These negation quotes will inspire you. Negation, the contradiction or denial of something.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging negation quotes, negation sayings, and negation proverbs.
Best Negation Quotes
- “Relief is a great feeling.It’s the emotional and physical reward we receive from our bodies upon alleviation of pain, pressure and struggle. A time to bask in the lack of the negative.And yet, think about it—relief is really the status quo, a negation of the suffering, a nothing in itself. It is the way things were before the pressure and struggle began.So, is it a step back? A regression?Or is it an opportunity to regroup, start over, and move in a different direction?Use your moment of relief well.” ~ Vera Nazarian
- “The advanced education in Tantra obviously has to do with the entrance into samadhi, the negation of the self. That is what the path of negation means, not the negation of life, but the negation of anything that is not enlightenment.” ~ Frederick Lenz , Negation quotes about life
- “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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“It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.” ~ Niels Bohr
- “In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “We tend to misunderstand the colour black, seeing it as evil, or negation of life. Rather, black means all things being possible, infinite energy of life before consciousness has constructed any boundaries. When we fear blackness or darkness we fear the deep unconscious source of life itself.” ~ Rachel Pollack
- “”No” is a word that must never be negotiated, because the person who chooses not to hear it is trying to control you… Declining to hear “no” is a signal that someone is either seeking control or refusing to relinquish it.” ~ Gavin de Becker
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“Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer – that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.” ~ William Hazlitt
- “Defenceless under the nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.” ~ W. H. Auden
- “Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation…. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.” ~ Andrea Dworkin , Negation quotes about love
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“Consensus is the negation of leadership.” ~ Margaret Thatcher
- “But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.” ~ Karl Marx
- “Practice rather than preach. Make of your life an affirmation, defined by your ideals, not the negation of others. Dare to the level of your capability then go beyond to a higher level.” ~ Alexander Haig
- “That knowledge which purifies the mind and heart alone is true Knowledge, all else is only a negation of Knowledge.” ~ Ramakrishna
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“An ‘unemployed’ existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.” ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset
- “No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.” ~ Knut Hamsun
- “Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.” ~ Ivan Illich
- “The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.” ~ Simone Weil
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“Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.” ~ Gustave Courbet
- “Social justice is group psychology, it’s group rights, it’s collectivism, and it’s a negation of individual responsibility, which is what the Bible teaches. Individual responsibility. And of course, social justice leads very quickly to socialism, and ultimately to communism.” ~ Ted Cruz
- “Negation is the mind’s first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.” ~ Emile M. Cioran
- “An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.” ~ Salvatore Quasimodo
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“Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.” ~ Albert Camus
- “Of course, even the general designation ‘religious’ includes various basic ideas or convictions, for example, the indestructibility of the soul, the eternity of its existence, the existence of a higher being, etc. But all these ideas, regardless of how convincing they may be for the individual, are submitted to the critical examination of this individual and hence to a fluctuating affirmation or negation until emotional divination or knowledge assumes the binding force of apodictic faith.” ~ Adolf Hitler
- “Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.” ~ Robert E. Howard”I know I’ve got a death wish. I’ve never enjoyed my life, I’ve never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be.” ~ Anna Kavan
- “I know I’ve got a death wish. I’ve never enjoyed my life, I’ve never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be.” ~ Anna Kavan”A healthy society is life-affirming. Homosexuality is the metaphysical negation of life. Incapable of reproduction (giving life), it can replenish its numbers only by seduction.” ~ Don Feder
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“Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound.” ~ Hannah Arendt
- “In the anarchist milieu, communism, individualism, collectivism, mutualism and all the intermediate and eclectic programmes are simply the ways considered best for achieving freedom and solidarity in economic life; the ways believed to correspond more closely with justice and freedom for the distribution of the means of production and the products of labour among men. Bakunin was an anarchist, and he was a collectivist, an outspoken enemy of communism because he saw in it the negation of freedom and, therefore, of human dignity.” ~ Errico Malatesta
- “Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.” ~ Aleksandar Hemon”My paintings cannot be a negation of what has always been and always will be necessary – drawing and search for values.” ~ Theodore Robinson
- “I am firmly opposed to the government entering into any business the major purpose of which is competition with our citizens… for the Federal Government deliberately to go out to build up and expand… a power and manufacturing business is to break down the initiative and enterprise of the American people; it is the destruction of equality of opportunity amongst our people, it is the negation of the ideals upon which our civilization has been based.” ~ Herbert Hoover
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“But in fact if you look at film as a metaphor, only through the negative can you have the positive print. What I’m trying to get to is the positive value of negation.” ~ Godfrey Reggio
- “Each pursues his private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing it or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual’s pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others’ interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation.” ~ Karl Marx
