Substance Vs Relation Quotes

We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc.

That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on.

But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ...

Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker.

It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions). ~ Gregory Bateson

We're making new investments in the development of gasoline and diesel and jet fuel that's actually made from a plant-like substance-algae ... we could replace up to 17 percent of the oil we import for transportation with this fuel that we can grow right here in America. ~ Barack Obama

When the entire process becomes a prescribed ritual that does not allow for spontaneous variations and reactions, the vitality of the medium and our relation to it suffers. ~ Jerry Uelsmann

Interestingly, in terms of shame triggers for women, motherhood is a close second. And (bonus!) you don't have to be a mother to experience mother shame. Society views womanhood and motherhood as inextricably bound; therefore our value as women is often determined by where we are in relation to our roles as mothers or potential mothers. Women are constantly asked why they haven't married or, if they're married, why they haven't had children. Even women who are married and have one child are often asked why they haven't had a second child. ~ Brene Brown

I'll tell you what the Lubavitcher Rebbe believed. You can hold a wooden chair in your hands and feel that it exists. But if the chair is burning, you can't hold the heat and energy that is created from the fire. So it is with our souls. No substance really disappears, it is transformed. But you can't always see it. ~ Diana Bletter

Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself. ~ Michel Foucault

Nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the limitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject; and that is something else again. ~ Thomas Merton

Comedians in their infancy are generally selfish, irresponsible, emotionally retarded, morally dubious, substance-addicted animals who live out of boxes and milk crates. They are plagued with feelings of failure and fraudulence. They are prone to fleeting fits of manic grandiosity and are completely dependent on the acceptance and approval of rooms full of strangers, strangers the comedian resents until he feels sufficiently loved and embraced.
Perhaps I am only speaking for myself here. ~ Marc Maron

I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology. ~ Italo Calvino

The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so. ~ Harriet Martineau

Hatred always involves a painful sense of separation from love, which may be idealized. A person you feel strongly against at any given time upsets you because he or she does not live up to your expectations. The higher your expectations the greater any divergence from them seems. If you hate a parent it is precisely because you expect such love. A person from whom you expect nothing will never earn your bitterness.

In a strange manner, hatred is a means of returning to love; and left alone and expressed it is meant to communicate a separation that exists in relation to what is expected.

Love, therefore, can contain hate very nicely. Hatred can contain love and be driven by it, particularly an idealized love. You "hate" something that separates you from a loved object. It is precisely because the object is so loved that it is so disliked if expectations are not met. You may love a parent, and if the parent does not seem to return the love and denies your expectations, then you may "hate" the same parent because of the love that leads you to expect more. The hatred is meant to get your love back. It is supposed to lead to a communication from you, stating your feelings - clearing the air, so to speak, and bringing you closer to the love object. Hatred is not the denial of love, then, but an attempt to regain it, and a painful recognition of circumstances that separate you from it. -- ~ Jane Roberts

It is essential that we enable young people to see themselves as participants in one of the most exciting eras in history, and to have a sense of purpose in relation to it. ~ Nelson Rockefeller

Here is the answer to the riddle of love. Love implies relation. If lived in isolation, it becomes selfishness; if absorbed in collectivity, it loses its personality and, therefore, the right to love. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

Justification is the means whereby we appropriate the saving act of God in the past, and sanctification the promise of God's activity in the present and future ... Justification is primarily concerned with the relation between man and the law of God, sanctification with the Christian's separation from the world until the second coming of Christ ... Justification is the new creation of the new man, and sanctification is his preservation until the day of Jesus Christ. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

They got drunk and high on a regular basis, but this is a vestige of youth that you either quit while you're young or you become an addict if you don't die.
If you are the Old Guy In The Punk House, move out. You have a substance abuse problem. ~ Bucky Sinister

Spend not the remnant of thy days in thoughts and fancies concerning other men, when it is not in relation to some common good, when by it thou art hindered from some other better work. ~ Marcus Aurelius

A hypocrite [is the one who] wants to impress others with an external facade of religious piety that he knows is devoid of internal spiritual substance. ~ Sam Storms

What distinguishes the language of science from language as we ordinarily understand the word? ... What science strives for is an utmost acuteness and clarity of concepts as regards their mutual relation and their correspondence to sensory data. ~ Albert Einstein

How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of apprehension at each childish ailment, and the children clung to their parents with love and adoration; a few years passed, the children grew up, and persons not of their kin were more important to their happiness than father or mother. Indifference displaced the blind and instinctive love of the past. Their meetings were a source of boredom and irritation. Distracted once at the thought of a month's separation they were able now to look forward with equanimity to being parted for years. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

