Dictum Quotes

What, then, of the priest's iconic representation of Christ at the altar? If there is no specifically masculine or feminine charism or ontology, the significance of the priest's maleness fades away. What matters - as patristic Christology recognized centuries ago with its dictum, 'That which is not assumed [by the Son of God in the incarnation] is not healed' - is that Christ became human, assuming and thereby healing the nature common to men and women. Although biologically a man, Christ assumed human nature in such a way as to include both men and women in his salvific work. And that means, in turn, that to refuse to allow a woman to preside at the Eucharist may be to say much more than opponents of women's ordination realize - namely, 'that women are not adequate icons of Christ.' The result, notes [Sarah] Hinlicky Wilson near the end of her book, is nothing less than 'to leave both their humanity and their salvation in doubt.' If women can't reflect the human nature of Christ at the altar, how then can they trust Christ's human nature to save them at all? ~ Wesley Hill

The old dictum is that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy," and the special-ops team is already regrouping and improvising a new plan. He hears the sharp, disciplined fire ~ Don Winslow

a good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving" Taoist dictum quoted by Sam Miller ~ Sam Miller

The mind is the athlete; the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further, or box better. Hoppie's dictum to me, "First with the head and then with the heart," was more than simply mixing brains with guts. It meant thinking well beyond the powers of normal concentration and then daring your courage to follow your thoughts. ~ Bryce Courtenay

I think you are wise. You haven't got what it takes for this job. You are like Rosemary's father. He couldn't understand Lenin's dictum: 'Away with softness.'"
I thought of Hercule Poirot's words.
"I'm content," I said, "to be human ... "
We sat there in silence, each of use convinced that the other's point of view was wrong. ~ Agatha Christie

If you're born rich, congrats! If not, take heart!
Options so abounding, the world so vast!
Nowadays there are no more alibis,
why we ought to remain poor all our lives.

We have this dictum where you I will tour:
"It is not your fault that you were born poor,
but it's already your fault, you died poor!"
What a great saying, big truth it conjures! ~ Rodolfo Martin Vitangcol

Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us. ~ Frances Wright

The disciples were absorbed in a discussion of Lao-Tzu's dictum: "Those who know, do not say; Those who say, do not know." When the master entered, they asked him what the words meant. Said the master, "Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?" All of them indicated that they knew. Then he said, "Put it into words." All of them were silent. ~ Anthony De Mello

The following story is true. There was a little boy, and his father said, "Do try to be like other people. Don't frown." And he tried and tried, but could not. So his father beat him with a strap; and then he was eaten up by lions.

Reader, if young, take warning by his sad life and death. For though it may be an honour to be different from other people, if Carlyle's dictum about the 30 million be still true, yet other people do not like it.

So, if you are different, you had better hide it, and pretend to be solemn and wooden-headed. Until you make your fortune. For most wooden-headed people worship money; and, really, I do not see what else they can do. In particular, if you are going to write a book, remember the wooden-headed. So be rigorous; that will cover a multitude of sins. And do not frown. ~ Oliver Heaviside

Descartes' dictum: 'There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another. ~ Paul Johnson

I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps. ~ David Mitchell

The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it. ~ Henry Hazlitt

For she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

[Queen Victoria had been denouncing the Women's Rights movement] ... And after chloroform was introduced to ease the pains of childbirth, she demanded that it be used on her. Religious and medical conservatives were shocked. They said God had decreed that women must suffer in childbirth as atonement for the sins of Eve. But queen Victoria wouldn't accept this particular anti-woman's-rights dictum. She became one of the first women to use anesthesia during childbirth , and knighted Dr. James Simpson, the Scottish physician who developed this use of chloroform, though he was excommunicated by his church for doing so. ~ Miriam Gurko

Galen , in the third section of his book, "The Use of the Limbs," says correctly that it would be in vain to expect to see living beings formed of the blood of menstruous women and the semen virile, who will not die, will never feel pain, or will move perpetually, or shine like the sun. This dictum of Galen is part of the following more general proposition: Whatever is formed of matter receives the most perfect form possible in that species of matter; in each individual case the defects are in accordance with that individual matter. ~ Maimonides