- “No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man’s inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society.” ~ Emma Goldman
- “Buddha himself taught different teachings to different people under different circumstances. For some people, there are beliefs based on a Creator. For others, no Creator. The only “definitive truth” for Buddhism is the absolute negation of any one truth as the Definitive Truth.” ~ Dalai Lama
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“Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.” ~ Terry Eagleton
- “One function, at least, of true wilderness is to provide a refuge from the crassitudes of civilization-whether visible, intangible, audible-whether of billboard, of pavement, of auto horn-all of these are urban essences; all are negations of wilderness.” ~ Benton MacKaye
- “Some popular quotations smell of airless closets. They exhale the stale imagination of the intellectual lower middle class. “Suspension of disbelief” has become one of them. Dressed up as a scintillating double negation, it serves the pedestrian notion of art as illusion.” ~ Rudolf Arnheim
- “how ridiculous we often are in our negations, our strutting self importance, our penchant for making labels and sticking them on people. As though labelling a person disposed of him!” ~ Muriel Lester
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“Art for me…is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.” ~ Emile Zola
- “[The sea] is the healer and the reviver, it cleanses the cavities of self-disgust and melancholy, of sloth and negation with the salt solution of life. It cures the lethargies of flesh and spirit with the slap and shake of elemental force. It cradles and comforts. Give it trust and it holds you secure; fight it and it kills.” ~ Marya Mannes
- “If there is one thing for which we stand in this country, it is for complete religious freedom, and it is an emphatic negation of this right to cross-examine a man on his religion before being willing to support him for office.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.” ~ Albert Camus
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“I despise simplicity. It is the negation of all that is beautiful.” ~ Norman Hartnell
- “There’s a path in enlightenment called the path of negation where we intentionally throw ourselves into experiences that are extremely transient. In other words, we do all the stuff you’re supposed to normally avoid to become enlightened, intentionally.” ~ Frederick Lenz
- “The direction we are going in at this moment is the negation of material goods as being important and the great importance of spiritual values and sensations. Permissiveness, if you will. There is tremendous talk of sex and bi-sexuality.” ~ Emilio Pucci
- “The truth is that my work – I was going to say my mission – is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.” ~ Miguel de Unamuno
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“Somehow the body keeps life going despite the ravaging negations of the mind.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windowsthe displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcitymimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.” ~ Jean Baudrillard
- “All rejection and negation indicates a deficiency in fertility: fundamentally, if only we were good plowland we would allow nothing to go unused, and in every thing, event, and person we would welcome manure, rain, or sunshine.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Evil denotes the lack of good. Not every absence of good is an evil, for absence may be taken either in a purely negative or in aprivative sense. Mere negation does not display the character of evil, otherwise nonexistents would be evil and moreover, a thing would be evil for not possessing the goodness of something else, which would mean that man is bad for not having the strength of a lion or the speed of a wild goat. But what is evil is privation; in this sense blindness means the privation of sight.” ~ Thomas Aquinas
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“Entertaining is one method of avoiding people. It is very often the negation of hospitality.” ~ Elizabeth Bibesco
- “I wrote The Philosophy of Disenchantment, which is, I think, the gloomiest and worst book ever published. Out of sheer laziness, I then produced a history of atheism, The Anatomy of Negation, which has been honored by international dislike. Need I state that of all my children it is the one that I prefer?” ~ Edgar Saltus
- “Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the way, that any other field of human endeavour does: the extent of the negation of man’s corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented.” ~ Stanislaw Lem
- “Social justice is collectivism. Social justice is the rights of a group. It denies individual responsibility. It’s a negation of individual responsibility, so social justice is totally contrary to the Word of God.” ~ Ted Cruz
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“The Buddhist message is a message not of the negation of life, but one of affirmation.” ~ Frederick Lenz
- “To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions-between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, cooperativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation.” ~ Norman Cousins
- “The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form of Divine revelation and scientific authority. But the same question stands open from the days of Socrates and Pilate down to our own age of wholesale negation: is there such a thing as absolute truth in the hands of any one party or man?” ~ H. P. Blavatsky
- “My personal view is that nobody should stand between an employer and employee when it comes to employment contract negations. Not the government and not meddlesome third parties. This includes the ability for individuals to bargain collectively with their employers.” ~ Mark Noble
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“What Marxism calls atheism is basically the negation of an idol, which sometimes bears the name of God.” ~ Ernesto Cardenal
- “Schools of science and physics replacing each other at a faster and faster rate. Just the nature of our world is constant revision, constant…negation of previous beliefs, and so…the whole world is a twist ending. Every week is a twist ending.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
- “We avoid sensuousness, only by resorting to simple negation. We come at last to define spirit by saying that it is not matter.” ~ Albert Pike
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“The only “definitive truth” for Buddhism is the absolute negation of anyone truth as the Definitive Truth.” ~ Dalai Lama
- “Ibsen is at heart an optimist. He could not close his life’s work with a note of negation. When We Dead Awaken is a clear, ringing call to the future.” ~ Jeanette Lee
- “To doubt has more of faith … than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
