Quotes & Sayings About Subtraction

To expound Scripture is to bring out of the text what is there and expose it to view. The expositor pries open what appears to be closed, makes plain what is obscure, unravels what is knotted and unfolds what is tightly packed ... Whether long or short, our responsibility as expositors is to open it up in such a way that it speaks its message clearly, plainly, accurately, relevantly, without addition, subtraction or falsification. — Matt Chandler

Here is the secret to subtraction. It doesn't matter what you remove. What matters is that you stop adding it back. — Erin Loechner

There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication. — Bess Streeter Aldrich

It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction. — Michael Pollan

The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction. — Meister Eckhart

And in this new place in my life- I was sleeping alone for over a year, finding the middle of the bed, and really working on myself- I started to become worried about meeting someone because I was really feeling different than I had ever felt in my life. So strong, and I didn't want anyone to take that away. Someone would have to be the human equivalent of addition and not subtraction. Period. — Drew Barrymore

So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition - given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Danglars was alone, but neither troubled nor disturbed. Danglars was even happy, because he had taken revenge on an enemy and ensured himself the place on board the Pharaon that he had feared he might lose. Danglars was one of those calculating men who are born with a pen behind their ear and an inkwell instead of a heart. To him, everything in this world was subtraction or multiplication, and a numeral was much dearer than a man, when it was a numeral that would increase the total (while a man might reduce it). So Danglars had gone to bed at his usual hour and slept peacefully. — Alexandre Dumas

I think as technology and expertise makes possible these sort of amazing levels of fidelity to the real world, a lot of people sort of get sort of - what's the word I'm looking for - seduced into that. And after a time, they get tired of it and they become a little bit more interested, I think at a certain level of subtraction and a new level of sophistication. — Khoi Vinh

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure. — Julian Barnes

Because all of us are made not only of what we have but what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition. — Augusten Burroughs

If the past was the age of adding to one's mind, now is the age of subtracting what is in his mind. A person who subtracts his minds in this time will recover his original nature. — Woo Myung

Those evangelicals who have been raised and shaped by forms of Christianity that are roughly "fundamentalist" will either: a. become taken with the modern moral order and thus sort of replay the excarnational development of modernity, just now a few centuries later, sort of catching up with the wider culture; so under the guise of the "emerging church" or "progressive" evangelicalism, we'll be set on a path to something like Protestant liberalism, a new deism; or b. recognize the disenchantment and excarnation of evangelical Protestantism, and also reject the Christianized subtraction stories of liberal Christianity, and feel the pull of more incarnational spiritualities, and thus move toward more "Catholic" expressions of faith - and these expressions of faith will actually exert more pull on those who have doubts about their "closed" take on the immanent frame. — James K.A. Smith

Any teaching that in any way detracts from Christ's exclusive role is by definition both wrong and ineffective. The teachers themselves are probably not denying that Christ was central to God's saving purposes. They seem rather to be arguing that certain practices must be added on in order to achieve true spiritual fulfillment. But, for Paul, in this case, addition means subtraction: one cannot "add" to Christ without, in effect, subtracting from his exclusive place in creation and in salvation history. — Douglas J. Moo

Contentment is not by addition but by subtraction: seeking to add a thing will not bring contentment. Instead, subtracting from your desires until you are satisfied only with Christ brings contentment. — Jeremiah Burroughs

If production does not increase in Iraq in an exponential way between now and 2015, we have a very big problem, even if Saudi Arabia meets its obligations. The figures are very simple, you do not need to be an expert. It is enough to know how to do a subtraction. China will grow very quickly, India also, and even Saudi Arabia projections of the 3 Mb/day will not be enough to meet the rise of Chinese demand. — Fatih Birol

We fixate on sins of commission: Don't do this, don't do that - and you're OK. But that is holiness by subtraction. And it's more hypocrisy than holiness! It's the sins of omission - what you would have, could have, and should have done - that break the heart of your heavenly Father. — Mark Batterson

Danglars was one of those men born with a pen behind the ear, and an inkstand in place of a heart. Everything with him was multiplication or subtraction. — Alexandre Dumas

Industrial bureaucrats - men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. — Kurt Vonnegut

in this job you really need to know only four things: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division - and most of the time you can get by without division!" I — Emanuel Derman

