Proximate Quotes & Sayings

Please." Ash gripped my hand, "Don't do this."
"I release you," I whispered. "From your vow of knighthood, and the promises you made. Your service to me is done, Ash. You're free. — Julie Kagawa

To fellowship with God is to be fulfilled — Sunday Adelaja

Understanding proximate cause is also like understanding your mother: It can take years and then, just when you think you have her figured out, she surprises you. — Peter F. Lake

There is an intense relationship between proximate objects, a much weaker one between objects further away, and as for the really distant ones there is none at all, and that is the nature of God. — Laszlo Krasznahorkai

The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22 — Thomas Merton

...if I do not take my intellectual vocation seriously, putting it before everything else even at the risk of appearing inhuman, then I am also incapable of helping people in more concrete and proximate ways. Conversely, if I am not alert and ready to save people from a conflagration, that is to say, if I do not take my spiritual calling in all earnestness, sacrificing to it all else, even my own life, then I shall be unable to help in rescuing the manuscript. If I do not involve myself in the concrete issues of my time, and if I do not open my house to all the winds of the world, then anything I produce from an ivory tower will be barren and cursed. Yet if I do not shut doors and windows in order to concentrate on this work, then I will not be able to offer anything of value to my neighbors. — Raimon Panikkar

It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever. — H.P. Lovecraft

Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what she thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what her painting isn't, until she finally finds out what it is. And when you finally do find out what one corner of your vision is; you're off and running. — Anne Lamott

For democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems. — Reinhold Niebuhr

It's very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words 'heroes.' I feel ... uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. — Chris Hayes

The scientist is a practical man and his are practical (i.e., practically attainable) aims. He does not seek the ultimate but the proximate. He does not speak of the last analysis but rather of the next approximation. His are not those beautiful structures so delicately designed that a single flaw may cause the collapse of the whole. The scientist builds slowly and with a gross but solid kind of masonry. If dissatisfied with any of his work, even if it be near the very foundations, he can replace that part without damage to the remainder. — Gilbert N. Lewis

In any case, if recognition arising from proximate circumstances based upon fleeting criteria constitutes the sole measure of our personal significance, recognition will be both mercurial and insufficient. — Neal A. Maxwell

The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz), teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from the air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals into us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent. — Primo Levi

The libertarian good society lies ... in the maximum dispersion of property compatible with effective production or, as process, in progressive reconciliation of conflicts between equality and efficiency. Such process involves increasing dispersion both of wealth among persons and families and of proximate productional control among enterprises or firms. — Henry Calvert Simons

People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end. — Herbert Spencer

Why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it. — Paul Graham

The passionate ones, the ones who go after what they want, may not get what they want, but they remain vital, in touch with themselves, and when they lie on their deathbeds, they have few regrets. — Charlie Kaufman

The proximate causes of the Flemish "peasant" revolt were local and immediate; its roots, the reason it could occur in the first place, were four centuries in creation. As Europe's population increased threefold between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the Continent's demographic pyramid changed its shape. The base grew larger relative to its peak, and more distant: the gap between nobility and peasantry got bigger and bigger. Families that were noble by birth became more and more "noble" in behavior: dressing more opulently, entertaining more lavishly, and housing themselves more extravagantly, while the rural peasantry lived more or less the same as their many times great-grandparents. — William Rosen

Addiction is-like all sin-a form of idolatry because it elevates some proximate good to the status of ultimate good, a status that belongs to God alone. But addiction is uniquely alluring, uniquely captivating and uniquely powerful because its object comes so close to making good on its false promise to be God. — Kent Dunnington

Reps once took chances on art, History's most treasured musicians were believed in and cultivated to reach their potential. Today, it would be difficult for those musicians to get deals. — Steve Vai

The good of our soul is more important than that of our body; and we have to prefer the spiritual welfare of our neighbor to our bodily comforts ... If a certain kind of dress constitutes a grave and proximate occasion of sin, and endangers the salvation of your soul and others, it is your duty to give it up. — Pope Pius XII

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems. — Reinhold Niebuhr

She might even have felt that self-congratulatory pride that heterosexual white people are known to experience due to proximate diversity. — Curtis Sittenfeld

When a young person, even a gifted one, grows up without proximate living examples of what she may aspire to become
whether lawyer, scientist, artist, or leader in any realm
her goal remains abstract. Such models as appear in books or on the news, however inspiring or revered, are ultimately too remote to be real, let alone influential. But a role model in the flesh provides more than inspiration; his or her very existence is confirmation of possibilities one may have every reason to doubt, saying, 'Yes, someone like me can do this. — Sonia Sotomayor

We're all looking for a rhythm, a movement that isn't forced, that feels right. I wanted to be more surefooted. I was still searching for the perfect pace. — Katie Kacvinsky

Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can. Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of the social universe: the price tag. — David Bentley Hart

Another world, another life, proximate but inaccessible. The elusive . . . Sat-is-fac-tion. — Graeme Simsion

You can choose how things affect you, and you can choose how you affect the world. The happiness that surrounds you is greatly affected by the choices you make every day. So be the change you want to see in the world. Don't tell others how to live their lives. Lead by example and let them follow you. Don't let your problems push you. Let your dreams lead you! — Anonymous

There are personal reasons, psychological reasons, but there could also be political reasons for becoming a terrorist. — Asne Seierstad

I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don't want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that's fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I'm wrong about that. — Chris Hayes

In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration, the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. The object given has symbolic exchange value. — Jean Baudrillard

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection. — Richard Dawkins

While the proximate ground of discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time. — Thorstein Veblen

A near win shifts our view of the landscape. It can turn future goals, which we tend to envision at a distance, into more proximate events. We consider temporal distance as we do spatial distance. (Visualize a great day tomorrow and we see it with granular, practical clarity. But picture what a great day in the future might be like, not tomorrow but fifty years from now, and the image will be hazier.) — Sarah Lewis

The soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it. — Muhammad Iqbal

It's hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy. — Esther Perel

Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever. — Haruki Murakami

friends of the king can no longer be grip hands with friends of the Commons. — G.A. Henty

I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn't be the cost of failure for a good friend. — Jodi Picoult

Please," Professor Solanka asked. "Just tell me."
"That's the worst part," Dubdub said. "There's nothing to tell. No direct or proximate cause. You wake up one day and you aren't a part of your life. You know this. Your life doesn't belong to you. Your body is not, I don't know how to make you this the force of this, yours. there's just life, living itself. You don't have it. You don't have anything to do with it. That's all. It doesn't sound like much, but believe me. It's like when you hypnotize someone and persuade them there's a big pile of mattresses outside their window. They no longer see a reason not to jump. — Salman Rushdie