Constructs Quotes - Page 19

• The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

  Daniel Kahneman

  People, Mind, Quality

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• Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.

  Susan Griffin

  Change, Hate, Self

  Susan Griffin (2015). “Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature”, p.170, Open Road Media

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• The mathematician is entirely free, within the limits of the imagination, to construct what worlds he pleases.

  J. W. N. Sullivan

  Math, Imagination, World

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• I'm interested in machines that make you aware of the process of seeing and aware of what you do when you construct the world by looking. This is interesting in itself, but more as a broad-based metaphor for how we understand the world.

  William Kentridge

  Interesting, Machines, World

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• If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Genius, Analogies, Fields

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.66, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence.

  Erwin Schrodinger

  Creativity, Men, Imagination

  Erwin Schrodinger (2012). “What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches”, p.122, Cambridge University Press

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• The question of the origin of life is essentially speculative. We have to construct, by straightforward thinking on the basis of very few factual observations, a plausible and self-consistent picture of a process which must have occurred before any of the forms which are known to us in the fossil record could have existed.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Thinking, Origin Of Life, Self

  John Desmond Bernal (1967). “The origin of life”

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• Well, part of it is a longstanding belief - it's been in our education establishment at least since the 1930s - that somehow children should be allowed to discover knowledge for themselves, that they should construct their own knowledge. This has surfaced most recently in connection with mathematics instruction, where the idea is that they need to discover how to add for themselves. Rather than being taught how to add, they should construct this knowledge on their own.

  Lynne Cheney

  Children, Ideas, Discovery

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• We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all. Because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand, and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you could hold onto that flame, great things could construct around it, that are massive and powerful and world changing, all held up by the tiniest of ideas.

  Nick Cave

  Powerful, Flames, Hands

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• I don't really deal with the attention I receive to be honest. I build up a fantasy world around me that I inhabit. I cherry pick elements of literature, music, film, history and art, then weave them together to construct a fantasy reality to live in. It doesn't always work out though, I got evicted from my own fantasy once, which was quite embarrassing.

  Pete Doherty

  Art, Reality, Film History

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• All life is related. And it enables us to construct with confidence the complex tree that represents the history of life

  David Attenborough

  Tree, History Of Life, Life Is

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• Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience.

  Northrop Frye

  Art, Moving, Science

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• However the machine would permit us to test the hypothesis for any special value of n. We could carry out such tests for a sequence of consecutive values n=2,3,.. up to, say, n=100. If the result of at least one test were negative, the hypothesis would prove to be false; otherwise our confidence in the hypothesis would increase, and we should feel encouraged to attempt establishing the hypothesis, instead of trying to construct a counterexample.

  Alfred Tarski

  Science, Special, Trying

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• If we are ever to construct a feminist movement that is not based on the premise that men and women are always at war with one another, then we must be willing to acknowledge the appropriateness of complex critical responses to writing by men even if it is sexist. Clearly women can learn from writers whose work is sexist, even be inspired by it, because sexism may be simply one dimension of that work. Concurrently fiercely critiquing the sexism does not mean that one does not value the work.

  Bell Hooks

  War, Writing, Mean

  bell hooks (2014). “Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics”, p.87, Routledge

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• When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right- hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right- hand glove, and a pair of gloves. 'She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair' is a well known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Home, Hands, Two

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.15, Lulu Press, Inc

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• I certainly incorporate facts into my fiction. I take the basic facts from the life of my subject and I pick and choose what to use to construct a really interesting novel. I don't let facts get in the way of my imagination and my exploration of the subject's emotions and relationships.

  Melanie Benjamin

  Imagination, Interesting, Fiction

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• Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.

  H. L. Mencken

  Philosophy, Trying, World

  H. L. Mencken (2003). “Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.92, See Sharp Press

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• You wish to be great, begin from the least. You are thinking to construct some mighty fabric in height; first think of the foundation of humility. And how great soever a mass of building one may wish and design to place above it, the greater the building is to be, the deeper does he dig his foundation.

  Saint Augustine

  Humility, Thinking, Design

  "Sermon 19:2 on the New Testament". "Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: First Series". Book edited by Philip Schaff, translated by R.G. MacMullen, Volume 6, www.newadvent.org.

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• A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields... leading towards a "system of systems." [...] I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse...(vi) [...] the "animal" level, characterized by increased mobility, teleological behavior and self-awareness...

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Animal, Self, Mobility

  "General systems theory - the skeleton of science". Kenneth E. Boulding, Management Science, Volume 2, No. 3 (pp. 200-201), April 1956.

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• Then "wrong" is right, and "right" is wrong! Yet I'll tell you this, to help you out of your dilemma: believe nothing I say. Simply live it. Experience it. Then live whatever other paradigm you want to construct. Afterward, look to your experience to find your truth.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Inspirational, Religious, Believe

  Neale Donald Walsch (1996). “Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue”, p.88, Penguin

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• It is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance.

  Bell Hooks

  Meaningful, Women, Home

  bell hooks (2014). “Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics”, p.61, Routledge

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• We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Human Nature, Make The Best Of It, Humans

  "A Woman's Thoughts About Women" by Dinah Maria Murlock Craik, (Ch. 11), 1858.

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• Happiness is not an end - it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence. The Omnipotent Himself could never be supposed by any, save those who out of their own human selfishness construct the attributes of Divinity, to be absorbed throughout eternity in the contemplation of His own ineffable bliss, were it not identical with His ineffable goodness and love.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Mean, Selfishness, And Love

  "A Woman's Thoughts About Women" by Dinah Maria Murlock Craik, (Ch. 10), 1858.

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• Normally, I'm a very controlling director. Directors are controlling. It's part of the job, but there's various degrees of it and the constructs I normally work on are very controlling constructs.

  Danny Boyle

  Jobs, Directors, Degrees

  "Danny Boyle Exclusive Interview 127 HOURS; Plus Updates on Shekhar Kapur’s PAANI, FRANKENSTEIN, the Olympics, and a Lot More". Interview with Ron Messer, collider.com. November 7, 2010.

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• It's pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don't actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what's going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings.

  Alan Moore

  Reality, Nerves, Ears

  Source: www.believermag.com

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