This preoccupation with the classics was the happiest thing that could have befallen me. It gave me a standard of values. To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education. ... Faulty though my own practice has always been, I learned sound doctrine - the virtue of a clean, bare style, of simplicity, of a hard substance and an austere pattern. Above all the Calvinism of my boyhood was broadened, mellowed, and also confirmed. For if the classics widened my sense of the joy of life they also taught its littleness and transience; if they exalted the dignity of human nature they insisted upon its frailties and the aidos with which the temporal must regard the eternal. I lost then any chance of being a rebel, for I became profoundly conscious of the dominion of unalterable law. ... Indeed, I cannot imagine a more precious viaticum than the classics of Greece and Rome, or a happier fate than that one's youth should be intertwined with their world of clear, mellow lights, gracious images, and fruitful thoughts. They are especially valuable to those who believe that Time enshrines and does not destroy, and who do what I am attempting to do in these pages, and go back upon and interpret the past. No science or philosophy can give that colouring, for such provide a schematic, and not a living, breathing universe. And I do not think that the mastery of other literatures can give it in a like degree, for they do not furnish the same totality of life - a complete world ~ John Buchan

Jesus never spoke of truth in abstraction, as something that stands alone. Jesus always spoke of truth in relation to God being revealed through himself. ~ Tim McConnell

Preparing citizens to act thoughtfully to create a more just, open, and creative society gives form, substance and meaning to often abstract concepts of freedom and democracy. ~ Gregory S. Prince, Jr.

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation. ~ Bertrand Russell

We can readily see the function of nature, how it reconciles discordant things in such a fashion that it reduces all the differences to unity and combines them into one body and one substance: and also it combines them in plants and in seeds, and by the joining of male and female engenders beings according to the natural course.' - Fioretto della Bibbia ~ Carlo Ginzburg

We are condemned to be modern. We can't escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it ... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity. ~ David Watson

The cows shorten the grass, and the chickens eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation. ~ Joel Salatin

Enron was becoming a virtual cult of creativity, often placing swagger over substance. New ideas were celebrated for their newness, for their potential; tried and true businesses like the pipelines were almost derided. ~ Kurt Eichenwald

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Love is a relation that starts before you are born and survives even after you die... ~ Deepanshu Saini

Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. ~ P.D. Ouspensky

To say that God is an incorporeal substance, is to say in effect there is no God at all. What alleges he against it, but the School-divinity which I have already answered? Scripture he can bring none, because the word incorporeal is not found in Scripture. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Image is only temporal. Substance endures. Who said, "Image is everything"? And who believed it? ~ T.F. Hodge

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads. ~ Andre Breton

Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world. ~ Ronald Coase

Over the years, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They're passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones. ~ Christina Baker Kline

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

In Illinois a pregnant woman who takes an illegal drug can be prosecuted for 'delivering a controlled substance to a minor.' This is an explicit recognition that the unborn is a person with rights of her own. But that same woman who is prosecuted and jailed for endangering her child is perfectly free to abort her child. In America today, it is illegal to harm your preborn child, but it is perfectly legal to kill him. ~ Randy Alcorn

The abstract idea of a spirit certainly implies that it has neither substance, form, shape, voice, or anything which can render its presence visible or sensible to human faculties. ~ Walter Scott

Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development. ~ Alexander Herzen

There is a thirst for Love which no human relation can quench. It is only the Divine's love that can satisfy that thirst.

MCW, vol 14, Words Of The Mother II, p.121 ~ The Mother

Everybody, whether or not he puts the question vocally, wants to know whether life has any meaning, what his relation is to 'whatever gods there be,' why he is here, what his destiny is, how sin and pain may be overcome, whether prayer matters, what lies beyond death for himself and his loved ones. ~ Georgia Harkness

Maya (deceit) means ignorance of one's own Self! ~ Dada Bhagwan

We need others for our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Without others we are nothing. Our sense that we are an island, an independent, self-sufficient individual, bears no relation to reality. It is closer to the truth to picture ourself as a cell in the vast body of life, distinct yet intimately bound up with all living beings. We cannot exist without others, and they in turn are affected by everything we do. The idea that it is possible to secure our own welfare while neglecting the welfare of others, or even at the expense of others, is completely unrealistic. ~ Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, andis an affair of the individual and the household, a ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Finally, there is a more subtle relation among F, E, and V. ~ Steven Weinberg

I do think we should be focused on substance and record. If you want a candidate who opposes amnesty, who opposes citizenship for the 12 million people here illegally, I'm the only candidate in the race who opposes that. ~ Ted Cruz

…it is certain that there are many things to which our language ascribes meaning indicative of a material substance, where simple contemplation indicates that it is largely referential in nature. The conditions or circumstances in our private, political, social and economic lives are such relations; we speak and behave as if these 'circumstances' were as rigid as fate, as immutable as a meteor or the trembling earth beneath our feet. In reality these circumstances are convenient shorthand for the way in which we relate to one another. In order to make it yet more comfortable we employ words of foreign origin, so that we might better obscure the source of the noun through the use of a verb. Speaking then of the state, we regard this word as nothing more than a certain civil-legal construction, existing only at the discretion of our will. This concession to comfort is a great sign of our common understanding, which wouldn't be possible without this materialization of the fluidity and spirituality of relations. Yet, it is a curse for the attainment of knowledge, because we mistake a mere representation for reality; and so it is a major curse for the type of understanding necessary for the establishment of just human relations in society. ~ Gustav Landauer