Coherence quotes

  • The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.
    -- Adam Smith

    #Ideas #Imagination #Coherence

  • Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
    -- Al Alvarez

    #Art #May #Coherence

  • A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.
    -- Dana Spiotta

    #Coherence #Satisfaction #Authenticity

  • Meditation makes the entire nervous system go into a field of coherence.
    -- Deepak Chopra

    #Meditation #Coherence #Fields

  • The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.
    -- Douglas Hofstadter

    #Communication #Long #Coherence

  • It is in many circumstances a troubling thing to belong to the advanced class of a backward nation. One surrenders coherence and begins a difficult process of choice which ends, often, in an eclectic idiosyncrasy.
    -- George W. S. Trow

    #Class #Choices #Coherence

  • You're suddenly seeing the coherence and the interconnectedness of everything, left to right, top to bottom, front to back. It's all connected, and, somehow, it's all in balance. And that's, of course, when you go, 'Yes!'.
    -- Henry Wessel, Jr.

    #Photography #Balance #Coherence

  • In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.
    -- Herbert Read

    #Degrees #Coherence #Evolution

  • we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.
    -- Jose Saramago

    #Identity #Coherence #Wasting Time

  • Rarely has a collection of essays from a dozen scholars created a whole greater than the sum of its parts, but Capitalism Takes Command conveys with detail, coherence, and sophistication the changes in the American economy in the nineteenth century under the multiple imperatives of capitalism.
    -- Joyce Appleby

    #Details #Dozen #Coherence

  • With acknowledgement of residues, we can be more easily prepared to grant the unit of science, the overlapping of disciplines, and the total coherence of all facts.
    -- Kenneth Lee Pike

    #Discipline #Coherence #Facts

  • The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures.
    -- Max Planck

    #Goal #Culture #Coherence

  • Those heart-hammering nightmares that start to lose coherence even as you're waking up from them, but that still manage to leave their moldering fingerprints all across your day.
    -- Mike Carey

    #Heart #Coherence #Waking

  • I mean, you hear the word 'globalization' over and over and over again. Globalization, globalization, globalization. Rarely has a word gone so directly from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence.
    -- Robert Reich

    #Mean #Coherence #Obscurity

  • Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
    -- Siri Hustvedt

    #Memories #Syntax #Coherence

  • Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the English language.
    -- William Shawn

    #Believe #Syntax #Coherence

  • People in power tend to find poetry dangerous to them because it is dislocating, they can't catch it, can't control it. They prefer coherence, what's blunt and has clarity.
    -- Elia Suleiman

    #People #Coherence #Clarity

  • In such systems, there is unquestioning respect for authority. Faith trumps evidence. But if indeed this is broadly the explanation for how co-operative behaviour has evolved and been maintained in human societies, it could be very bad news. Because although such authoritarian systems seem to be good at preserving social coherence and an orderly society, they are, by the same token, not good at adapting to change.
    -- Robert May, Baron May of Oxford

    #Behaviour #News #Coherence

  • The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imagined plenitude.
    -- Victor Burgin

    #Reality #Identity #Coherence