Coherence Quotes - Page 2

• 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, Facts, Acknowledgement

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• In my view the structure of the whole atom was that of an individual, with all its parts interconnected, and the emission of a spectral line appeared to me to be the result of the coherence and co-operation of several electric quanta.

  Johannes Stark

  Views, Atoms, Lines

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• We have power... Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems... they have power... but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.

  John Trudell

  Religious, Military, Power

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• And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it.

  John Donne

  Philosophy, Fire, Doubt

  'An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary' (1611) l. 205

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• Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Answers, Patterns, Pleasure

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• 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, Surrender

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• It sounds superficially fair. But it presupposes that that there is something in Christian theology to be ignorant about. The entire thrust of my position is that Christian theology is a non-subject. It is empty. Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content. I imagine that McGrath would join me in expressing disbelief in fairies, astrology and Thor's hammer. How would he respond if a fairyologist, astrologer or Viking accused him of ignorance of their respective subjects?

  Richard Dawkins

  Christian, Ignorance, Astrology

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• We should commit ourselves to 'eucharistic coherence,' that is, we should be conscious that people cannot receive holy communion and at the same time act or speak against the commandments, in particular when abortions, euthanasia, and other serious crimes against life and family are facilitated. This responsibility applies particularly to legislators, governors, and health professionals.

  Pope Francis

  Responsibility, People, Pro Life

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• 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, Favour

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• Consider the case of a person who holds a view with probability 1. Then coherence says that it is no use having a debate with them because nothing will change their mind.

  Dennis Lindley

  Views, Mind, Use

  "Understanding Uncertainty". Book by Dennis Lindley (Chapter 6 "Bayes Rule", p. 91), 2006.

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• 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, Wasting Time, Study

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• Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Heart, Order, Might

  Lawrence Durrell (2012). “The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea”, p.164, Faber & Faber

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• If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.

  Don DeLillo

  Heart, Men, Games

  Libra pt. 2 (1988)

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• Pure earth does not petrify, because the predominance of dryness over [i.e. in] the earth endows it not with coherence but rather with crumbliness. In general, stone is formed in two ways only (a) through the hardening of clay, and (b) by the congelation [of waters].

  Avicenna

  Science, Rocks, Two

  Avicenna, Alfred (of Sareshel.), Eric John Holmyard (1927). “Avicennae De Congelatione Et Conglutinatione Lapidum”, AMS Press

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• Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment.

  Michael Polanyi

  Judgment, Criteria, Conclusion

  Michael Polanyi, Harry Prosch (2008). “Meaning”, p.100, University of Chicago Press

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• To believe in explanations is good, because it means you may believe also that beneath the chaotic, mindless jumble of everything, beneath the horrible disjunction you feel at every moment between you and all you are not, there dwells in the universe a secret harmony, a coherence and rightness like a balanced equation that’s out of reach for now but some day will reveal itself in its entirety.

  Paul Murray

  Believe, Mean, Secret

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• Nowadays, the process of growth and development almost never seems to manage to create this subtle balance between the importance of the individual parts, and the coherence of the environment as a whole. One or the other always dominates.

  Christopher Alexander

  Growth, Balance, Development

  Christopher Alexander (1975). “The Oregon Experiment”, p.12, Oxford University Press, USA

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• 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, Clarity, Blunt

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I do think that the long poem speaks for an inner need for continuity. We live in a time of so many losses, disruptions, and distractions, that the need for a sense of the ongoing is quite real. The long poem is very satisfying in offering the psyche a model of coherence.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Real, Loss, Thinking

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

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• 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

  Believe, Men, Essence

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

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• 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, Bottom

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• The developing coherence of Asian regional thinking is reflected in a disposition to consider problems and loyalties in regional terms, and to evolve regional approaches to development needs and to the evolution of a New World Order.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Loyalty, Thinking, Nwo

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• Theology is a serious quest for the true knowledge of God, undertaken in response to His self-revelation, illumined by Christian tradition, manifesting a rational inner coherence, issuing in ethical conduct, resonating with the contemporary world and concerned for the greater glory of God.

  John Stott

  Christian, Self, World

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• I think an artist has the potential to investigate both form and content within one activity, to show that there can be coherence between form and values in our society, as in thinking about a city and building one.

  Olafur Eliasson

  Artist, Thinking, Cities

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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