I have always been an advocate and was, in my last job at M&S, a supporter of the Al Gore dictum that a sustainable business can be a profitable business. We were the first sizeable company in the U.K. to prove that was the case. ~ Stuart Rose

When did it start, you ask, this job of ours (to burn book). There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. ~ Ray Bradbury

If our democracy worked as it should, we would elect wise women and men who made laws for the good of the people and enforced those laws.
That, though, is not the way things work. Greedy, power–mad billionaires spend money so that politicians such as George W. Bush can buy elections. Corrupt corporations such as Enron defraud old ladies and commit crimes. And they get away with it. They get away with it because most of us are so afraid of losing the security of our nice, normal lives that we are not willing to risk anything about those lives. We are either afraid to fight or we don't know how. Or we believe that bad things won't happen to us.
And so, in the end, too many people lose their lives anyway. In Nazi Germany, millions of men who acquiesced to Hitler's murderous rise to power wound up marching into Russia's icy wasteland - into the Soviet Army's machine guns and cannon - to themselves be murdered. In America after 9–11, trusting teenagers who had joined the National Guard found themselves sent to Iraq on extended and additional tours. Our enemy killed many of them because we, citizens of the richest country in the world, did not provide them with body armor.
Grieving mothers protested the wasting of their sons' lives. Nadia McCaffrey defied Bush's shameful ban on the filming of U.S. soldiers' coffins returning home from Iraq. She knew, as we all did, that this tyrannical dictum of Bush dishonored our soldiers' sacrifice. And so she invited the press to ~ David Zindell

Forget the boring old dictum "write about what you know." Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that. ~ Rose Tremain

Scientists themselves readily admit that they do not fully understand the consequences of our many-faceted assault upon the interwoven fabric of atmosphere, water, land and life in all its biological diversity. But things could also turn out to be worse than the current scientific best guess. In military affairs, policy has long been based on the dictum that we should be prepared for the worst case. Why should it be so different when the security is that of the planet and our long-term future? ~ Prince Charles

The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscles, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait. ~ Alan Garner

When I say tourism is sin and traveling on foot is virtue, it's condensed into a dictum. It's much more complex than that, but let's face it, for me, my experience, the world reveals itself to those that travel on foot. You understand the world in a much deeper level. And it does good to anyone who makes film. ~ Werner Herzog

Saadi's dictum, in the Bostan: 'The Path is not in the rosary, the prayer-mat and the robe ~ Idries Shah

But why bother? Why exert all this effort to focus totally on the boring prattlings of a six-year-old?
First, your willingness to do so is the best possible concrete evidence of your esteem you can give your child. If you give your child the same esteem you would give a great lecturer, then the child will know him- or herself to be valued and therefore will feel valuable. There is no better and ultimately no other way to teach your children that they are valuable people than by valuing them.
Second, the more children feel valuable, the more they will begin to say things of value. They will rise to your expectation of them.
Third, the more you listen to your child, the more you will realize that in amongst the pauses, the stutterings, the seemingly innocent chatter, your child does indeed have valuable things to say. The dictum that great wisdom comes from "the mouths of babes" is recognized as an absolute fact by anyone who truly listens to children. Listen to your child enough and you will come to realize that he or she is quite an extraordinary individual. And the more extraordinary you realize your child to be, the more you will be willing to listen. And the more you will learn.
Fourth, the more you know about your child, the more you will be able to teach. Know little about your children, and usually you will be teaching things that either they are not ready to learn or they already know and perhaps understand better than you.
Finally, the more ch ~ M. Scott Peck

I'm not one who goes for the 'all press is good press' dictum. ~ Jill Sobule

Love whom you will but marry your own kind was a dictum amounting to instinct within her. ~ Harper Lee

It starts with the writer-it's a familiar dictum, but somehow it keeps getting forgotten along the way. No film-maker, irrespective of his electronic bag of tricks, can ever afford to forget his commitment to the written word. ~ Steven Spielberg

