Absolute Value Quotes

The absolute value of love makes life worth while, and so makes Man's strange and difficult situation acceptable. Love cannot save life from death; but it can fulfill life's purpose. ~ Arnold J. Toynbee

Next comes the temptation to destroy ourselves for love of the other. The only value is love of the other. Self-sacrifice is an absolute value in itself. And the desire of the other is also absolute in itself. No matter what the lover desires, we will give up our life or even our soul to please him. This is the asceticism of Eros, which makes it a point of honor to follow the beloved even into hell. For what greater sacrifice could man offer on the altar of love than the sacrifice of his own immortal soul? Heroism in this sacrifice is measured precisely by madness: it is all the greater when it is offered for a more trivial motive. ~ Thomas Merton

In answer to our question then, 'What is man?' we may give the Greek, Jewish, and Christian idea of man: man as an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity is in the intellect; and man as a free individual in personal relation with God, whose supreme righteousness consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God; and man as a sinful and wounded creature called to divine life and to the freedom of grace, whose supreme perfection consists of love. . . . A person possesses absolute dignity because he is in direct relationship with the realm of being, truth, goodness, and beauty, and with God, and it is only with these that he can arrive at his complete fulfillment. His spiritual fatherland consists of the entire order of things which have absolute value, and which reflect, in some manner, a divine Absolute superior to the world and which have a power of attraction toward this Absolute. ~ Jacques Maritain

It's a wonderful paradox: only when you have a changeless sense of who you are, can real changes take place. It is the ground of your absolute value and everything that is truly worthwhile. ~ Ilchi Lee

I was writing down the rule for absolute values in algebra:
"The absolute value of a = a, and the absolute value of -a also equals a. In other words, absolute value has to do with the number [its identity], not the sign in front of it."
GUYS. Our absolute value is in our identity. What we do, who we truly are inside. Not our outward appearance or the things that happen to us.
Our identity as Christians is in Christ. That, my friends, is our absolute value. ~ Your's Truly

I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. ~ Stephen Fry

Absolute value: the distance that a given number is from zero on a number line . . . always a positive ~ Meg Cabot

Those who fully express their soul are peaceful, bold, and confident. They can be peaceful because they know that their essence is eternal, indestructible wholeness, and they are bold and confident because they know their own absolute value. ~ Ilchi Lee

In a way, the fearful fundamentalists are right: globalism does undermine systems of absolute value and belief. But in a way they are wrong: the systems of value and belief do not immediately disappear - people simply inhabit them in a different fashion, and sometimes the old ways turn out to have a surprising amount of life left in them. The human mind has a great repertoire of ways to accept and honor social constructions of reality without swallowing them whole. Globalizing processes require us to renegotiate our relationships with familiar cultural forms, and remind us that they are things made by people: human, fallible things, subject to revision. Globalism ~ Walter Truet Anderson

In life, we chase things like money and status, but there things have no lasting value relative to the soul. Only the soul has absolute value, which is why I believe it should be at the center of everyone's life ~ Ilchi Lee

[W]e have more than two options ... a critique of reason does not have to be a call for the return of superstition and arbitrary power ... [O]ur problems do not lie with reason itself but with our obsessive treatment of reason as an absolute value. Certainly it is one of our qualities, but it functions positively only when balanced and limited by the others. ~ John Ralston Saul

Not to be attached to something is to be aware of its absolute value. Everything you do should be based on such an awareness, and not on material or self-centered ideas of value. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

Being a better dialectician meant not only being skillful at invention or at denouncing tricks in reasoning. Before anything else, it meant knowing how to dialogue, together with all the demands that this entails: recognizing the presence and the rights of one's interlocutor, basing one's replies on what the interlocutor admits he knows, and therefore agreeing with him at each stage of the discussion. Above all, it meant submitting oneself to the demands and norms of reason and the search for truth; finally, it meant recognizing the absolute value of the Good. It therefore meant leaving behind one's individual point of view, in order to rise to a universal viewpoint; and it meant trying to see things within the perspective of the All and the deity, thereby transforming one's vision of the world and one's own inner attitude. ~ Pierre Hadot

If the assumptions underlying the legislative state of the parliamentary-democratic variety are no longer tenable, then closing one's eyes to the concrete constitutional situation and clinging to an absolute, 'value-neutral,' functionalist and formal concept of law, in order to save the system of legality, is not far off. The 'law,' then, is only the present decision of the momentary parliamentary majority. ~ Carl Schmitt

I asked everyone I met what 'freedom' meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience - it's like they're from different planets. For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear;[...] For the children: freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you're not afraid of your own desires; ~ Svetlana Alexievich

The absolute value of being neutral is zero. ~ Toba Beta

Peace is preferable to war. But it's not an absolute value, and so we always ask, What kind of peace? ~ Noam Chomsky

In each time, in each place, in each life, there is absolute value and beauty ~ Gyomay M. Kubose

The objects which we admire have no absolute value in themselves ... ~ Marcel Proust

