Arbitrary quotes
174 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside arbitrary — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion."
"The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit."
"They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind."
"We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze."
"No language is as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem'd polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another."
"The most pernicious of all taxes are the arbitrary."
"Youth was so mercilessly hard in its decisions; it had its own unyielding standards and had not yet learned enough to know that time would prove them arbitrary."
"There is a God inside my PC. An Old-Testament God with lots of arbitrary rules and utterly no mercy."
"Democracy is about non-arbitrary decisions. Democracy is about spreading decisions; it is not about destroying processes."
"I use color in a completely arbitrary way in order to express myself powerfully."
"All colours are arbitrary."
"We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena."
"For instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself more forcefully."
"The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it."
"We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience."
"I removed the freeway from its temporal context. Overpasses, cloverleafs, exit ramps took on the personality of Mayan ruins for me. Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units. I abstracted and purified."
"Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours."
"In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political."
"And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost."
"I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being."