The process of transforming the heart can be difficult because as we open it, we inevitably encounter our own pain and become more aware of the pain of others. In fact, much of our personality is designed to keep us from experiencing this suffering. We close down the sensitivity of our hearts so that we can block our pain and get on with things, but we are never entirely successful in avoiding it. Often, we are aware of our suffering just enough to make ourselves and everyone around us miserable. Carl Jung's famous dictum that "neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering" points to this truth. But if we are not willing to experience our own hurt and grief, it can never be healed. Shutting out our real pain also renders us unable to feel joy, compassion, love, or any of the other capacities of the heart. ~ Don Richard Riso

In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story. ~ Ben Bova

May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it. ~ Werner Herzog

To quote a dictum of Simon, what a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. ~ Xenophon

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. ~ John Stuart Mill

The most important extra-curricular lesson we learned, - and we learned it properly, - was summed up in Chief Justice Jay's dictum that "justice is always the same, whether it be due from one man to a million, or from a million to one man." We learned this, not by precept, but by example, which is the best way to learn such lessons. In ~ Albert Jay Nock

The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Hemingway had a handy dictum. You want to know if something is morally right? Listen to your stomach. If it sits like broken glass, then it's morally wrong. ~ Ken Bruen

The Age of the Screen isn't going to go away; indeed it offers all kinds of wonderful possibilities, if it could just acquire a little more quality control. But there is one truth, one necessary dictum, that we must never forget: _Every child should be encouraged to read books, words on a page, for his or her own pleasure, in his own time, dreaming his own - and the author's - dream_. There is no substitute. None. ~ Susan Cooper

We have not advanced very far in our spiritual lives if we have not encountered the basic paradox of freedom, to the effect that we are most free when we are bound. But not just any way of being bound will suffice; what matters is the character of our binding. The one who would like to be an athlete, but who is unwilling to discipline his body by regular exercise and by abstinence, is not free to excel on the field or the track. His failure to train rigorously and to live abstemiously denies him the freedom to go over the bar at the desired height, or to run with the desired speed and endurance. With one concerted voice the giants of the devotional life apply the same principle to the whole of life with the dictum: Discipline is the price of freedom. ~ Elton Trueblood

I, too, lived - which I had not done before, and which I could still do. I lived into the depths, and the depths began to speak. The depths taught me the other truth. It thus united sense and nonsense in me. I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul, and I am thoroughly a serf, completely subjugated, utterly obedient. The spirit of the depths taught me to say: "I am the servant of a child." Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need. ~ C. G. Jung

Charlie's dictum: All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there. ~ Warren Buffett

CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, author of 'Cogito ergo sum' to demonstrate the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved 'Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum' 'I think that I think, therefore I think that I am' as close an approach. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Dictum on television scripts: We don't want it good - we want it Tuesday. ~ Denis Norden

Over all this lay Hoppie's dictum: First with the head and then with the heart. Winning was something you worked at intellectually, emotion clouds the mind and is its natural enemy. This made for a loneliness which often let me aching to share an emotion but equally afraid that if I did so I would reveal a weakness which could later be used against me. ~ Bryce Courtenay

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. ~ Ray Bradbury

It was incomprehensible to her that anyone should be amused by such a circumstance, but both Gilly and Gideon plainly thought it excessively funny, so she smiled dutifully, realizing the truth of her mama's dictum, that there was never any knowing what stupidities men would find diverting. ~ Georgette Heyer

We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all. ~ Aldo Leopold

While there are deeper regularities in the Universe than the simple circumstances we generally describe as orderly, all that order, simple and complex, seems to derive from laws of Nature established at the Big Bang (or earlier), rather than as a consequence of belated intervention by an imperfect deity. "God is to be found in the details" is the famous dictum of the German scholar Aby Warburg. But, amid much elegance and precision, the details of life and the Universe also exhibit haphazard, jury-rigged arrangements and much poor planning. What shall we make of this: an edifice abandoned early in construction by the architect? The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed. Sometimes it seems a very slender hope. The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.
--Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space ~ Sagan, Carl; Druyan, Ann

