Famous quotes containing the word relative:
“Excellence or virtue is a settled disposition of the mind that determines our choice of actions and emotions and consists essentially in observing the mean relative to us ... a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“And since the average lifetime—the relative longevity—is far greater for memories of poetic sensations than for those of heartbreaks, since the very long time that the grief I felt then because of Gilbert, it has been outlived by the pleasure I feel, whenever I wish to read, as in a sort of sundial, the minutes between twelve fifteen and one o’clock, in the month of May, upon remembering myself chatting ... with Madame Swann under the reflection of a cradle of wisteria.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)