Constraints Quotes - Page 13

• By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Eye, Reality, Effort

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms”, p.109, Random House

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• Adolescence is a relatively recent thing in human history -- a period of years between the constraints of childhood and the responsibilities of adulthood. This irresponsible period of adolescence is artificially extended by long years of education, much of it wasted on frivolities. Tenure extends adolescence even further for teachers and professors.

  Thomas Sowell

  Teacher, Responsibility, Years

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• Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock to go their own way: they get eaten. In society it's a bit more complicated. Nonetheless the admonition stands: avoiding the unknown has considerable survival value. Society, nature, and artmaking tend to produce guarded creatures.

  David Bayles

  Simple, Survival, Way

  David Bayles, Ted Orland (2001). “Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking”, p.68, Image Continuum Press

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• With stand-up, you can be as freeform as you want to be. You can say what you want, how you want, at any moment without constraint.

  Michael Ian Black

  Want, Moments, Be You

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Dreams and waking life are both the same kinds of things. The difference is that dreaming is perceiving free of external constraints, whereas perceiving otherwise is dreaming true. Meaning what you dream about actually happens.

  Stephen LaBerge

  Dream, Differences, Waking Life

  "Live Chat with Filmmaker and Dream Experts". Live Chat, www.pbs.org.

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• The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

  Rachel Cusk

  Self, Musical, Want

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• I don't think the people today who start hearing voices, stop eating and sleeping, and run amuck are likely to get good treatment. Having more knowledge, better diagnostic capabilities, better medications with fewer side effects, can't make up for the fact that most patients are being treated by doctors, therapists, and hospitals, who are operating under constraints and incentives that reward non-treatment, non-hospitalization, non-therapy, non-follow-up, non-care. Lost to follow-up is the best outcome a health insurer can hope for.

  Mark Vonnegut

  Running, Sleep, Thinking

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• The mind is the enemy of intuition, according to many New Age adherents, but I don't buy that. I look at everything in terms of polarities - two ends of the same continuum. Young/old, male/female, individuality/conformity, work/play, freedom/constraint, right/left, day/night, life/death, rational/emotional, and so on.

  Shakti Gawain

  Night, Emotional, Play

  "Shakti Gawain Is Still ‘Living in the Light’". Interview with BJ Gallagher, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 5, 2012.

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• In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal.

  Camille Paglia

  Law, Civilization, Tyrants

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae”, p.128, Yale University Press

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• Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man's yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!

  Flora Tristan

  Men, Rights, Law

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• Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Casting Off, Self, Generosity

  "What A Shy Waitress Taught Me About Generosity" by Marilynne Robinson, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 2, 2013.

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• If you have no power, talk about your influence. If you have power, talk about the constraints that hem you in.

  Mason Cooley

  Power, Hem, Influence

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• Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.

  Jeane Kirkpatrick

  Character, Choices, Limits

  Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (1983). “The Reagan phenomenon, and other speeches on foreign policy”, Aei Pr

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• There are some people who think that they should be always mourning, that they should put a continual constraint upon themselves, and feel a disgust for those amusements to which they are obliged to submit. For my own part, I confess that I know not how to conform myself to these rigid notions. I prefer something more simple, which I also think would be more pleasing to God.

  Francois Fenelon

  Simple, Thinking, People

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• The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.

  Gerald Edelman

  Memories, Mean, Diversity

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• We can at least see that the question is asked, and asked on the basis of a clear recognition that there is no way of manipulating our environment that is without cost or consequence - and thus also of a recognition that we are inextricably bound up with the destiny of our world. There is no guarantee that the world we live in will "tolerate" us indefinitely if we prove ourselves unable to live within its constraints.

  Rowan Williams

  Destiny, Our World, Guarantees That

  "Our duty to the earth" by Rowan Williams, www.theguardian.com. March 26, 2009.

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• Our future is only limited by our commitment to keep the momentum going. Now that television has been set free from all constraints - including time, place, and all previous definitions - what comes next?

  Anne Sweeney

  Commitment, Momentum, Television

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• TV has a longer narrative, and TV's more like short stories. So there's less rules with TV; you can make it a little bit different. [With] movies, the medium has more constraints, so it was just about what stories are the most cinematic and the best resolution.

  Tucker Max

  Different, Stories, Littles

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• Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.

  Niklaus Wirth

  Yield, Engineering, Resources

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• If you give a little credit to the concept of the artist, I think you ought to indulge excesses a bit, because that reflects the personality of the writer. Now if a joke is in bad taste or it's not funny, okay, that's awhole different thing, but how you craft a joke is really what the writer's job is, and I don't think that technique should be subject to any editorial constraints.

  Bill Watterson

  Jobs, Thinking, Artist

  Source: bob.bigw.org

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• I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

  Richard Powers

  Flower, Writing, Design

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• The difference between a good educator and a great educator is that the former figures out how to work within the constraints of traditional policies and accepted assumptions, whereas the latter figures out how to change whatever gets in the way of doing right by kids. 'But we've always...', 'But the parents will never...', 'But we can't be the only school in the area to...' - all such protestations are unpersuasive to great educators. If research and common sense argue for doing things differently, then the question isn't whether to change course but how to make it happen.

  Alfie Kohn

  School, Kids, Differences

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• Since the nation's founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.

  Michelle Alexander

  African American, Crow, Needs

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.21, The New Press

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• Society has recognized over time that certain kinds of scientific inquiry can endanger society as a whole and has applied either directly, or through scientific/ethical constraints, restrictions on the kind and amount of research that can be done in those areas.

  Bobby Ray Inman

  Inquiry, Done, Research

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• Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in the maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Destiny, Men, Choices

  Cormac McCarthy (2013). “The Border Trilogy: Picador Classic”, p.863, Pan Macmillan

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