Suspend Quotes & Sayings

I determine nothing; I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine. — Michel De Montaigne

There's something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they're by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief. — Charles Duhigg

He knew how to touch her, how hard to thrust, when to roll his hips, when and how to angle himself so she could not only feel him inside her, but rubbing against her clitoris, brushing, sensitizing. The fiend knew how to make her agony last, how to suspend it until he would allow her to reach out for it and surrender. — Charlotte Featherstone

As a child, I was just never that interested in the lives of my favourite actors, like Cary Grant. I do wonder whether knowing too much about someone's personal life interrupts an audience's ability to suspend disbelief, to really invest in the characters. My preference would always be that people engage with the work. — Chiwetel Ejiofor

Today, the best way to communicate with someone is still face-to-face. Virtual reality has the potential to change that, to make it where VR communication is as good or better than face-to-face communications, because not only do you get all the same human cues as real-world communication, you basically suspend the laws of physics, you can do whatever you want, you can be wherever you want. — Palmer Luckey

Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered. — Stephen Jay Gould

It is my hope that when a reader chooses to suspend their reality for mine, that it will be time well spent. — Sharon Van Orman

The Abyss. Globalization had many economic benefits but, as in our own times, the creation of a truly international economic network combined greater efficiency with greater fragility. In 1914 a highly optimized system crashed in what was, without doubt, the biggest financial collapse of all time. (Unlike in 1929 or in 2008, the world's major stock markets were forced to suspend trading for no less than five months.) — Niall Ferguson

But I also wanted to give them an intelligent emotional journey, without having to suspend reality - to be able to look at those characters and see reasons for the relationships and why what happens happens. — Graeme Murphy

Truly creative people in all fields can temporarily suspend their ego and simply experience what they are seeing, without the need to assert a judgment, for as long as possible. They are more than ready to find their most cherished opinions contradicted by reality. — Robert Greene & Joost Elffers

I will treat all my negative reactions to this form of meditation as merely thought forms prompted by my ego to keep me from taking it seriously. I will suspend judgment, criticism, and doubt. — Ram Dass

To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights. — Gore Vidal

[Suspend them there, in the mind's eye: skinny, young, coming through dark toward warmth, flying over the cold sand and stone. We will return to them. — Lauren Groff

It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands, on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his reason, is contradicting himself.
There can be no knowledge of what is good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life. — George H. Smith

Suspend for a moment your disbelief and encounter once again the sense of wonder you knew when there was ... magic! — Andrew Lord

I think it's hard for people to suspend the era they live in and understand the decisions that had to be made often during the western [frontier era] were life and death. You had to be resourceful and on your feet to try to figure out somebody. You didn't have the benefit of knowing who somebody was. — Kevin Costner

Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgement for years to come, you may begin to hope. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The past was a bridge that looked solid and sturdy, but once you were on it, you saw that it extended only far enough to strand you, to suspend you between loss and longing with nowhere to go at all. — Bret Anthony Johnston

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. — Stephen Jay Gould

Everyone is a flux - so it's good to suspend judgements forever. — Frederick Lenz

I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Le vi- Strauss inTristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference. — Pierre L. Van Den Berghe

The high stone fireplace, the heavy walnut tables, the fringed Oriental rug, the leather furniture. The air definitely came alive, but Willie felt out of place. Not because of any excessive luxury-the furnishings, while meticulously preserved, were still scarred and worn, but they seemed to suspend him in another time. Why, it was like walking into a movie set for Wuthering Heights. — Gloria Naylor

You can't really do a big character in an action film; you're already suspending your disbelief in the action, then to suspend your disbelief in the character is too much. — Adam McKay

[We should] suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the character of man. — Edward Gibbon

Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.
This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The sun was shining, but Christ had hidden Himself, and all the world was black to you; or it was night, and since the bright and morning star was gone, no other star could yield you so much as a ray of light. What a howling wilderness is this world without our Lord! If once He hideth Himself from us, withered are the flowers of our garden; our pleasant fruits decay; the birds suspend their songs, and a tempest overturns our hopes. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so. — Aphrodite Matsakis

