Conceiving Quotes - Page 2

• He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!

  Charles Baudelaire

  Forever, Too Much, Impossible

  Charles Baudelaire (1986). “La Fanfarlo”

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• The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language. Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word.

  Alan Moore

  Reality, Perception, Language

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• Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a "He." You cannot say God is a "She." You cannot say God is an "It." (18)

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, God, Space

  Joseph Campbell (2010). “Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor”, p.26, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for 
the existence of God.

  Charles Darwin

  Self, Religion, Atheism

  Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin (1958). “Autobiography and Selected Letters”, p.61, Courier Corporation

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• The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it.

  Karl Popper

  Science, Analysis, Logical

  Karl Popper (2005). “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, p.7, Routledge

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• Creation,' in the ordinary sense of the word, is perfectly conceivable. I find no difficulty in conceiving that, at some former period, this universe was not in existence, and that it made its appearance in six days (or instantaneously, if that is preferred), in consequence of the volition of some preexisting Being.

  Thomas Huxley

  Ordinary, Six, Evolution

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• No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope.

  Simone Weil

  Inspirational, Desire, Movement

  Simone Weil (1970). “First and last notebooks”

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• From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.

  Charles Darwin

  Nature, War, Animal

  On the Origin of Species ch. 14 (1859)

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• Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

  Charles Darwin

  Intelligent, Men, Feelings

  Charles Darwin (1887). “The Autobiography of Charles Darwin”, p.70, Barnes & Noble Publishing

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• No longer can we consider what the artist does to be a self-contained activity, mysteriously inspired from above, unrelated and unrelatable to other human activities. Instead, we recognize the exalted kind of seeing that leads to the creation of great art as an outgrowth of the humbler and more common activity of the eyes in everyday life. Just as the prosaic search for information is "artistic" because it involves giving and finding shape and meaning, so the artist's conceiving is an instrument of life, a refined way of understanding who and where we are.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Art, Eye, Self

  Rudolf Arnheim (2004). “Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye”, p.5, Univ of California Press

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• This merely formal conceiving of the facts of one's own wretchedness is at the same time a departure from them--placing them in the object. It is not idle, therefore, to observe reflexively that in that very Thought, one has separated himself from them, and is no longer that which empirically he still sees himself to be.

  William Ernest Hocking

  Facts, Departure, Formal

  William Ernest Hocking, Ph.D. (1912). “The Meaning of God in Human Experience”

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• The difficulties of economics are mainly the difficulties of conceiving clearly and fully the conditions of utility.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Economics, Difficulty, Utility

  William Stanley Jevons (1970). “The Theory of Political Economy”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• I wish my life and decisions to depend upon myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men's, acts of will. I wish to be the subject, not an object...I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer - deciding, not being decided for, slef-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Men, Animal, Goal

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• Theism, as a way of conceiving God, has become demonstrably inadequate, and the God of theism not only is dying but is probably not revivable. If the religion of the future depends on keeping alive the definitions of theism, then the human phenomenon that we call religion will have come to an end. If Christianity depends on a theistic definition of God, then we must face the fact that we are watching this noble religious system enter the rigor mortis of its own death throes.

  John Shelby Spong

  Religious, Rigor Mortis, Dying

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• Yet the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God-especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side-is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact.

  David Bentley Hart

  Atheist, Errors, Agency

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• Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind.

  Thomas Nagel

  Taken, Mean, Reality

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• So yes, I'm trying to think about the connections between politics and poetry. There's an awful lot you could say here.Poetics is a form of poesis, a form of production-construction, but there might be ways of conceiving of that in a much more interesting manner. That's what I'm thinking about at the moment.

  Simon Critchley

  Thinking, Interesting, Trying

  "Demand Everything! An Interview With Philosopher Simon Critchley". Interview with Anders Gullestad, www.truth-out.org. May 15, 2010.

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• I do think that copyrights and intellectual property are important - it's important to be able to keep people from making verbatim copies of a particular creation that could somehow hurt the creator. If I spend time conceiving and making a piece of art and somebody else sees that it has market value and replicates it in order to steal part of my market, then that's not cool.

  Shepard Fairey

  Art, Hurt, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The object of all religious activity is to mingle the human and the non-human, and the lower gods represent that which is cast back to the human from the non-human - human gods merely, practice-gods who embody the errors which man makes in first conceiving the non-human.

  Laura Riding

  Religious, Men, Errors

  "The Bull-Fight". "Essays from 'Epilogue' 1935-1937". Book by Laura Riding, Robert Graves, and Mark Jacobs, 2001.

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• Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.

  Will Durant

  Art, Lying, Design

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• When we pray, we must begin by conceiving God in full and vigorous images, but we must go on to acknowledge the inadequacy of them and to adhere nakedly to the imageless truth of God.

  Austin Farrer

  Goes On, Praying, Invisible

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• The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

  Simone Weil

  Philosophy, Science, Years

  Simone Weil (2015). “First and Last Notebooks: Supernatural Knowledge”, p.335, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• If an organised body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be most liable to perish, while, on the other hand, those organised bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying the individuals of their race.

  James Hutton

  Race, Hands, Body

  "An Investigation into the Principles of Knowledge". Book by James Hutton, 1794.

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• Classical philosophical theism maintained the ontological distinction between God and creative world that is necessary for any genuine theism by conceiving them to be of different substances, with particular attributes predicated of each.

  Arthur Peacocke

  Philosophical, Creative, Different

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• I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Ideas, Words Of Wisdom, Causes

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