Arbitrary

Famous quotes containing the word arbitrary:

“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)

“It is not an arbitrary “decree of God,” but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

“Languages exist by arbitrary institutions and conventions among peoples; words, as the dialecticians tell us, do not signify naturally, but at our pleasure.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)