Incoherence Quotes:

Incoherence is a common hazard for journalists who dabble in ethical judgments.

- Andrew Ferguson

source: "Scotty". www.weeklystandard.com. February 24, 2003.

topic: Hazards, Common, Judgment, Incoherence

When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.

- P. J. O'Rourke

source: P.J. O'Rourke (2009). “On The Wealth of Nations: A Book that Shook the World”, p.33, Atlantic Books Ltd

topic: Luxury, Adam, Term, Incoherence, Shorthand

It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence.

- Deborah Levy

topic: Believe, Want, Impossible, Incoherence

Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?

- Paul Valery

topic: Real, Boredom, People, Incoherence, Sudden Change

Since I've become a central banker, I've learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.

- Alan Greenspan

source: 1987 Address to Congress, Sep. Quoted by Jonathan Marshall in the San Francisco Chronicle, 9 Jun 1995.

topic: Misunderstood, Bankers, I've Learned, Incoherence

Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

topic: Believe, Sweat, People, Incoherence, Bustle

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

- Oscar Wilde

source: Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.78, Oxford University Press on Demand

topic: Hurt, Real, Style, Incoherence, Crude

Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.

- Judith Butler

topic: Identity, Connections, May, Incoherence

And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call 'sustained incoherence.

- David Bohm

source: Professor Chris Jenks, David Bohm (2004). “Thought as a System”, p.11, Routledge

topic: Struggle, Thinking, Trying, Incoherence

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

- William Butler Yeats

topic: Ideas, Breakfast, Poet, Incoherence, Bundles

All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

- Wallace Stevens

topic: Political, Poetic, Economic, Incoherence, Intricacy

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

- Paul Auster

topic: Simple, Goes On, Opaque, Incoherence

The aggressive incoherence of our common surroundings can be described as entropy made visible. The way we have disposed things on the landscape leads us in the direction of disorder and death. They are categorically evil. These dispositions are destroying our only home-planet and other organisms that share it. They defeat our need to care about where we are and the things in place there. They prompt us to feel that civilization is not worth carrying on. They rob us of our identity and our will to live. These things are not about personal taste or style.

- James Howard Kunstler

source: Interview With Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org.

topic: Home, Civilization, Evil, Incoherence, Personal Taste

In my incoherence I was grateful that for a few moments I had known what it was to suffer-or so I thought. But nothing is less like a thing that that which is closest to it. A man who had been near to death thinks how he knows death. When the day finally comes for him to meet it, he does not recognise it. 'This is not it,' he says, as he dies.

- Raymond Radiguet

topic: Grateful, Thinking, Men, Incoherence

Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating the enemies . . . despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent; all are familiar images of American society. They are signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climaxes where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems - private nightmares expanded to a social level.

- Paul Shepard

topic: Technology, Broken, Historical, Incoherence, Wallowing

In trying to explain our political paralysis, analysts cite President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for important legislation. These are large factors to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit of all: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

- Jacob Weisberg

topic: Ignorance, Political, Important, Culprit, Incoherence

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e. the Book of Revelations), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams.

- Thomas Jefferson

topic: Dream, Religious, Book, Incoherence, Maniacs

Any time one person makes an effort to contact a deeper part of him or herself, balance his or her emotions, and deflect the stress momentum, others benefit. As more individuals learn to maintain their poise and balance and refrain from adding to the incoherence around them, they help to counterbalance the frequency of stress

- Howard Martin

topic: Stress, Effort, Balance, Incoherence, Poise

The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

- James Gleick

topic: Reading, Past, Mirrors, Incoherence, Rearranging

Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.

- Gaston Bachelard

topic: Dream, Boredom, People, Incoherence, Recitals

Wrangel pretended to combat the Bolsheviks, Bolshevism is Jewry. In order to retain the favor of the Jews holding the real power in England, France and the United States, Wrangel showed to the Jews signs of his submission to them. Thereafter the Russian masses abandoned Wrangel as a traitor or as a comedian. It is impossible simultaneously to be an auxiliary of the Jew and an enemy of the Bolsheviki who are Jews. Be it incoherence or treason, Wrangel deserved the same fate as Denikin and he got it.

- Boris Brasol

topic: Real, Fate, Order, Incoherence, Bolsheviks

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God's hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

- Steven Weinberg

source: "Islam and science – the 'hideous' way". www.the-tls.co.uk. January 18, 2007.

topic: Country, Islamic, Flames, Incoherence

Any writer who could handle all these different voices would deserve high praise, but to do so without any sense of jarring or incoherence is an extraordinary accomplishment.

