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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• Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

  Salman Rushdie

  Stories, Individual, Our Lives

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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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• 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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• 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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• You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

  Oliver Stone

  Book, Order, Shapes

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• I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

  David Foster Wallace

  Jobs, Important, Information

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• There's a certain power in vague language, but I started to get more into the idea of really trying to have a discrete thought in the lyrics and to have songs that were about stuff - to try to make things more coherent.

  David Longstreth

  Song, Ideas, Trying

  "Dirty Projectors". Interview with Brandon Stosuy, pitchfork.com. July 2, 2012.

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• In my view, a political vision is not a grab-bag of discrete problems and solutions. It is the visionary anticipation of a direction.

  Roberto Unger

  Views, Political, Vision

  "The ideas interview: Roberto Unger". Interview with John Sutherland, www.theguardian.com. February 28, 2006.

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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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• 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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• 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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• At the time, in 1996, an electronic band signing with a major label was something new, at least in France. Daft Punk knew that this meant a marathon of promotion, TV appearances, etc. To protect themselves and to be discrete, they came up with the masks and, three years later, the robot helmets.

  Pedro Winter

  Years, Labels, Band

  Source: pitchfork.com

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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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• I'd prefer to include sex scenes alongside the adventure scenes and everyday-life scenes, as if they were all part of the same thing. Which of course they are. Sex is not discrete from the rest of our existence.

  Alan Moore

  Sex, Adventure, Everyday

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Chi-Os were ideal partners for all occasions. They were discrete, desirable, tactful, polite, and fun... Every mom dreamed of her son coming home with a Chi Omega, a woman's woman.

  David Letterman

  Mom, Fun, Home

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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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• 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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• If you think about even very common examples like, say, something that you would build, like a clock or a car or a group of people trying to accomplish something, it fails when its unity breaks down. So when it stops having a single form, which is functioning all together, then it sort of falls apart into discrete elements.

  Peter Adamson

  Fall, Thinking, People

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is "continuous", and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer.

  Doron Zeilberger

  Real, Evil, Intuition

  ""Real" Analysis is a Degenerate Case of Discrete Analysis". Ruthgers School of Arts and Sciences Website, sites.math.rutgers.edu. November 26, 2001.

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• Holocaust is very much a part of present discussion all over the place. There are little plaques everywhere you go around in different neighborhoods. "This person here was prosecuted." "This person was sent to this concentration camp." "A family of Jews lived here. They took over his business." Little, very discrete, very dignified plaques are everywhere.

  Bob Balaban

  Holocaust, Different, Littles

  Source: collider.com

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• Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.

  Stanley Fish

  Writing, Practice, Forever

  "How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One". Book by Stanley Fish, 2011.

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• The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.

  William James

  Other Worlds, Two, Filters

  William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.463, Library of America

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