimmelman

There is a twofold knowledge of good of which God has made the mind of man capable. The first, that which is merely notional . . . and the other is, that which consists in the sense of the heart, as when the heart is sensible of pleasure and delight in the presence of the idea of it. In the former is exercised merely . . . the understanding, in distinction from the . . . disposition of the soul. Thus there is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet and having a sense of its sweetness. A man may have the former that knows not how honey tastes; but a man cannot have the latter unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind. — Timothy Keller

Religion is a cultural relic inherited from ancient civilizations that doctrinal influence persists globally in modern times. Religious people rely upon their notional belief in the primal innocence of human beings in order to support the abstract supposition of inherently benevolent God guiding human souls. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, the higher you go, the fewer women there are. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie