Quotes & Sayings About Totality

Life is the totality of time — Sunday Adelaja

Humility consists of knowing that in this world the whole soul , not only what we term the ego in its totality, but also the supernatural part of the soul, which is God present in it, is subject to time and to the vicissitudes of change . There must be absolutely acceptance of the possibility that everything material in us should be destroyed. But we must simultaneously accept and repudiate the possibility that the supernatural part of the soul should disappear. — Simone Weil

In its totality, a raga is a combination of musical heritage, technical elements, emotional charge, cognitive understanding and aural identity. — T.M. Krishna

This book by Dr. Yasuda, while ostensibly about haiku, in reality penetrates deeply into the totality of this living spirit of Japan. It deals with those aspects which have produced and maintained haiku into the present day. The important key to understanding comes with the realization that in Japanese art one strives always for the absolute. Of the absolute there is no question of degree; it is either attained or lost. Most often, to be sure, it is not attained, but it is the constant striving toward and awareness of that high goal which gives strength and vitality to this living aesthetic spirit which has so impressed me in Japan.

(Robert B. Hall, Foreword, p. x) — Kenneth Yasuda

The masses are always wrong - Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning and you have the heaven they're looking for. — Charles Bukowski

[The] first postulate of the Principle of Uniformity, namely, that the laws of nature are invariant with time, is not peculiar to that principle or to geology, but is a common denominator of all science. In fact, instead of being an assumption or an ad hoc hypothesis, it is simply a succinct summation of the totality of all experimental and observational evidence. — M. King Hubbert

The brain is the hardware, and the mind is the software, with the totality always in action, hardware plus software. — Pearl Zhu

It has happened, women have helped their husbands, sacrificed their whole lives, never thought about themselves. Their surrender, their devotion to their lovers has been total. In this totality, they have achieved before their lover has. — Rajneesh

As individuals, we will be judged in our lives by the totality of our actions. Not one thing will stand out. And I think that's how we get judged by our colleagues and that's how we get judged by the good lord. — Rahm Emanuel

It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. — Michel Foucault

It took six days from start to finish for the totality of Creation; but within three days He cut His schedule in half to save you. — Johnnie Dent Jr.

The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is. — Anonymous

The genius of happiness is still so rare. To possess it means to approach life with the humility of a beggar, but to treat it with the proud generosity of a prince; to bring to its totality the deep understanding of a great poet and to each of its moments the abandonment and ingenuousness of a child. — Ellen Key

I don't believe that we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are
an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew. — Donald Barthelme

Yes, I am well aware that nature - or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes that surrounds us and that alternately creates us and devours us - is neither our accomplice nor our confidant. — Octavio Paz

This is only a small part of the totality. From this island earth we see only a fragment of creation and its knowledge. — Frederick Lenz

When people find God, Jesus or the Divine, they are merely allowing the connection that was always there. You are God/the Universe both in part and totality, and you should realize your control of and connection to everything. — Russell Anthony Gibbs

The most decisive and certainly most delicious option for an aggrieved worker in a narcissist's office is simply quitting. Slamming your resignation letter on the boss's desk and striding out to take a better job somewhere else is satisfying and in both its finality and its totality. Instantly the feared figure is stripped of all power, reduced to a person of utter inconsequence in your life. Not only does this spell immediate freedom for the exiting employee, it can also contribute to the long-term decline of the boss. — Jeffrey Kluger

We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible. — Alan Watts

The point of politics is to keep multiple and irreducible goods in play, rather than yielding to some dream, Nazi or otherwise, of totality. - — Timothy Snyder

Faced with a world of "modern ideas" which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of "greatness," on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it. — Frank Stella

Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

In our totality we are born of the Earth. Our spirituality itself is earth-derived ... If there is no spirituality in the earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves — Thomas Berry

I don't take reviews very seriously, but in their totality I think they are representative of how the audience feels, and of what their reaction is. There's always one guy who doesn't get it. — David Zucker

History is the view from the cheap seats. Distance from the action provides a unique perspective; one can recognize the plays and appreciate the totality of certain events. — Debra Komar

The sum total or Ishwara may be said to be All-good, Almighty, and Omniscient. These are obvious qualities, and need no argument to prove, from the very fact of totality. — Swami Vivekananda

Prior to the early 20th century, for the totality of humankind's existence if they saw something moving, it meant it was there. If they saw a tiger walking, that meant they were near a live tiger. This was entrenched in our subconscious and our unconscious.Then that drastically changed with film and television. — Chuck Klosterman

The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality. — Tony Judt

And spirituality or what you call "religion" is mainly to understand this: that you don't require anything, you are a part of the totality, or reality. — Nisargadatta Maharaj

Open your eyes, Mac." "What do you mean?" "Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them. He thinks you have the heart of a warrior. He believes in you. Believe in him. — Karen Marie Moning

To be sensitive to the beauty of something is to perceive the totality of it. The mind that is thinking in terms of a part can never perceive the whole. In the whole the part is contained, but the part will never make up the whole, the total. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The pleasure a man gets from a landscape would [not] last long if he were convinced a priori that the forms and colors he sees are just forms and colors, that all structures in which they play a role are purely subjective and have no relation whatsoever to any meaningful order or totality, that they simply and necessarily express nothing ... No walk through the landscape is necessary any longer; and thus the very concept of landscape as experienced by a pedestrian becomes meaningless and arbitrary. Landscape deteriorates altogether into landscaping. — Max Horkheimer

A mandala is the psychological expression of the totality of the self. — Carl Jung

Faith makes you stable and steady. It brings out the totality in you. Consolidation of your energy is faith. Dissemination of energy is doubt. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

You have to go the rounds from individual to individual in order to gather the totality of the race. — Friedrich Schiller

All phenomena are embraced within a single self-knowing awareness.
Even though they arise as the totality of samsara and nirvana,
the phenomena of the world of appearances and possibilities
limitless, boundless - arise from basic space.
Therefore, they are subsumed within basic space from which the first arise. — Longchen Rabjam

Well that's a bit of a question like saying, what have you learned in life that would help you lead? My whole life has been learning to lead, from my parents, to my education, to the experience I had in the private sector, to helping run the Olympics, and then of course helping guide a state. Those experiences in totality have given me an understanding of how America works and how the economy works. — Mitt Romney

The work of each individual contributes to a totality, and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives - past and present and to come - forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens of thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. Even the Spacers are an offshoot of the tapestry and they, too, add to the elaborateness and beauty of the pattern. An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole? Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you. — Isaac Asimov

Calling resists privatization by insisting on the totality of faith. Calling resists politicization by demanding a tension with every human allegiance and association. Calling resists polarization by requiring an attitude toward, and action in, society that is inevitably transforming because it is constantly engaged. Grand Christian movements will rise and fall. Grand campaigns will be mounted and grand coalitions assembled. But all together such coordinated efforts will never match the influence of untold numbers of followers of Christ living out their callings faithfully across the vastness and complexity of modern society. — Os Guinness

The theatre-acting, creating, interpreting - means total involvement, the totality of heart, mind and spirit. — Stella Adler

I mean by Society, the totality of concepts of all purely natural relations and institutions between man and man. — Franz Oppenheimer

Totality is, in effect, nothing other than the ancient dream of unity common to both believers and rebels,
but projected horizontally onto an earth deprived of God. To renounce every value, therefore, amounts to
renouncing rebellion in order to accept the Empire and slavery. Criticism of formal values cannot pass
over the concept of freedom. Once the impossibility has been recognized of creating, by means of the
forces of rebellion alone, the free individual of whom the romantics dreamed, freedom itself has also been
incorporated in the movement of history. It has become freedom fighting for existence, which, in order to
exist, must create itself. Identified with the dynamism of history, it cannot play its proper role until
history comes to a stop, in the realization of the Universal City. Until then, every one of its victories will
lead to an antithesis that will render it pointless — Albert Camus

The dance goes from realizing that you're separate (which is the awakening) to then trying to find your way back into the totality of which you are not only a part, but which you are. — Ram Dass

The body of the last Flealouse contained the flesh of everything that had ever lived. It was content. — Alasdair Gray

The ocean stands for God, the sole substance, and individual beings are like waves - which are modes of the sea. Each wave has its own shape that it holds for a certain time, but the wave is not separate from the sea and cannot be conceived to exist independently of it. Of course, this is only a metaphor; unlike an infinite God, an ocean has boundaries, and moreover the image of the sea represents God only in the attributes of extension. But maybe we can also imagine the mind of God - that is to say, the infinite totality of thinking - as like the sea, and the thoughts of finite beings as like waves that arise and then pass away. — Clare Carlisle

What a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give. The totality of their life, of the way they go about it in the smallest details, is what gets transmitted. — David Brooks

it is only in social relations that we are human...to be human women must share in the totality of humanity's common life. Women, forced to lead restricted lives, retard all human progress. Growth of organism, the individual or social body requires use of all of our powers in four areas: physical, intellectual, spiritual and social — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; it is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified. 6. The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. — Guy Debord

