Friend

What is a friend exactly? After some deliberation, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of the word ‘friend’ is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the word ‘friend’.

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
– Elbert Hubbard

“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
– Aristotle

“To like and dislike the same things, that is indeed true friendship.”
– Catiline‎

“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
– Anaïs Nin

“There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.”
– Linda Grayson

“Friendship is Love without his wings!”
– Lord Byron

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
– C.S. Lewis

See more: Approximations

Beauty

When contemplating the property beauty, as with knowledge, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of beauty is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the property beauty.

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
– Confucius

“The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

“Beauty awakens the soul to act.”
– Dante Alighieri

“Beauty is not caused. It is.”
– Emily Dickinson

“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.”
– Khalil Gibran

“Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth whether it existed before or not.”
– John Keats

“There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.”
– Edgar Allan Poe

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
– David Hume

“Beauty is a form of Genius – is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.”
– Oscar Wilde

“Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.”
– Gwyneth Paltrow

“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”
– Anne Frank

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Hatred

When contemplating the property hatred, as with knowledge, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of hatred is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the property hatred.

“Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself lacks.”
– Shannon L. Alder

“Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”
– John Steinbeck

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”
– Maya Angelou

“Never waste a minute thinking about people you don’t like.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.”
– George Bernard Shaw

“In time we hate that which we often fear.”
– William Shakespeare, (Antony and Cleopatra)

“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”
– Booker T. Washington

“Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”
– Gautama Buddha

See more: Approximations

Probability‏

When contemplating the property probability, as with knowledge, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of probability is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the property probability.

“In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.”
– Baruch Spinoza

“Life is a school of probability.”
– Walter Bagehot

“If nature has taught us anything it is that the impossible is probable.”
– Ilyas Kassam

“Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that the mere fact of our existence should keep us all in a state of contented dazzlement.”
– Lewis Thomas

“Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.”
– William Osler

“The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.”
– B. F. Skinner

“Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.”
– Edward Thorndike

“Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.”
– George Boole

“The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.”
– Thomas Huxley

“Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”
– George Eliot

See more: Approximations

Uncertainty‏

When contemplating the property uncertainty‏, as with knowledge, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of uncertainty‏ is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the property uncertainty‏.

“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
– Douglas Adams

“Il n’est pas certain que tout soit incertain.”
(It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)
– Blaise Pascal

“The mistake is thinking that there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.”
– David Levithan

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
– Albert Einstein

“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of not knowing.”
– Mark Z. Danielewski

“In these times I don’t, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don’t want what I know and want what I don’t know.”
– Marsilio Ficino

“When in doubt, be ridiculous.”
– Sherwood Smith

“We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.”
– Blaise Pascal

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
– Richard Feynman

See more: Approximations

Truth

When contemplating the property truth, as with knowledge, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of truth is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the property truth.

“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”
– François de La Rochefoucauld

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
– Winston Churchill

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
– Oscar Wilde

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
– Gloria Steinem

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
– Socrates

“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
– Mark Twain

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
– Aldous Huxley

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
– Pablo Picasso

“The more I see, the less I know for sure.”
– John Lennon

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
– Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

See more: Approximations

Certainty‏

When contemplating the property certainty, as with knowledge, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of certainty is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the property certainty.

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
– Voltaire

“The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.”
– Ashley Montagu

“There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life.”
– John Stuart Mill

“I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.”
– Christiaan Huygens

“What is known for certain is dull.”
– Max Ferdinand Perutz

“To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous.”
– Chinese proverb

“Inquiry is fatal to certainty.”
– Will Durant

“It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.”
– Anatole France

“If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we have to correct them.”
– Karl Popper

See more: Approximations

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