Mechanism Quotes - Page 2

If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond "Es Muss sein!

Milan Kundera

Lying, Love Is, Use

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The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)

Milan Kundera

Love Is, Men, Emotional

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Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own

Rollo May

Choices, Fundamentals, Existentialism

Rollo May (1994). “Existence”, p.45, Jason Aronson

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If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?

Timothy Keller

Strong, Atheist, Judging

Timothy Keller (2008). “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism”, p.45, Penguin

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I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.

Leonard Cohen

Regret, Congratulations, Past

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For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

Roland Barthes

Technique, Cameras, Sound

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Deeply buried in the mind, there lies a mechanism that accepts what the mind experiences as beautiful and pleasant and rejects those experiences that are perceived as ugly and painful. This mechanism gives rise to those states of mind that we are training ourselves to avoid-- things like greed, lust, hatred, aversion, and jealousy.

Henepola Gunaratana

Beautiful, Lying, Giving

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Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.

Clive Barker

Stars, Butterfly, Men

"Galilee". Book by Clive Barker, February 3, 1999.

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In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.

Clive Barker

Beautiful, Stars, Butterfly

"Galilee". Book by Clive Barker, February 3, 1999.

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Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight. Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.

Chuck Palahniuk

Revenge, Coping Mechanisms, Giving

Chuck Palahniuk (2011). “Invisible Monsters: A Novel”, p.181, W. W. Norton & Company

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With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.

Marshall McLuhan

Suicidal, Technology, Men

"Understanding media: the extensions of man".

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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

Aldo Leopold

Ignorance, Men, Animal

Aldo Leopold (1972). “Round River”, p.108, Oxford University Press

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Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel like?” José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: “It’s like an earthquake.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Brother, Earthquakes, Details

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Fear is a part of life. It's a warning mechanism. That's all. It tells you when there's danger around. Its job is to help you survive. Not cripple you into being unable to do it.

Jim Butcher

Jobs, Fear, Positive Thinking

Jim Butcher (2006). “Dead Beat: A Novel of The Dresden Files”, p.227, Penguin

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[A] process was going on in which people were transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control. … [T]he safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price: man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means.

Paul Tillich

Mean, Reality, Men

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Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

Philip K. Dick

Religious, Real, Writing

"How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later". Speech by Philip K. Dick, published in "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" (book by Philip K. Dick), 1978.

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There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are "nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations." But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my "defense mechanisms," nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my "reaction formations.

Viktor E. Frankl

Defense, Sake, Reactions

Viktor E. Frankl (2015). “Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition”, p.78, Beacon Press

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God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.

William Nicholson

Selfish, Suffering, Add

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Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda. The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.

Thomas Merton

Spiritual, Men, Thinking

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Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.

Lauren Oliver

Stupid, Dumb, World

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What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Anne Carson

Somewhere Else, Names, Greek

Anne Carson (1999). “Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse”, Vintage

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That's when you realize that most of it-life, the relentless mechanism of existing-isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead.

Lauren Oliver

Realizing, Relentless, Thrust

Lauren Oliver (2015). “Delirium Trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, Requiem”, p.212, Hachette UK

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..but maybe this was a defense mechanism. Maybe my mind was making me see things I refused to accept were gone forever. It was filling the void, because that was easier than letting go.

Becca Fitzpatrick

Letting Go, Forever, Mind

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I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew -- the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonnight. -- Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of color. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all.

e. e. cummings

Tired, Unique, Moon

E.E. Cummings (2015). “The Enormous Room”, p.46, Xist Publishing

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At the moment, he is in shock," said Magnus. "He has believed one thing for five years, and now he has realized that all this time he has been looking at the world through a faulty mechanism - that all the things he sacrificed in the name of what he thought was good and noble have been a waste, and that he has only hurt what he he loved." "Good God," said Woolsey. "Are you quite sure you've helped him?

Cassandra Clare

Hurt, Years, Names

Cassandra Clare (2011). “Clockwork Prince”, p.413, Simon and Schuster

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