“Life is not theory. It is reality, with inherent duties to everything and everyone.”

— Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka

The Authority

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Life is not theory. It is reality, with inherent duties to everything and everyone." by Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka?

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka photo

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka 6

painter from Hungary 1853–1919

Related quotes

“History moves in contradictions. The skeleton of historic existence, the economic structure of society, also develops in contradictions. Forms eternally follow forms. Everything has only a passing being. The dynamic force of life creates the new over and over again — such is the law inherent in reality.”

Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) Soviet politician

Imperialism and World Economy (1917), Ch. 15 http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1917/imperial/index.htm

“His whole duty is only to sort life as it flows through him, and in the vast fragmentariness of time and space and event to discover essential and inherent order and rhythm and shape.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)
Context: A good novelist, or so I have been taught in China, should be above all else tse ran, that is, natural, unaffected, and so flexible and variable as to be wholly at the command of the material that flows through him. His whole duty is only to sort life as it flows through him, and in the vast fragmentariness of time and space and event to discover essential and inherent order and rhythm and shape. We should never be able, merely by reading pages, to know who wrote them, for when the style of a novelist becomes fixed, that style becomes his prison. The Chinese novelists varied their writing to accompany like music their chosen themes.

“An open society such as ours is based on the recognition that our understanding of reality is inherently imperfect. Nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. As the philosopher Karl Popper has shown, the ultimate truth is not attainable even in science. All theories are subject to testing and the process of replacing old theories with better ones never ends.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Speech at the National Press Club (2004)

“The Constitution of the United States asserts that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Justice William Johnson (1823)
1820s

“When we have lost everything, including hope, life becomes a disgrace, and death a duty.”

W.C. Fields (1880–1946) actor

“I'll tell everyone that the children are my reason for living, when in reality my life is their reason for living.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Veronika Decides to Die (1998)

“Everyone has the right to doubt everything as often as he pleases and the duty to do it at least once. No way of looking at things is too sacred to be reconsidered. No way of doing things is beyond improvement.”

Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician

Source: The Use of Lateral Thinking

“Those who grumble at the little thing that has fallen to their lot to do will grumble at everything. Always grumbling, they will lead a miserable life, and everything will be a failure. But those who do their duties as they go, putting their shoulders to the wheel, will see the light, and higher duties will fall to their share.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

“It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Letters on Tactics (April 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/x01.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 24.
1910s

“Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.”

Michael Crichton book Jurassic Park

Source: Jurassic Park

Related topics