Just as religion can lead its devotees to suspend reason for faith, it can also lead them to suspend morality for piety. Indeed, — Ali A. Rizvi

Think about it for a brief moment. Suspend disbelief. Wind the clock forward 100 years. Do you think, as a species, we will still be struggling with the things that vex us today? Will we still be arguing about the same stuff? We will still be eating Cocoa Puffs? We are at the end of the beginning. — Brad Feld

The ultimate cynicism is to suspend judgment so that you are not judged. — Marya Mannes

Let's say I dared to suspend myself in the moment between breaths. — Steve Erickson

I am the Maker of all things. By my word were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of my mouth. I spread out the northern skies over empty space; I suspend the earth over nothing. I clothe you with skin and flesh and knit you together with bones and sinews. I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster. — Zhang Yun

People suspend judgment in the presence of mystery. — Robert Genn

Very often I suspend my musical sensibilities to enjoy music as a fan. — Billy Sheehan

As an artist, i live in fantasy and flirt with reality. I'm an emotional magician of sorts. I paint my feelings onto the abstract canvas of a waking dream. I suspend my concepts in the ether's of otherworldly realms. This is the way my existence has always been. I am untethered, a traveler between worlds. I sinuously slip in and out of the real and surreal, until, they are one and the same. I do not like being shackled or chained, to the physical plane. — Jaeda DeWalt

There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis. — Christopher Hitchens

You are engaged in repressing an insurrection against the laws of the United States. If at any point on or in the vicinity of the [any] military line, which is now [or which shall be] used between the City Philadelphia and the City of Washington, via Perryville, Annapolis City, and Annapolis Junction, you find resistance which renders it necessary to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus for the public safety, you, personally or through the officer in command at the point where the [at which] resistance occurs, are authorized to suspend that writ. — Abraham Lincoln

The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface.
[Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air] — Edmund Burke

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer's travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country. — Thomas Friedman

This variety of objects will suspend, for some time, the course of the narrative; but the interruption will be censured only by those readers who are insensible to the importance of laws and manners, while they peruse, with eager curiosity, the transient intrigues of a court, or the accidental event of a battle. — Edward Gibbon

Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has produced? Is it not better to suspend your convictions than to get mixed up in these seditious and quarrelsome divisions? — Michel De Montaigne

For the religious, passivism [i.e., objects are obedient to the laws of nature] provides a clear role of God as the author of the laws of nature. If the laws of nature are God's commands for an essentially passive world ... , God also has the power to suspend the laws of nature, and so perform miracles. — Brian Ellis

If the president is allowed to suspend constitutional rights on his own personal whims, our free republic has effectively ceased to exist. — Steve Stockman

A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust — Po Bronson

No more the mounting larks, while Daphne sings, Shall, list'ning, in mid-air suspend their wings. — Alexander Pope

July is high burglary season because so many people leave town. To help avoid making that obvious, suspend your newspaper subscription and have your mail held. Another clear indication is if all your lights are off for an extended period. To fix that, you can buy a timer for about $30. — Jean Chatzky

The art of movies is to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief. They need to use their imaginations. — William Friedkin

It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money. One day, after — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You need to suspend your reaction when you feel like striking back, to listen when you feel like talking back, to ask questions when you feel like telling your opponent the answers, to bridge your differences when you feel like pushing for your way, and to educate when you feel like escalating. Breakthrough — William Ury

Now, learning how to make a movie is something you can figure out in about an afternoon. The physics of it, the marks, the lights, etc. What's hard to do is to suspend your own feelings of self consciousness. The natural actors can do that; they can become part of a characterization and learn how to maintain it. — Tom Hanks

So that there is no misunderstanding from my perspective, I will suspend any player who tests positive for an illegal steroid. There will be no exceptions. The (players) union is aware of that and they accept it. — Bud Selig

Theatre's great. It's such an act of faith. It's a wonderful art form where you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. It's a lovely art form because the actors and the audience are alive and in the room at the same time together. That's why I love the theatre. — Israel Horovitz

The very first thing you need to do to get your life back, heal your past or excel in your future is to suspend certain beliefs. — Tanja Diamond