Life is addition! Death is subtraction. You add to your life by imagining whatsoever things are true, lovely, noble, and Godlike. Imagine and feel yourself successful, and you must become successful. You are never a slave to circumstances, environment, or conditions. — Joseph Murphy

Try another Subtraction sum. Take a bone from a dog: what remains?' Alice considered. 'The bone wouldn't remain, of course, if I took it - and the dog wouldn't remain; it would come to bite me - and I'm sure I shouldn't remain!' 'Then you think nothing would remain?' said the Red Queen. 'I think that's the answer.' 'Wrong, as usual,' said the Red Queen: 'the dog's temper would remain.' 'But I don't see how - ' 'Why, look here!' the Red Queen cried. 'The dog would lose its temper, wouldn't it?' 'Perhaps it would,' Alice replied cautiously. 'Then if the dog went away, its temper would remain!' the Queen exclaimed triumphantly. Alice said, as gravely as she could, 'They might go different ways.' But she couldn't help thinking to herself, 'What dreadful nonsense we ARE talking! — Lewis Carroll

Somethings you know right away to be final- when you lose your last baby tooth ... Other times, you have to work out the milestone via subtraction, a math you do to assign significance, like when I figured out that I'd just blown through my last-ever wednesday with Mom on the day after she died. — Karen Russell

Because this, after all, was the basic truth they all chose to live by: that love was no finite commodity. That it was not subject to the cruel reckoning of addition and subtraction, that to give to one did not necessarily mean to take from another; that the heart, in its infinite capacity-even the confused and cheating heart of the man in front of her, even the paltry thing now clenched and faltering inside her own chest-could open itself to all who would enter, like a house with windows and doors thrown wide, like the heart of God itself, vast and accommodating and holy, a mansion of rooms without number, full of multitudes without end. — Brady Udall

I don't know when the boys
began to walk away with parts of myself
in their sticky hands; when loving
became a process of subtraction. Or why,
having given up what seems so much,
I'm willing to lose even more - erasing
all this body's known, relearning it with you. — Melissa Stein

The Difference Engine can in reality (as has been already partly explained) do nothing but add; and any other processes, not excepting those of simple subtraction, multiplication and division, can be performed by it only just to that extent in which it is possible, by judicious mathematical arrangement and artifices, to reduce them to a series of additions. — Ada Lovelace

No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been. still they must have understood that living like that was just murder, a capital crime - except it was slow, day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) could not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man - that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives - that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years - that was not a crime! No, really, isn't it funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn't solve it. All their Kant's together couldn't solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kant's to construct a system of scientific ethics - that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication). — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The worst class of sum worked in the every-day world is cyphered by the diseased arithmeticians who are always in the rule of Subtraction as to the merits and successes of others, and never in Addition as to their own. — Charles Dickens

Danglers alone was content and joyous, he had got rid of an enemy and preserved his situation on board the Pharaon; Danglers was one of those men born with a pen behind the ear, and an ink-stand in place of a heart. Everything with him was multiplication or subtraction, and he estimated the life of a man as less precious than a figure, when that figure could increase, and that life would diminish, the total of the amount. — Alexandre Dumas

But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death, similarly distant in time and geography, of a beloved person. Such a death bears a peculiar imprint of doubt. To be told one day that someone has gone off to the other side of the world, and with whom you expect momentarily to be reunited, has actually been dead for many months, during which you have been going on with your life, unaware of this subtraction that has taken place, makes a mockery of the finality of death. Death is reduced to news. And news is always a little unreal - which is why we bear to take in so much of it. — Susan Sontag

He wondered how he could ever have thought of the planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness. — C.S. Lewis

You may discover an easier way of counting, but for most people the subtraction-by-two method works just fine. If you just have to be different, here — Eddie Kantar

We middle-aged folk have the education of life, truly; we know the multiplication table of anxieties and sorrows, the subtraction table of loss, the division table of responsibility. — Margaret Deland

Open, the eyes of the dead are a travesty, a parody, make a fool of the deceased. Open, the eyes of the dead perform that most indecent subtraction, show the person without his life. — Glen Duncan

