Top 1004 Relative Quotes & Sayings

The relative size of your force as against that of your adversary is by itself of no consequence. What controls is the relative size of your force at the point where you join in battle. You can strike with the few and be many if you strike your adversary in his gaps. Seek out places where the defense is not strict, the place not tightly guarded, the generals weak, the troops disorderly, the supplies are scarce and the forces are isolated.

An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations.

The bookis a distant relative of the truth, and the film is a distant relative of the book.

It is however, difficult to make your narratives relative by yourself. A novelists' work is to provide models to make your narratives relative. If you read my novels then you may feel, "I have the same experience as this narrative", or "I have the same idea as this novel". It means that your narrative and mine sympathize, concord and resonate together.

Kids are told there are no differences between boys and girls. They are told there is no such thing ultimately as right and wrong. Values are relative. Truth is relative. Morality is defined by individual choice. If that isn't a recipe for sexual harassment and other forms of sexual and physical abuse, I don't know what it is.

Age is relative. Experience is relative. And I think often intensity is confused with maturity.

The less you demand total fulfillment from relationships, the more you can appreciate them for the beautiful tapestries they are, in which absolute and relative, perfect and imperfect, infinite and finite are marvelously interwoven. You can stop fighting the shifting tides of relative love and learn to ride them instead. And you come to appreciate more fully the simple, ordinary heroism involved in opening to another person and forging real intimacy.

In addition to the problem of public confidence, hiring a relative also causes problems within the government organization. It can undermine the morale of government officials. It can cause confusion about what the lines of authority are; in other words, the relative may have a particular title, but many may perceive the relative's role as even more important than the title would suggest. It may be very difficult to say no to the president's son-in-law.

All wealth is relative; and so is its absence.

Everything in life is relative.

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.

It's possible to be a woman married to a very wealthy, powerful man but to be relatively disempowered. Not just relative to him, relative to a middle class woman who works.

Freedom is relative.

A brother who is unhappy is a dangerous relative to have.

All progression is in the relative world.

There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things.

Where there's a will - there's a relative!

Unreasonable is very relative.

Poverty is relative, and, therefor not ignoble.

Risk is relative. And relative to the imminent planetary 'game over' neon sign that's starting to flicker above our children's heads, just as they are preparing for a full life ahead... now that's what you call risk!

The history of man so far is nothing to brag about, from the standpoint of our ideas - and what I mean is, that in comparison with most other societies, our present-day American society has achieved things which are remarkable: material wealth, greater than for any other nation; a relative freedom from oppression; a relative mobility; a spreading of art, of music, of thought, which is also rather unique.

Whoever is my relative, I will not be nice to them.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?

Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative.

One will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative to sight, but the fact that this or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not itself relative to sight; it is a real fact.

The real conflict in the abortion issue is between a value - the right to choose whether or not to have the child - and a moral dictum - don't kill other humans. The more here, even, is flexible and relative. "Thou shall not kill" really means, "don't kill productive, contributing members of your own society that aren't a threat to your safety." If it was not relative, then no "Judeo-Christian" person could ever go to war or execute someone.

When we say a show is successful, it's because, relative to the investment, it's successful, relative to how else we would have spent that money on licensing something else, does this creation - did it attract the audience that it was built for.

Our relative being is what rules our relative world.

Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.

Grades are almost completely relative, in effect ranking students relative to others in their class. Thus extra achievement by one student not only raises his position, but in effect lowers the position of others.

A commodity has a value because it is a crystallization of social labor. The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it; that is to say, on the relative mass of labor necessary for its production.

Impossible is relative.

Allah is in Himself the non-being and the being, the inexistent and the existent. He is at the same time that which we designate by absolute non-being and by absolute being; or by relative non-being and relative being. . . . All these designation come back to God alone, for there is nothing which we can perceive, know, write or say which is not Him.

Hear me, four quarters of the world-a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand, that I may be like you. With your power only can I face the winds.

I think evil is very relative.

One of my favorite patterns is the tendency for the markets to move from relative lows to relative highs and vice versa every two to four days. This pattern is a function of human behavior. It takes several days of a market rallying before it looks really good. That’s when everyone wants to buy it, and that’s the time when the professionals, like myself, are selling. Conversely, when the market has been down for a few days, and everyone is bearish, that’s the time I like to be buying.

It may seem rash indeed to draw conclusions valid for the whole universe from what we can see from the small corner to which we are confined. Who knows that the whole visible universe is not like a drop of water at the surface of the earth? Inhabitants of that drop of water, as small relative to it as we are relative to the Milky Way, could not possibly imagine that beside the drop of water there might be a piece of iron or a living tissue, in which the properties of matter are entirely different.

Everything is relative; and only that is absolute.

Over the past decade or so, you have seen the flip side of that as you've seen stock prices have come down a lot relative to gold. Now you are getting a change where people are more comfortable holding gold because in the rear-view mirror it doesn't look so bad for gold. Bonds have not come down as much relative to gold, but I think the bond bubble is going to burst and will be falling for years too. And gold will look that much better.

I think the word rich is all relative.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

I still have drive, but everything is relative.

I am unpersuaded that relative poverty and hard work are greater adversities than relative affluence and free time.

Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.

Both light and dark are eternity. Human beings assign relative values to colors, but beyond the relative, there just is - what in Zen we call "suchness".

It appears that all that can be, is. The Creator's hand does not appear to have been opened in order to give existence to a certain determinate number of species, but it seems that it has thrown out all at once a world of relative and non-relative creatures, an infinity of harmonic and contrary combinations and a perpetuity of destructions and replacements. What idea of power is not given us by this spectacle! What feeling of respect for its Author is not inspired in us by this view of the universe!

When you put relative and absolute truth together and they become one unit, it becomes possible to make things workable. You are not too much on the side of absolute truth, or you would become too theoretical. You are not too much on the side of relative truth, or you would become too precise. When you put them together, you realize that there is no problem.

Insanity is relative. Who sets the norm?

We now have the technology to pretty much hear everything. Can you imagine how our holiday dinners would be if every relative's entire conversations from birth to that moment in time was shown to every other relative?

Life grows relative to one’s investment in it.

Normal is all relative.

It is hard to witness to truth to people who believe truth is relative. It is hard to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to people who believe that, since morality is relative, they have no sins to forgive.

People are, by and large, quite poor at judging correct absolute values but are astute about determining relative values. Psychologists call this coherent arbitrariness, which suggests that individuals are coherent when they compare prices on a relative basis but arbitrary when those prices are considered versus fundamental value.

Time has only a relative existence.

But everything is relative, Bertie... You, for instance, are my relative, and I am your relative.

It has become clear that America's civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long - relative to what we spend on the military, and more important, relative to the responsibilities and challenges our nation has around the world.

Success, you know, is a relative thing.

Scores do not reveal the most important facts about a wine. The written commentary (tasting notes) that accompanies the ratings is a better source of information than any score regarding the wine's style and personality, its quality level relative to its peers, and its relative value and aging potential.

What is Thanksgiving without a nutty relative?