Discrete Quotes

• The world is continuous, but the mind is discrete.

  David Mumford

  Mind, World, Statistics

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• The basic structure of proteins is quite simple: they are formed by hooking together in a chain discrete subunits called amino acids.

  Michael Behe

  Simple, Ties, Together

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• Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. Pay attention to everything in the world as if it's alive. Realize everything has its own discrete existence outside your story. By doing this, you open to gifts and lessons that the world has to give you.

  David Whyte

  Giving, Attention, Stories

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• No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

  Leslie Jamison

  Life, Boundaries, Trauma

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.9, Granta Books

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• Life is a constant creation. It is a moment by moment, instant by instant creation. I don’t mean by this that it is a set of discrete creations, it is not like that. But nevertheless, this spontaneity is constantly arising. And it is within this that is our freedom.

  Albert Low

  Mean, Life Is, Spontaneity

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• Innocence could be considered a discrete state of mind.

  John Shirley

  Mind, Innocence, States

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• The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill....[The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century....Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature.

  Kevin Myers

  Thinking, Skills, Two

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• In large organizations there are discrete functions. I do this; you do that. I swim in my lane; you swim in your lane. That can be very effective for certain processes and in certain stable conditions. But it doesn't work in unstable conditions.

  Daniel H. Pink

  Leadership, Organization, Swim

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• Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Winning, Joy, Purity

  A. Bartlett Giamatti (1981). “The University and the Public Interest”, Atheneum Books

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• The full beauty of the subject of generating functions emerges only from tuning in on both channels: the discrete and the continuous.

  Herbert Wilf

  Math, Tuning, Function

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• Those revolutions are not strictly incessant; they occur in discrete rushes which are separated from each other by spans of comparative quiet. The process as a whole works incessantly however, in the sense that there always is either revolution or absorption of the results of revolution, both together forming what are known as business cycles.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  Business, Together, Revolution

  Joseph A. Schumpeter (2013). “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, p.83, Routledge

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• The evidence here, as elsewhere, suggests that education is certainly relevant, but more because better education is associated with general differences in patterns of life than because discrete parts of a lifestyle can be changed. Health-change policies which focus entirely on the individual may be ineffective not only because exposure to health risks is largely involuntary, but also, as this study has shown, because of unwarranted assumptions about the extent to which behaviour can, in these circumstances, be effective in improving health.

  Mildred Blaxter

  Differences, Focus, Risk

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• Do you think it's possible that things that seem to be discrete in three dimensions might all be part of the same bigger object in four dimensions? ...What if humanity- that collective noun we so often employ- really is, at a higher level, a singular noun? What it what we perceive in three dimensions as seven billion individual human beings are really all just aspects of one giant being?

  Robert J. Sawyer

  Thinking, Humanity, What If

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• At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion.

  Johannes Stark

  Light, Discovery, Facts

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• We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child's life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.

  Selma Fraiberg

  Memories, Children, Believe

  Selma H. Fraiberg (2015). “The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood”, p.120, Simon and Schuster

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• Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world.

  Tom Chatfield

  Book, Mean, Cutting

  "Do writers need paper?" by Tom Chatfield, www.prospectmagazine.co.uk. October 20, 2010.

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• The books remind us that way down deep in our hearts, part of us knows that we are creatures of light and we cannot be touched or destroyed by anything made out of atoms or destroyed at all - that light is indestructible. And we may reflect that and express that in multiple trillions of discrete ways, but nevertheless, that indestructible sense of joyful capacity to express life and express love is always there.

  Richard Bach

  Book, Heart, Love Is

  Interview with Michael Peter Langevin, www.inner-growth.info.

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• The second [argument about motion] is the so-called Achilles, and it amounts to this, that in a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.
  Statement of the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox in the relation of the discrete to the continuous.; perhaps the earliest example of the reductio ad absurdum method of proof.

  Zeno of Elea

  Science, Race, Example

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• Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else. Winning is important to any man's or woman's sense of satisfaction and well-being. Winning is not everything; but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Success, Beautiful, Sports

  A. Bartlett Giamatti (1981). “The University and the Public Interest”, Atheneum Books

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• Most biologists, (says Vogel, 1981) seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region.

  Bill Mollison

  Layers, Fuzzy, Boundaries

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

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• Digital time does not flow; it flicks. Like any binary, discrete decision, it is either here or there. In contrast to our experience of the passing of time, digital time is always in the now, or in no time. It is still. Poised.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Decision, Doe, Flow

  Douglas Rushkoff (2013). “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”, p.55, Penguin

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• Looking out over the port of Dover, with the endless steam of boats coming in and out, every British citizen is reminded that belonging here has never been about blood or genes. It's simply about being at home on this discrete island and being aware of the privileges and responsibilities that brings.

  Julian Baggini

  Home, Responsibility, Islands

  "Why the white cliffs of Dover are so special" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. August 19, 2012.

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• When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting - the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness - or into waves of probability.

  Robert Lanza

  Animal, Smell, Kitchen

  "Robert Lanza doesn't seem to be kidding" by Adam Rogers, www.wired.com. March 8, 2007.

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• Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.

  Peter Høeg

  Falling In Love, Reality, Break Through

  Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.49, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Men, Blood, Order

  Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.160, Pan Macmillan

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