Configuration Quotes - Page 2

• An observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own. Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture.

  Ruth Benedict

  Example, Generations, Culture

  28 Copy quote

• The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal".

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Real, Animal, Men

  4 Copy quote

• The concept of an independent system is a pure creation of the imagination. For no material system is or can ever be perfectly isolated from the rest of the world. Nevertheless it completes the mathematician's "blank form of a universe" without which his investigations are impossible. It enables him to introduce into his geometrical space, not only masses and configurations, but also physical structure and chemical composition. Just as Newton first conclusively showed that this is a world of masses, so Willard Gibbs first revealed it as a world of systems.

  Lawrence Joseph Henderson

  Independent, Science, Space

  4 Copy quote

• Our advanced art approaches a fragile but marvelous life, one that maintains itself by a mere thread, melting into an elusive, changeable configuration, the surroundings, the artist, his work and everyone who comes to it.

  Allan Kaprow

  Art, Melting, Surroundings

  13 Copy quote

• Illusions... are simple facts, but they have been created by the mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of the new spatial configuration.

  Georges Braque

  Simple, Mind, Facts

  9 Copy quote

• It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium, that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Feelings, Being Me

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.

  Tom Stoppard

  Posture

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Tom Stoppard Plays 5: The Real Thing; Night & Day; Hapgood; Indian Ink; Arcadia”, p.164, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.

  Umberto Eco

  Teenage, Poetry, Acne

  "Novelist Umberto Eco dies at 84; wrote 'Name of the Rose' and 'Foucault's Pendulum'" by Carolyn Kellogg and Jill Leovy, www.latimes.com. February 19, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Logos, Causes, Responsible

  "Laws of Media: The New Science". Book by Marshall McLuhan, co-written with Eric McLuhan, p. 37, 1988.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language. Any concept, whether or not it forms part of the system of grammatical categories, can be conveyed in any language. If a notion is lacking in a given series, it implies a different configuration and not a lack of expressive power.

  Edward Sapir

  Patterns, Different, Would Be

  16 Copy quote

• In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on Earth, there first had to be hundreds of millions of protein molecules of the Ninth Configuration. But, given the size of the planet Earth, do you know how long it would take for just one of these protein molecules to appear by chance? Roughly 10 to the 243rd power, billions of years; and I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in a god.

  William Peter Blatty

  Believe, Order, Years

  "Fictional character: Col. Vincent Kane". The Ninth Configuration, www.imdb.com. 1980.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most of my recorded material has been in small group configurations. I have not released large orchestral works as recordings because it hasn't been within the realm of possibility.

  Bill Dixon

  Groups, Possibility, Realms

  5 Copy quote

• Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.

  Edward Said

  Ideas, Culture, Orientalism

  Edward W. Said (2014). “Orientalism”, p.5, Vintage

  146 Copy quote

  Show source

• In a world where concepts are so often deployed in an ad hoc fashion, half explored before being displaced by others, it is immensely refreshing to encounter such serious and sustained attention to the building blocks of inquiry—and to the responsibilities thereby incurred. Designs on the Contemporary is a work of profound importance to the philosophy of anthropology. In conjunction with Rabinow’s other works, it creates a nonpareil, a configuration of thought with no equal.

  Marilyn Strathern

  Fashion, Block, Philosophy

  5 Copy quote

• Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Hurt, Grief, Suffering

  Jesmyn Ward (2013). “Men We Reaped: A Memoir”, p.140, A&C Black

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two thing being in the same location (place). The law of the 'proper' rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own 'proper' and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.

  Michel de Certeau

  Taken, Order, Law

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.117, Univ of California Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• When drawings of the main buildings I have designed in the last five years are juxtaposed, the fact that they all involve the pursuit of certain configurations is obvious to anyone.

  Yoshio Taniguchi

  Years, Drawing, Lasts

  Yoshio Taniguchi (1996). “The Japan Architect”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is necessary not only to relieve the gravest needs but to go to their roots, proposing measures that will give social, political and economic structures a more equitable and solidaristic configuration.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Roots, Giving, Justice

  23 Copy quote

• O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.

  William Carlos Williams

  Next, Chaos, Complexity

  William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.36, New Directions Publishing

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• This equation of the impersonal plus time plus chance producing the total configuration of the universe and all that is in it, modern people hold by faith.

  Francis Schaeffer

  People, Chance, Modern

  Francis August Schaeffer (1976). “How should we then live?: the rise and decline of western thought and culture”, Good News Pub

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• The configuration of the ocean-floor is of great interest to seismologists studying the movements of the Earth's crust. Oceanographers are also able to explain certain peculiarities of ocean currents by the contour of the ocean-bed. But enormous areas are still unexplored.

  Paul J. H. Schoemaker

  Ocean, Bed, Movement

  4 Copy quote

• What is art? A violet. Is that all? An artistic style is a living entity, a continuous process of invention. It can never be imposed from without; born of the profoundest tendencies within a society, its direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, in much the same way as the eventual configuration of a tree's branches.

  Octavio Paz

  Art, Tree, Style

  4 Copy quote

• Yes, gentlemen, give me the map of any country, its configuration, its climate, its waters, its winds, and the whole of its physical geography; give me its natural productions, its flora, its zoology, &c., and I pledge myself to tell you, a priori, what will be the quality of man in history:-not accidentally, but necessarily; not at any particular epoch, but in all; in short, -what idea he is called to represent.

  Victor Cousin

  Country, Men, Wind

  Victor Cousin (1832). “Introduction to the History of Philosophy”, p.240

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• We might not know we are seeking people who best enrich our lives, but somehow on a deep subconscious level we absolutely are. Whether the bond is temporary or permanent, whether it succeeds or fails, fate is simply a configuration of choices that combine with others to shape the relationships that surround us. We cannot choose our family, but we can choose our friends, and we sometimes, before we even meet them.

  Simon Pegg

  Fate, People, Choices

  11 Copy quote

• Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death. ...Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance? Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.

  Muriel Barbery

  Mean, Track, Dying

  4 Copy quote