We penalize and suspend players for making contact with the head while checking, in an effort to reduce head injuries, yet we still allow fighting. We're stuck in the middle and need to decide what kind of sport do we want to be. Either anything goes and we accept the consequences, or take the next step and eliminate fighting. — Steve Yzerman

Most of us encounter a great deal more Mystery than we are willing to experience. Sometimes knowing life requires us to suspend disbelief, to recognize that all our hard-won knowledge may only be provisional and the world may be quite different than we believe it to be. This can be very stressful, even frightening. But if we are not willing to wonder, we may have to hang up the phone on life. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imagine, to conjure images, to suspend disbelief, to enter a world visible only in their minds. It is in that unseen world where the art of the writer lives. — Mindie Burgoyne

A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspend their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

You aren't allowed back until you've learned to willingly suspend disbelief. — Rebecca Murphy

The Mode of circular reasoning is the form used when the proof itself which ought to establish the matter of inquiry requires confirmation derived from the matter; in this case, being unable to assume either in order to establish the other, we suspend judgement about both. — Sextus Empiricus

My hope is that the work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with looking at the body and fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it. — Jock Sturges

Every so often a disappearance is in order. A vanishing. A checking out. An indeterminate period of unavailability. Each person, each sane person, maintains a refuge, or series of refuges, for this purpose. A place, or places, where they can, figuratively if not literally, suspend their membership in the human race. — John Murray

The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility. — Guy Davenport

Good teachers aren't simply born, they perfect their craft over time. Teachers need a chance to practice and improve, especially now as the American education system lags behind international standards. If education in the United States is to raise its standards, we need to nurture our teachers through a combination of accountability and development methods. Actionable advice: Don't discipline children too harshly. It's certainly tempting to punish or suspend children that behave badly. That might fix the problem in the short term, but it actually inhibits a child's overall learning. It's much more effective to solve conflicts through social problem solving. When children can engage with a problem in a safe environment, their behavior is more likely to change for the good. — Anonymous

Take a moment to ask yourself, "What do I want to be, have, and do?" Suspend any doubts and fears about being unrealistic, and pretend that a philanthropist will finance any ambition you have. Write down detailed descriptions about your ideal life - everything from your dream house, to your ideal relationship, to relaxation and play time, to your perfect career choice. — Doreen Virtue

The same tools that make any writer good, plus a cheerful willingness to suspend belief. — Fred Saberhagen

To even win a nomination in this country, you have to say you're a person of great faith. You have to pledge to the people out there that you put your faith in things that are unable to be proven - that you suspend critical thinking as the way to go. — Bill Maher

The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you. — George Carlin

In a drawl so low, it seemed to suspend time, the old man said, "When the last leaf falls from the Widow's Tree this year, she'll be done for good. No coming back. No bothering anyone no more. Nobody will find her bones, and before next spring, nobody'll even remember her. She'll just be a wisp of a thing."
Peggy looked toward the tree, now hidden behind a low patch of morning cloud. She breathed out hard through her nose. "That's a terrible thing to do. Even for you, even to her."
"Set in motion a long time ago," he said blithely. "Just took this long to finish up. — Alex Bledsoe

Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it. — Ernest Dimnet

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative. — Michel Faber

Earl gave me his version of what happened and asked me not to suspend the umpires. — Lee MacPhail

No one thinks Las Vegas is real; it is illusion, but visitors willingly suspend disbelief and pretend. — Hal Rothman

We maintain, on the contrary, that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase "with the addition of other means" because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs. — Carl Von Clausewitz

But we must be careful not to do our enemies' work for them. To argue that to preserve our freedoms we must suspend our freedoms, that to safeguard elections we must cancel elections, that to defend ourselves from dictatorship we must appoint a dictator - what logic is this? We — Robert Harris

Our passing interrupted the road crossing, and the crowd bunched on both sides waited for us to go by as we all waited for the war to go by, thinking we can suspend or postpone living and not knowing that in war the heart grows older than it does in dreams — Dan Davin

I set up a system, and the system can catch part of what is happening in the world - what's going on in the world - an appearance in the world, and suspend that appearance itself from being important ... The work is about the system. — Douglas Huebler