It's a kind of moral dictum, moral responsibility to keep in mind that whatever I do this second affects what the next second will be. So I try not to do anything negative, which is my best insurance that the world will be better next second, or at least not worse. ~ John Leland

There is a popular heresy abroad today which states that if a little is good, more is better. Following this dictum creates a life which is never fulfilling. Even while you are engaged in one rich experience you are looking about for another. There is no contentment because future plans are always intruding on the present. ~ Robert A. Johnson

Montesquieu wrote: "I have never known any distress that an hour of reading did not relieve." If one substituted the word music for reading, the exact same dictum applied to me. ~ Zhu Xiao-Mei

Having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat ... ~ Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

It made Daniel think. The people who had the least were the most willing to share. He outlined a dictum that he would believe the rest of his life: the more people have, the less the give. Similarly, generous cultures produce less waste because excess is shared, whereas stingy nations fill their landfills with leftovers. ~ Mark Sundeen

When I am asked to summarize the fundamental message from research on self-control, I recall "Descartes's famous dictum cogito, ergo sum - "I think, therefore I am." What has been discovered about mind, brain, and self-control lets us move from his proposition to "I think, therefore I can change what I am." Because by changing how we think, we can change what we feel, do, and become. If that leads to the question "But can I really change?," I reply with what George Kelly said to his therapy clients when they kept asking him if they could get control of their lives. He looked straight into their eyes and said, "Would you like to? ~ Walter Mischel

The real conflict in the abortion issue is between a value - the right to choose whether or not to have the child - and a moral dictum - don't kill other humans. The more here, even, is flexible and relative. "Thou shall not kill" really means, "don't kill productive, contributing members of your own society that aren't a threat to your safety." If it was not relative, then no "Judeo-Christian" person could ever go to war or execute someone. ~ Morris Sullivan

Since I was in flight from religion, I assumed that my classmates had to be in flight from religion too, albeit in a quieter, savvier way than I had as yet been able to discover. Only today do I realize how mistaken I was. They were never in flight at all. Nor are their children in flight, or their grandchildren. By the time I reached by seventieth year, I used to predict, all the churches in the world would have been turned into barns or museums or potteries. But I was wrong. Behold, new churches spring up every day, all over the place, to say nothing of mosques. So Nietzsche's dictum needs to be amended: while it may be so that only the higher animals are capable of boredom, man proves himself highest of all by domesticating boredom, giving it a home. ~ J.M. Coetzee

One dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work fast enough. ~ Diana Gabaldon

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. ~ Charles Bukowski

When I first began my career I had one dictum that I set myself: to be paid for my work, but not to work for pay. Fame makes it that much easier to follow that maxim." He gave her a sharp look. "At least it does so long as I recognize when I am beginning to paint the obvious, rather than painting what I must express. People would rather you did the same thing over and over again and it becomes very easy to fall into their trap - particularly when you're young and hungry. But the more you do so, the nearer you are drawn to something you should not be a part of that homogeneity that is the death of any form of creative expression. ~ Charles De Lint

This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm ... They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.) ~ Jorge Luis Borges

In a now-famous Rogers dictum, delivered in speeches and in his books, he advises adults: "Please, think of the children first. If you ever have anything to do with their entertainment, their food, their toys, their custody, their day care, their health, their education – please listen to the children, learn about them, learn from them. ~ Maxwell King

Quantitative changes suddenly become qualitative changes. From all of Marxism, which I once thought attractive enough, I find only this dictum remaining in the realm of my opinions. Water grows colder and colder and colder, and suddenly it's ice. The day grows darker and darker, and suddenly it's night. Man ages and ages, and suddenly he's dead. Quantitative changes suddenly become qualitative changes; differences in degree lead to differences in kind. ~ John Barth

Nothing is sillier than the creative writing teacher's dictum
"Write about what you know." But whether you're writing
about people or dragons, your personal observation of how
things happen in the world - how character reveals itself - can
turn a dead scene into a vital one. Preliminary good advice
might be: Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly
what is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy,
not that they can necessarily write it down. ~ John Gardner

