Famous quotes containing the word arbitrary:
“We do the same thing to parents that we do to children. We insist that they are some kind of categorical abstraction because they produced a child. They were people before that, and they’re still people in all other areas of their lives. But when it comes to the state of parenthood they are abruptly heir to a whole collection of virtues and feelings that are assigned to them with a fine arbitrary disregard for individuality.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“The Brahman’s virtue consists in doing, not right, but arbitrary things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)