- Philip Kitcher

source: Source: www.3ammagazine.com

topic: Voice, Accomplishment, Different, Incoherence, Different Voices

Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.

- George Santayana

topic: Religious, Soul, Atheism, Incoherence, Matter Of Fact

Everybody have equal rights to a life of full flourishing. Philosophy slowly, slowly has given us arguments saying, look, you already committed to your own life flourishing, and you're being inconsistent if you don't expand it. So philosophy often works in trying to show us that there's an inner incoherence in our points of view. We're all committed to one thing when it comes to us and our own kind, but we're not willing to expand it and we're guilty of inconsistency.

- Rebecca Goldstein

topic: Philosophy, Rights, Views, Inconsistent, Incoherence

Freudian psychoanalytical theory is a mythology that answers pretty well to Levi-Strauss's descriptions. It brings some kind of order into incoherence; it, too, hangs together, makes sense, leaves no loose ends, and is never (but never) at a loss for explanation. In a state of bewilderment it may therefore bring comfort and relief.... give its subject a new and deeper understanding of his own condition and of the nature of his relationship to his fellow men. A mythical structure will be built up around him which makes sense and is believable-in, regardless of whether or not it is true.

- Peter Medawar

topic: Relationship, Nature, Loss, Incoherence, Levi Strauss

If you engage in positive thinking to overcome negative thoughts, the negative thoughts are still there acting. That's still incoherence. It's not enough just to engage in positive thoughts when you have negative thoughts registered, because they keep on working and will cause trouble somewhere else.

- David Bohm

source: David Bohm (2004). “Thought as a System”, p.44, Routledge

topic: Pain, Positive Thinking, Somewhere Else, Positive Thoughts, Incoherence

The new coherent picture is not yet available. With all their immense empirical success, G(eneral)R(elativity) and Q(uantum)M(echanics) have left us with an understanding of the physical world which is unclear and badly fragmented. At the foundations of physics there is today confusion and incoherence.

- Carlo Rovelli

source: "Quantum gravity". Book by Carlo Rovelli, 2004.

topic: Confusion, Understanding, Foundation, Incoherence, Unclear

Mr Earbrass stands on the terrace at twilight. It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything. Words drift through his mind: anguish turnips conjunctions illness defeat string parties no parties urns desuetude disaffection claws loss Trebizond napkins shame stones distance fever Antipodes mush glaciers incoherence labels miasma amputation tides deceit mourning elsewards.

- Edward Gorey

topic: Distance, Twilight, Party, Incoherence, Amputation

Al-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out al-Ghazali's Ash?arite theology with unusual clarity and provides important background for such well-known works as his autobiographical Deliverance from Error and his attack on Avicenna in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This first English-language translation, with notes that bring out the argumentation and background of the work, is thus very much to be welcomed.

- Peter Adamson

topic: Philosophical, Errors, Important, Incoherence, Argumentation

As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people.

- W. Somerset Maugham

source: "Cakes And Ale".

topic: Real, Men, Occupy Yourself, Incoherence

We could speak about the meaning of life vis-a-vis non-consequential/deontological theories, apodictic transformation schemata, the incoherence of exemplification, metaphysical realism, Cartesian interactive dualism, revised non reductive dualism, postmodernist grammatology and dicey dichotomies. But we would still be left with Nietzsche's preposterous mustache which instills great anguish and skepticism in the brain, which leads (as it did in his case) to utter madness. I suggest we go to Paris instead.

- Maira Kalman

topic: Paris, Mustache, Brain, Incoherence, Interactive

Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.

- Luke Davies

topic: Wind, People, Joy, Incoherence

I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves...I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.

- Daniel Day-Lewis

topic: Beautiful, Struggle, People, Great Feelings, Incoherence

Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange.

- Neil Patrick Harris

topic: Reality, Irrelevance, Culture, Incoherence, Epistemology

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

- Henry A. Kissinger

source: "The White House Years". Book by Henry Kissinger, 1979.

topic: Believe, Men, Essence, Incoherence, Blind Man

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.

- Edgar Allan Poe

source: Edgar Allan Poe, Stuart Levine, Susan Levine (1976). “The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition”, p.181, University of Illinois Press

topic: Distance, Goal, Mind, Incoherence

The Church in the United States turned a corner about three decades ago, and the idea that we're going back to the incoherence of the late Sixties and Seventies is, frankly, silly. Let's have a little faith in what the Holy Spirit has done among us these past 35 years.

- George Weigel

source: Source: eppc.org

topic: Silly, Past, Years, Incoherence, Have A Little Faith