Significance Quotes - page 2

...even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph. (John Fowles)
An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain. View quote
Upton Sinclair
(Coining the phrase ‘test of significance'): Critical tests of this kind may be called tests of significance, and when such tests are available we may discover whether a second sample is or is not significantly different from the first. View quote
Ronald Fisher
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles. View quote
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Time has no meaning in itself unless we choose to give it significance. View quote
Leo Buscaglia
The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation. View quote
Bell hooks
And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later... View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
I noticed long ago that Amin has the tendency to concentrate power in his own hands but I did not attach any particular significance to this. However, recently this tendency has become dangerous. View quote
Nur Muhammad Taraki
To penetrate into the essence of all being and significance and to release the fragrance of that inner attainment for the guidance and benefit of others, by expressing, in the world of forms, truth, love, purity and beauty - this is the sole game which has intrinsic and absolute worth. All other happenings, incidents and attainments in themselves can have no lasting importance. View quote
Meher Baba
I spent on the Other Earth many "other years," wandering from mind to mind and country to country, but I did not gain any clear understanding of the psychology of the Other Men and the significance of their history till I encountered one of their philosophers, an aging but still vigorous man whose eccentric and unpalatable views had prevented him from attaining eminence. View quote
Olaf Stapledon
In man, social intercourse has centred mainly on the process of absorbing fluid into the organism, but in the domestic dog and to a lesser extent among all wild canine species, the act charged with most social significance is the excretion of fluid. (Olaf Stapledon)
In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Without God, life has no purpose, and without purpose, life has no meaning. Without meaning, life has no significance or hope. View quote
Rick Warren
In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance. View quote
Edwin H. Land
Man's chief purpose...is the creation and preservation of values: that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Stalin made mistakes. He made mistakes towards us, for example, in 1927. He made mistakes towards the Yugoslavs too. One cannot advance without mistakes... It is necessary to make mistakes. The party cannot be educated without learning from mistakes. This has great significance. View quote
Mao Zedong
The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. View quote
Walter Benjamin
Perfidy and brutal force thwarted opportunities for calling President Wilson's Arbitral Award to life. Nevertheless, its significance is not to be underestimated: through that decision the aspiration of the Armenian people for the lost Motherland had obtained vital and legal force. View quote
Serzh Sargsyan
It was not certain what significance the ceremony held, for unfortunately the records were lost, but the formality was no less sacred for being unintelligible. View quote
Mervyn Peake
The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word. View quote
Stanisław Lem
As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the problem of madness arose and became of great social significance. In the next chapter I shall examine the creation of social deviants, and shall show that as formerly priests had manufactured heretics, so physicians, as the new guardians of social conduct and morality, began to manufacture madmen. (Thomas Szasz)
It is a good lesson --though it may often be a hard one --for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us. View quote
Marcel Proust
When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself. View quote
Karl Jaspers
The significance of God, cause, number, substance or soul consists, as James asserts, in nothing but the tendency of the given concept to make us act or think. If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about such metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no ‘distinct ideas' or truths, since they do not make any ‘sensible difference to anybody. View quote
Max Horkheimer