A free-standing arch of rough-hewn stones and no mortar can be a stable structure, but it is irreducibly complex: it collapses if any one stone is removed. How, then, was it built in the first place? One way is to pile a solid heap of stones, then carefully remove stones one by one. More generally, there are many structures that are irreducible in the sense that they cannot survive the subtraction of any part, but which were built with the aid of scaffolding that was subsequently subtracted and is no longer visible. Once the structure is completed, the scaffolding can be removed safely and the structure remains standing. In evolution, too, the organ or structure you are looking at may have had scaffolding in an ancestor which has since been removed. 'Irreducible — Richard Dawkins

And then there's its hair," Justin said, pushing the vegetables across to me. "Don't forget the hair. It's horrible."
"It's wearing a dead person's hair," Rafe informed me. "If you stick a pin in the doll, you can hear screaming coming from the graveyard. Try it."
"See what I mean?" Abby said, to me. "Wusses. It's got real hair. Why he thinks it's from a dead person - "
"Because your poppet was made in about 1890 and I can do subtraction. — Tana French

The external view [of agency] forces itself on us at the same time that we resist it. One way this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of what happens. — Thomas Nagel

The soul grows by subtraction, not addition. — Henry David Thoreau

For by either eliminating mention of God from the curriculum altogether (departments of religious studies concern themselves with various types of belief in God, not with God), or by restricting reference to God to departments of theology, such universities render their secular curriculum Godless. And this Godlessness is, as I already noted, not just a matter of the subtraction of God from the range of objects studied, but also and quite as much the absence of any integrated and overall view of things. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing. — Martin Amis

We don't carry in subtraction, however; we borrow, and that involves an intrinsically different mechanism - a messy back-and-forth kind of thing. — Charles Petzold

But these gains in freedom for both men and women often seem like a triumph of subtraction rather than addition. Over time, writes Coontz, Americans have come to define liberty "negatively, as lack of dependence, the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one's wealth or time." If this is how you conceive of liberty - as freedom from obligation - then the transition to parenthood is a dizzying shock. Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all. — Jennifer Senior

The minimum could be defined as the perfection that an artefact achieves when it is no longer possible to improve it by subtraction. This is the quality that an object has when every component, every detail, and every junction has been reduced or condensed to the essentials. it is the result of the omission of the inessentials. — John Pawson

But I think that so many of the rest of us do what we can to avoid this math because if we do the subtraction, do the addition, our own personal sum will be unbearable sorrow, terror, and a feeling of being entirely out of control. I think many of us do what we can to avoid this math because we know that if we do the subtraction, do the addition, our psyches and our consciences and our lives will forever be changed; and we know that no matter how fierce the momentum that leads to this subtraction and addition, no matter our fears that we may be crushed (or perhaps more fearsome, ridiculed), that we will be led in some way to oppose the subtraction of life and the addition of toxics to this planet that is our only home. — Derrick Jensen

Upon the whole, then, it appears, that no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and that, even supposing it amounted to a proof, it would be opposed by another proof; derived from the very nature of the fact, which it would endeavour to establish. It is experience only, which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience, which assures us of the laws of nature. When, therefore, these two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do but subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side, or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder. But according to the principle here explained, this subtraction, with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire annihilation; and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion. — Christopher Hitchens

Our days flowed around well-charted, often traveled courses, and yet, the underlying sense of falling out of time, out of the trajectory of one's life, not by choice, but by subtraction, was frequent and disquieting. Then I grieved for him, for the lost and previous Paul. He grieved for that man too. Both our griefs were mainly private, internal, unuttered. Return was impossible, and there was only one direction open ; and so we kept our compass pointed forward. [p. 286] — Diane Ackerman

A German merchant of the fifteenth century asked an eminent professor where he should send his son for a good business education. The professor responded that German universities would be sufficient to teach the boy addition and subtraction but he would have to go to Italy to learn multiplication and division. Before you smile indulgently, try multiplying or even just adding the Roman numerals CCLXIV, MDCCCIX, DCL, and MLXXXI without first translating them. — John Allen Paulos

Meekness, the subtraction of self, reduces the multiplication of words. — Neal A. Maxwell

Perhaps nothing ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right. — George Eliot

I am a zero on the rez. And if you subtract zero from zero, you still have zero. So what's the point of subtracting when the answer is always the same? — Sherman Alexie