The urgency of the global situation is such that the foundation work of activating the totality of humankind via the Global Cooperative Forum must happen now, so that, during the next few years, there can be global conversion of all systems to a right functioning in the context of the total system. — Adi Da

Mind is a duality; it is always split. There is no single point on which the mind agrees in totality. Half of the mind will agree and half of the mind will disagree, and whatever you choose, you are choosing only the half. The remaining half is going to take revenge. The unchosen part, the left over, will wait for its chance to show you that whatever you have chosen is wrong. But it does not matter which part you choose. Choice itself is wrong. — Rajneesh

It is very important to learn to weigh up objectively (or assess intuitively) the totality of the competitive and psychological factors. — Mark Dvoretsky

You build inner strength through embracing the totality of your experience, both the delightful parts and the difficult parts. — Pema Chodron

The heathen spirit is wingless. It cannot lift itself to heights from which the totality of being is visible, and it therefore loses itself in details. — Sholem Asch

From the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to find out order in the chaotic world surrounding them. It has however never been easy to find a solution to explain a given system while being a part of that system. The best bet is to find out the most fundamental components within the system and building a theory round these. In other words, a theory that is able to describe the world in totality has to keep the number of basic postulates it depends upon to zero or near zero. — Subhajit Ganguly

On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it. — Albert Einstein

The individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. — Albert Einstein

We see parts of each other, and we put them together. But if I want to see you in totality, you need to move away; we need space between us. Across the street, I can see all of you at once, but then I also see this huge vista of space surrounding you, coming in and compressing you. — Diego Giacometti

Having totality means being capable of following "what is," because "what is" is constantly moving and constantly changing. If one is anchored to a particular view, one will not be able to follow the swift movement of "what is. — Bruce Lee

Thinking goes on in your head. It is not really deep into the roots of your being; it is not your totality. — Osho

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic, and galactic
structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature! And you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? — Paddy Chayefsky

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197 — Daniel Libeskind

If we expect translation to reproduce the totality of the semantics and affective uses of the original text, then we believe that translation must be loyal to the seminal language system, rather than letting the discourse travel and undertake the adventure of discovering - or creating - a new set of meaning according to the politics of the translation itself. Rigid loyalty to the original in the translated version was, in effect, the intentionality of the translation of the doctrines and precepts that constituted the colonial discourse. — Hector Dominguez Ruvalcaba

This is the thing, I think often, that never occurs to you when you consider what it would be like to lose someone you love. That you would miss not just the flowers and kisses, but the totality of the experience. You miss the failures and little evils with as much desperation as you miss being held in the middle of the night. I wish he were here now, and I was kissing him. I wish he were here now, and I was betraying him. Either would be fine, so fine, as long as he was here. — Cody McFadyen

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe. — Lionel Shriver

This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. — Mark Z. Danielewski

The tendency in our spiritual life but also our more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on. And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn't "feeling" Christ's love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, "Your happiness is all I want." — Brian Kolodiejchuk

Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to happen to, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The totality of life cannot be understood, so runs Sufi teaching, if it is studied only through the methods which we use in everyday living. — Idries Shah

The Pleroma is the totality. The superset. Magisteria are the subsets." Eat your heart out, Bertrand Russell. "We all have one. Even you. Your own little slice of the divine. — Ian Tregillis

The man who is to be great is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a man lavishly endowed with will - this is precisely what greatness is to be called: it is able to be as much a totality as something multi-faceted, as wide as it is full — Friedrich Nietzsche

Hellbenders. I collected with exuberance and totality, bringing home almost everything I could get my hands on, and releasing them into the assorted outdoor terrariums or aquariums in my back yard (the turtles I let run wild in the yard, like dogs or cats). — Rick Bass

China has secretly developed an army of 180,000 cyber spies and warriors, mounting an incredible ninety thousand computer attacks a year against the U.S. Defense Department networks alone. The totality of the thefts and their impact on American national security are breathtaking. — Marc Goodman

I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality. — Barnett Newman

The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment - the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one's head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don't believe such a homunculus exists - perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein - you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found - and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears. — Sam Harris

Perhaps the most important reason of all for taking action now is that time is finite. No matter how proficient you are, you can only accomplish so much in a lifetime. Every second that's wasted reduces the totality of what you can accomplish by one second — Robert Ringer

Never underestimate the totality of chaos and betrayal that comes through currency debasement. — James Cook