In actual fact, if we want to understand whether things are chicken feed or not, we must learn to distinguish instrumental value from intrinsic value and recognize the difference between relative value and absolute value. ( "This is no chicken feed") ~ Erik Pevernagie

Sogol's aim was to measure the power of thought as an absolute value.
"This power," said Sogol, "is arithmetical. In fact, all thought is a capacity to grasp the divisions of a whole. Now, numbers are nothing but the divisions of the unity, that is, the divisions of absolutely any whole. In myself and others, I began to observe how many numbers a man can really conceive, that is, how many he can represent to himself without breaking them up or jotting them down: how many successive consequences of a principle he can grasp at once, instantaneously; how many inclusions of species as kind; how many relations of cause and effect, of ends to means; and I never found a number higher than four. And yet, this number four corresponded to an exceptional mental effort, which I obtained only rarely. The thought of an idiot stopped at one, and the ordinary thought of most people goes up to two, sometimes three, very rarely to four. ~ Rene Daumal

He who wishes to maintain that the past of mankind no longer has any absolute value in lifemust also be ready to deny his ownlife until the present moment, indeed in advance until the last moment, as worthless. He who realizes that culture is the giving of form will also see that the highest forms that it is given to the human spirit to recognize have always been, psychologically considered, such evasions from the present. Considerations such as these do not at all square with the direction of America's mind. ~ Johan Huizinga

...I think everything has value, absolute value, a child, a house, a day's work, the sky. But nothing will save us. We were never meant to be saved." "What were we meant for then?" "To love the whole damned world. ~ Jane Rule

When a person feels appreciated for their infinite and absolute value, you can then communicate about any issue and you will have their cooperation and respect. ~ Kimberly Giles

Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book's absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, "I hate, I love", and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. ~ Virginia Woolf

You are an irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind, amazing being. There will never be another you and this fact alone makes you infinitely and absolutely valuable. Having absolute value means you cannot be diminished by anything or anyone. You are bulletproof and nothing can change your value. ~ Kimberly Giles

The United States, with the greatest ability and the weakest desire to finance a welfare state, winds up in the middle of the pack in terms of the absolute value of the resources devoted to it. By 2003 ... America's per capita Public Expenditures were greater than those in Japan, Spain, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, while lower than those in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Denmark and Sweden. ~ William Voegeli

The market made up new standards as it went along, by accepting the current price - however high - as the sole measure of value. Any idea of safety based on this uncritical approach was clearly illusory and replete with danger. ~ Benjamin Graham

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people. ~ Barry M. Goldwater

Vanity is a mortgage that must be deducted from the value of a man. ~ Otto Von Bismarck

Putting in place the most ambitious and daring objective isn't enough, it should be backed with an intricate plan and executed like hell, this is what i call the superiority framework, from proximity the dots might seem random and chaotic but from a strategist view these dots are so beautifully interconnected forming greatness in an absolute form ~ Ahmed Elkadi

Many entrepreneurs have shifted their focus to pursuing VC funding as a primary strategic priority instead of concentrating on generating value for their users. This is worrisome because raising capital alone is misleading as a benchmark for success. ~ Jon Oringer

In proportion to the value of this revolution; in proportion to the importance of instruments, every word of which decides a question between power and liberty; in proportion to the solemnity of acts, proclaiming the will authenticated by the seal of the people, the only earthly source of authority, ought to be the vigilance with which they are guarded by every citizen in private life, and the circumspection with which they are executed by every citizen in public trust. ~ James Madison

While knowing how to value businesses is essential for investment success, the first and perhaps most important step in the investment process is knowing where to look for opportunities ~ Seth Klarman

I'm a Utilitarian, so I don't see the rule against lying as absolute; it's always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise. ~ Peter Singer

Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. ~ Carl Sagan

The loss of a hierarchy of values is dangerous for two reasons, as Nietzsche sees it. Without such a hierarchy values prove anchorless, unstable, and shifting. It is not that all values have disappeared under nihilistic conditions; we may, on the contrary, witness a proliferation of competing values, but the relation of these values to each other is unsecured. And from this follows a second danger that without a hierarchy of values there can be no human greatness. We will not be capable of achievements that require deep, long-term, unwavering commitment. We can see what Nietzsche has in mind from our own contemporary culture which displays precisely such a loss of a hierarchy of values and is thus already nihilistic in Nietzsche's sense. In this culture of ours the most trite and trivial counts in consequence as much as the greatest and most profound. Triviality itself has, indeed, become a value for us and all values have become trivial. What is acclaimed today is discarded tomorrow. Our values have been reduced to fashions and as such to something of no consequence. ~ Hans D. Sluga

Please, let patients help improve healthcare. Let patients help steer our decisions, strategic and practical. Let patients help define what value in medicine is. ~ Dave DeBronkart

The symbol in the dream has more the value of a parable: it does not conceal, it teaches. ~ Carl Jung

A good portfolio manager knows which companies to keep and which ones to let go. Many a GP has struggled with portfolio companies that cannot meet their value-creation milestones, or raise additional follow-on rounds of capital, or generate target returns in a time span of, say, five to seven years. The faster you recognize those losses, the better it is."
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"As David Cowan says, "Just focus on your top five - the rest is distraction." The harder part of the investor's discipline is to know when to quit."
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"You have to constantly scan all of those things and be willing to adjust your own sense of what's a reasonable outcome and move the company into a position where it has the maximum chance to succeed. "
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"Time is your enemy: Portfolio companies always take twice as much capital and twice as long to exit. Early-stage companies rarely meet milestones as planned and always burn cash faster than anticipated. ~ Mahendra Ramsinghani

This merger is a logical next step that creates substantial value for customers and stockholders of both AT&T and BellSouth. It will benefit customers through new services and expanded service capabilities. ~ Edward Whitacre, Jr.

Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the tooth Fairy are creatures in which every child has absolute faith until it is utterly destroyed by adults who burst the bubble and explain the truth. God is the one imaginary friend that many never grow out of; and all because no one tells them the truth before it is too late and the delusion becomes their reality. ~ Jim Whitefield

I demand riches in definite terms; I have a definite plan for acquiring riches;I am engaged in carrying out my plan, and I am giving an equivalent,in useful service, of the value of those riches I demand. ~ Andrew Carnegie

On the other hand, there would be some value in different folks getting together to share expertise and technology; but to the listener, it wouldn't necessarily seem like a single station in the traditional sense. ~ Jamie Zawinski

Angel blinked hard and bit her lip, trying to stop the quivering of her chin. "I feel like I've waited my whole life for him, waited to get to this point where I could appreciate and value him most. ~ Linda Winfree

My doodles and sketches are not the work of an academic engineer. They represent many years of design study in attempts to produce the best value for money in the field of small car design. ~ Alec Issigonis

As more men become more educated and women get educated, the value system has to be more enhanced and the respect for human dignity and human life is made better. ~ Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

When teachers are forced to teach to the test, students get bored and genuine education ceases, no matter what the test scores may say ... The examination as a test of the past is of no value for increased learning ability. Like all external motivators, it can produce a short term effect, but examinations for the purpose of grading the past do not hook a student on learning for life. ~ Myron Tribus

Success is transient; value is eternal. ~ Debasish Mridha

A citizen of the Roman Empire, for example, would have placed less value on individual liberty in the modern Western sense than on collective responsibility. ~ Stephen Baxter

No one expects this nation to become a theocracy, where Christianity is the only value, but we do indeed say that the essential values and founding principles of the nation should not be ignored. ~ D. James Kennedy

I should like to find a crime with perpetual repercussions, which would continue even after I had ceased to act, so there would not be a single instant of my life, not even when I was asleep, when I would not be causing some sort of disorder, a disorder so extensive as to involve general corruption, or so absolute a disturbance that its effect would be prolonged even when my life had ceased. ~ Marquis De Sade

If I am to cherish anything to the fullest I must humbly embrace it as an undeserved 'privilege,' for to nonchalantly handle anything as other than a 'privilege' is to handle things of immense value and in the holding be entirely oblivious to what I'm holding. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Your true value is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment. ~ Bob Burg

Why should a man marry and have children, study and build a career; why should he invent new techniques, build new institutions, and develop new ideas--when he doubts if there will be a tomorrow which can guarantee the value of human effort?
Crucial here for nuclear man is the lack of a sense of continuity, which is so vital for a creative life. He finds himself part of a nonhistory in which only the sharp moment of the here and now is valuable. For nuclear man life easily becomes a bow whose string is broken and from which no arrow can fly. In his dislocated state he becomes paralyzed. His reactions are not anxiety and joy, which were so much a part of existential man, but apathy and boredom. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

And this may teach us the extreme value of searching the Scriptures. There may be a promise in the Word which would exactly fit your case, but you may not know of it, and therefore you miss its comfort. You are like prisoners in a dungeon, and there may be one key in the bunch which would unlock the door, and you might be free; but if you will not look for it, you may remain a prisoner still, though liberty is so near at hand. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I believe if you want to be trusted, you have to trust first. If you do that, you will be betrayed sometimes. But the value of engendering trust is greater than the cost of being betrayed sometimes. ~ Mark Leslie

Being afraid is not a sign of weakness. Being afraid is a sign of a will to live, it is an indication that we place value in our lives and those in it. The only defeat in fear is allowing your fear to defeat you. ~ Shenita Etwaroo

Sometimes the things we do second time around are better and hold more value because we take the time to reflect and review, and revive them through a higher love. Don't be afraid to try again and do-over with greater wisdom, a fresh set of eyes, and a renewed hope. Life is not a straight line of first time successes. It's the road that is paved with failure and seemingly wrong turns that provides us with character, emotional grit and inner muscle to find new perspectives. The only expiry date to your dreams, intentions or goals is the one you allow to soak into your soul. ~ Christine Evangelou

Editions made sense when people worked with engravings where the plate wore down as prints were made. An early number of the edition had slightly better quality. But that's not the case with photography. To me, it's a false way of creating value. ~ Jerry Uelsmann