Edwards's stark presentation of the immanent consciousness of Separation enters the structure of her poems. Each word is a cipher, through its sensible sign another sign hidden. The recipient of a letter, or combination of letter and poem from Emily Dickinson, was forced much like Edwards' listening congregation, through shock and through subtraction of the ordinary, to a new way of perceiving. Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding. This re-ordering of the forward process of reading is what makes her poetry and the prose of her letters among the most original writing of her century. — Susan Howe

The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables. — Charles Lamb

Subtraction stories Accounts that explain "the secular" as merely the subtraction of religious belief, as if the secular is what's left over after we subtract superstition. In contrast, Taylor emphasizes that the secular is produced, not just distilled. — James K.A. Smith

Since Satan can't destroy the gospel, he has too often neutralized its usefulness by addition, subtraction or substitution. — J.C. Ryle

I meet a man with a thousand dollars and leave him with two; that's the meaning of subtraction. — Mae West

The schoolteacher asks Billy Bob: "If you have 12 sheeps and one jumps over the fence, how many sheeps do you have left?"

Billy Bob answers, "None."

"Well" says the teacher, "you sure don't know your subtraction."

"Maybe not," Billy Bob replies, "but i darn sure know my sheeps. — Benjamin Graham

Politics is human beings; it's addition rather than subtraction. — Donald Rumsfeld

The question of accumulation, Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack - there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure. Adrian — Julian Barnes

"She can't do sums a bit!" the Queens said together, with great emphasis. "Can you do sums?" Alice said, turning suddenly on the White Queen, for she didn't like being found fault with so much. The Queen gasped and shut her eyes. "I can do Addition, if you give me time-but I can do Subtraction, under any circumstances!" — Lewis Carroll

The process of change is made up of subtraction and addition. Taking something off and then puttin something on. — Creflo A. Dollar

Cheer up, my dear," said Rose, leaning affectionately on her husband's arm; "it is altogether addition and not subtraction; you have not lost a daughter but gained a son. — Martha Finley

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication? — Julian Barnes

It is strange a difference comes from a subtraction. — Natasha Tsakos

Eath, when it finally arrives, does so in a surprising fashion: it adds nothing to the room, not a light or a spark or a sound; death does not stir a molecule of the air. You know it arrives because there is suddenly a subtraction. You will feel it before you know it. — Augusten Burroughs

If the unusual never happened there would be no difference in people and then there wouldn't be any fun in life. The game would become merely a matter of addition and subtraction. It would make of us a race of bookkeepers with plodding minds. It's the guessing that develops a man's brain power. — Jesse Lauriston Livermore

"She can't do Subtraction." said the White Queen. "Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife-what's the answer to that?" "I suppose-" Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen answered for her. "Bread-and-butter, of course." — Lewis Carroll

Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes). — Milan Kundera

God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction. — Meister Eckhart

Six minus six is zero. Spears are good for subtraction Ella said — Rick Riordan

He's teaching her arithmetic,
He said it was his mission,
He kissed her once and said,
"Now that's addition."
And as he added smack by smack
In silent satisfaction,
She sweetly gave the kisses back and said,
"Now that's subtraction."

Then he kissed her, she kissed him,
Without an explanation,
And both together smiled and said,
"That's multiplication."
Then Dad appeared upon the scene and
Made a quick decision.
He kicked that kid three blocks away And said, "That's long division! — Dan Clark

According to the celestial multiplication table, once one is three, and three times one is one, and according to heavenly subtraction if we take two from three, three are left. The addition is equally peculiar, if we add two to one we have but one. Each one is equal to himself and the other two. Nothing ever was, nothing ever can be more perfectly idiotic and absurd than the dogma of the Trinity. — Robert Green Ingersoll

No more Lastrygonians." Ella fluttered down and landed next to them. "Six minus six is zero. Spears are good for subtraction, yep. — Rick Riordan

A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars, that's subtraction. — Mae West

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language ... Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world
qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them. — Italo Calvino

The suite was set: Chris and I in the left, back room; Tom and Ricky in the left, front room; Junior and Danny Tampon in the back, right room next to the bathroom; and Dickstein all by his peanut-dick-self in the front, right room. It was quite a radical change from the suite that surrounded me, Chris, and Tom the previous year. Just getting rid of Lebeuf was addition by subtraction. The Beachside Dorm, Suite 524, would be one of the happiest places in my two-decade life. Freedom of expression was never diminished, unless Dickstein opened his mouth and shit flew out of it. — Phil Wohl