Occasionally and frequently the exercise of the judgment ought to end in absolute reservation. It may be very distasteful, and great fatigue, to suspend a conclusion; but as we are not infallible, so we ought to be cautious; we shall eventually find our advantage, for the man who rests in his position is not so far from right as he who, proceeding in a wrong direction, is ever increasing his distance. — Michael Faraday

We've made clear our view, which is we support the Russian proposal. It's within the context of the EU diplomacy aimed at getting Iran to re-suspend its enrichment activities and return to negotiations. — Joseph Adam Ereli

One of the hardest things to believe is that anyone will abandon the effort to escape a charge of murder. It is extremely important to suspend disbelief on that. If you don't, the story is spoiled. — Rex Stout

I thought a time would come when people would rout me out of Ars with sticks, when the Bishop would suspend me, and I should end my days in prison. I see, however, that I am not worthy of such a grace. — John Vianney

What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don't think through another's brain and you don't work through another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. — Ayn Rand

Certainly every historian brings certain predilections to the study of history. But every historian also has the ethical obligation to suspend judgment until finding the evidence overwhelmingly persuasive, the method beyond reproach, the results replicable, and the analyses sound. — George M. Dennison

If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool. — Andrew Sullivan

If we suspend judgment and look to how we can make conscious choices to uplift the situation, we can be sure that we are doing all we can to attract a happier and more harmonious outcome. — Deepak Chopra

On your quest to spirituality it is often required to suspend your rationality; but true spirituality asks that you enhance your rationality. — Steve Maraboli

Please, Kate. Suspend your dislike of me for a few moments and listen to what I have to say. It makes sense."
"I don't dislike you. It's an oversimplification. — Ilona Andrews

It's freaking football. There are going to be big hits. I don't understand how they can do this after one weekend of hitting. And I can't understand how they can suspend us for it. I think it's a bunch of bull. — Brian Urlacher

When you have a movie about people landing from planet Neptune, you suspend disbelief. I totally get it. But I like doing things that happen in real life. — Will Gluck

A company at the top of its game has accumulated a number of rules of thumb - implicit assumptions and beliefs about what has been central to its success. New technologies and business models belie or change some of those assumptions, but they only seem sensible if the management team can become aware of those implicit assumptions and mind-sets and suspend them for a moment to contemplate the change. It's very hard to do that with the inherited wisdom, experience, and lore of a company. This is why the failures of incumbents to capture the benefits of disruptive innovations are a result not of bad managers, but of good managers practicing what they have done best. Incremental innovations can quickly be scaled and incorporated. Disruptive innovations require changes in customer sets, business models, or performance metrics that are no longer consistent with what led to success in the past. — Stefan Heck

Pope Pius XI called for a world-wide day of prayer, to be held on 16 March 1930, on behalf of the persecuted believers in Russia. This action led Stalin to suspend temporarily the antireligious campaign, according to Roy Medvedev — Lynne Viola

In order to have faith, or follow any other organized religion, I'd have to suspend a degree of disbelief. — Pete Townshend

try to explain to her she's dead and therefore has no further need for Romeo's impressive erection, but she's finding it difficult to suspend her disbelief. — Leisa Rayven

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the "Nation," it's time for all of us to sit up and worry. — Arundhati Roy

I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that. — Bev Perdue

There is a challenge of doing something new. Sometimes you have to suspend whether you believe in yourself doing it and just give yourself over to the idea that they believe in you. — Josh Peck

An encounter with other cultures can lead to openness only if you can suspend the assumption of superiority, not seeing new worlds to conquer, but new worlds to respect. — Mary Catherine Bateson

In order that the concept of substance could originate
which is indispensable for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it
it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see or perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux." At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency
to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just
had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong. — Friedrich Nietzsche

God is able to place stars in their sockets & suspend sky like a curtain; surely He is mighty enough to light your path. — Max Lucado

What if you began to expect the best from any situation? Isn't it possible that you could write new chapters in your life with happy endings? Suspend your disbelief? Take a leap of faith? After all, what have you got to lose but misery and lack? — Sarah Ban Breathnach

We spend this life looking for a center, a place where we can suspend without a wobble. The specific coordinates are elusive, scalable only by the heart. _Population: 485_, p 202 — Michael Perry