Oh no, no, a state that adopts Common Core must adopt in its totality the Common Core and can only add 15 percent. It was then that I realized that this initiative, which had been constantly portrayed as state led and voluntary, was really about control. — Glenn Beck

God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our action. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

When I say 'I am', I do not mean a separate entity with a body as its nucleus, I mean the totality of being, the ocean of consciousness, the entire universe of all that is known. I have nothing to desire for I am complete forever — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Some of the biggest bores I've ever known are men who have been highly successful in business, particularly self-made heads of big companies. Before the first olive has settled into the first martini, they pour the stories of their lives into the nearest and sometimes the remotest ears capturable ... These men have indeed paid the price of success. To rise to the top of a big company often takes a totality of effort, concentration and dedication. Others, too, have to pay part of the price. Wife and children are out of mind even when in sight ... — Malcolm Forbes

To educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens. — Frantz Fanon

The very agony
of death experienced in the humiliation of the entire being lifts the slave to the level of human totality. He
knows, henceforth, that this totality exists; now it only remains for him to conquer it through a long series
of struggles against nature and against the masters. History identifies itself, therefore, with the history of
endeavor and rebellion. It is hardly astonishing that Marxism-Leninism derived from this dialectic the
contemporary ideal of the soldier worker. — Albert Camus

But what is more, if we have succeeded in adding to the basic understanding of our universe and ourselves, we will have made a contribution to the totality of human culture. — Haldan Keffer Hartline

I was teaching live drawing in a community college and students started zoning in on the face and spending a couple of hours on that and then putting the rest of the body on the face only in the last hour. It didn't work to just tell them, 'Well, you're really not thinking of the body as a totality.' So in desperation I would put a drape over the model's head so they couldn't see it. They had to draw the body and then at the end of the session for an hour I would take the drape off just to try to reverse their procedure. — John Baldessari

People often need to describe things quickly and so they use a shorthand. The problem is that after they use a label, they begin to think only in terms of the label instead of the totality of the experience a novel provides. — Akhil Sharma

When you start reconnecting with these missing [parts of yourself], you tend to realize that, until then, you had never really been incarnated on the planet. You thought you were, but if one considers the totality of your being, you were hardly there. You were literally all over space. The result was that you were sleeping your life instead of living it. Only when a gathering of all the parts has taken place inside your heart can you be fully present and find your real purpose on earth. — Samuel Sagan

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality. — Theodor Adorno

All science is experiential; but all experience must be related back to and derives its its validity from the conditions and context of consciousness in which it arises, i.e., the totality of our nature. — Wilhelm Dilthey

The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator - computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about. — Gilles Deleuze

So it seems as though this part of us that is living a life on Earth is only a small piece or splinter of a much larger us. That we are many rather than one, or rather pieces of a more complex whole. We are only able to focus on the splinter we perceive as our totality. That is a good thing, because if we were aware of the complexity of it we would not be able to function in this world or reality. We are only able to see the facade that masks a much larger picture. Only now are we being allowed to peek behind the veil. — Dolores Cannon

The body is never more alive than when it is dead; but it is alive in its units, and dead in its totality; alive as a congeries, dead as an organism. — Annie Besant

I became aware that there was no barrier between what was inside and what was outside. My body was illuminated by a bright light. I heard with my eyes and saw with my ears. I used my nose as mouth and my mouth as nose. I experienced the world with the totality of my senses as my spirit gathered and my form dissolved. There was no distinction between muscles and bones. My body stopped being heavy and I felt like a floating leaf. Without knowing it, I was being carried by the wind. Drifting here and there, I did not know whether I rode on the wind or the wind rode on me. — Liezi

Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role. — Marcel Proust

If [man] thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole. — David

We have repeatedly observed that while any whole is evolving, there is always going on an evolution of the parts into which it divides itself; but we have not observed that this equally holds of the totality of things, which is made up of parts within parts from the greatest down to the smallest. — Herbert Spencer

Beauty is what we have seen and what we are going to see in the future. It is the totality of physical, emotional and biological structures we have created within generations intentionally or unintentionally for our enjoyment and satisfaction. We consider ourselves beautiful, because we have seen it and imagine for thousands of years. If we had five feet, nine eyes and twenty fingers we still were beautiful. — M.F. Moonzajer

The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like "nation," "society," and "culture" name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding. — Eric R. Wolf

We could say that the totality, life wants the sapling to become a tree, but the sapling doesn't see itself as separate from life and so wants nothing for itself. It is one with what life wants. That's why it isn't worried or stressed. And, if it has to die prematurely, it dies with ease.. — Eckhart Tolle