Ever since that day in Chicago, whenever I see such scenes, I think of a quote by Billat-Savarin, the eighteenth-century 'modern' gastronome, well known for his writings and meditations on the physiology of taste and for his famous dictum 'We are what we eat.' But he also wrote even more revealingly: 'The destiny of a nation depends on how it feeds itself. ~ Mireille Guiliano

No one in our society needs to be told that exercise is good for us. Whether you are overweight or have a chronic illness or are a slim couch potato, you've probably heard or read this dictum countless times throughout your life. But has anyone told you-indeed, guaranteed you-that regular physical activity will make you happier? I swear by it. ~ Sonja Lyubomirsky

Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel's dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life. ~ Donald Phillip Verene

Good design is not about form following function. It is function with cultural content. By adding "cultural content" to the concept of "form follows function," objects cease to be finite or predictable. Maybe the right way to interpret the dictum is to first acknowledge that the function needs to be clearly understood before the form is considered. ~ Carl Magnusson

You cannot kill or steal from a man while he is asleep and heartbroken. While it is said that everything is fair in love an war, the dictum is nullified when both love and war occur simultaneously ... ~ Salvador Plascencia

Another difference between amateur and professional writers, almost by definition, is that the latter more successfully engage their audience. It is partly a question of skill, but more often a matter of goals. Amateur writers tend to write primarily for self-expression, whereas writers able to become professional can hide or transform their own agendas enough so that they are of interest to others. Is this position the same as Freud's famous dictum that artists take unacceptable drives and present them in an acceptable way? ~ Alice W. Flaherty

A foot note in Scale, Geoffery West:

The full quotation from Einstein is worth repeating because it emphasizes a central dictum of science:
"Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed this into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics, indeed of modern science altogether."

Taken from Einstein's "On the Methods of Theoretical Physics," Essays on modern Science (New York:Dover, 2009) 12-21 ~ Albert Einstein

When he thought about how he wanted to build his career coming out of college, Hahn took inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt's famous dictum, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."5 ~ Reid Hoffman

German Marxian's coined the dictum: If socialism is against human nature, then human nature must be changed. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Unfortunately we did not attend Voltaire's dictum to define our terms before we began. The result was disagreement on all issues. ~ James Aldridge

For a person accustomed to the multi ethnic commotion of Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, or even Denver, walking across the BYU campus can be a jarring experience. One sees no graffiti, not a speck of litter. More than 99 percent of the thirty thousand students are white. Each of the young Mormons one encounters is astonishingly well groomed and neatly dressed. Beards, tattoos, and pierced ears (or other body parts) are strictly forbidden for men. Immodest attire and more than a single piercing per ear are forbidden among women. Smoking, using profane language, and drinking alcohol or even coffee are likewise banned. Heeding the dictum "Cougars don't cut corners," students keep to the sidewalks as they hurry to make it to class on time; nobody would think of attempting to shave a few precious seconds by treading on the manicured grass. Everyone is cheerful, friendly, and unfailingly polite.

Most non-Mormons think of Salt Lake City as the geographic heart of Mormonism, but in fact half the population of Salt Lake is Gentile, and many Mormons regard the city as a sinful, iniquitous place that's been corrupted by outsiders. To the Saints themselves, the true Mormon heartland is here in Provo and surrounding Utah County--the site of chaste little towns like Highland, American Fork, Orem, Payson and Salem--where the population is nearly 90 percent LDS. The Sabbath is taken seriously in these parts. Almost all businesses close on Sundays, as do public swimming pools, e ~ Jon Krakauer

By elevating the dictum of the market to the role of the sole criterion of rationality and efficiency, economics denies even all "respectability" to the distinction between essential and non-essential consumption, between productive and unproductive labor, between actual and potential surplus. ~ Paul A. Baran

There is a deep connection between Bernoulli's dictum and John Kelly's 1956 publication. It turns out that Kelly's prescription can be restated as this simple rule: When faced with a choice of wagers or investments, choose the one with the highest geometric means of outcomes. ~ William Poundstone