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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.

  Hesiod

  Wise, Patience, Hope

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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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• Childhood obesity isn't some simple, discrete issue. There's no one cause we can pinpoint. There's no one program we can fund to make it go away. Rather, it's an issue that touches on every aspect of how we live and how we work.

  Michelle Obama

  Simple, Issues, Childhood

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• The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders.

  Meg Wolitzer

  Wall, Kids, Islands

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• Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.

  Alfred Kinsey

  Sex, Reality, Two

  Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ch. 21 (1948)

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• The Nazi Party was, in the early 1920s, but one among many nationalist and volkisch radical political groups. It was catapulted to prominence with the onset of economic recession in the late 1920s... The Nazis owed their spectacular to a combination of two discrete sets of factors: first, their distinctive organisation and strategy; and secondly, the wider socio-economic conditions which created climates of opinion and sets of grievances on which the Nazis could prey.

  Mary Fulbrook

  Party, Two, History

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• Although we tend to think of the brain as a discrete organ - a lump of squidgy tissue - it is better to think of it as part of an elaborate network of nervous tissue that reaches out to every single part of the body.

  Tim Birkhead

  Thinking, Brain, Tissues

  Tim Birkhead (2012). “Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird”, p.13, A&C Black

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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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• ...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.

  Dan Ariely

  Running, Business, Technology

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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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• Time, among all concepts in the world of physics, puts up the greatest resistance to being dethroned from ideal continuum to the world of the discrete, of information, of bits.... Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than 'time.' Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence ... is a task for the future.

  John Archibald Wheeler

  Time, Connections, Tasks

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• Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white.

  Alfred Kinsey

  Two, White, Black

  Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ch. 21 (1948)

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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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• 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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• 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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• The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Music, Order, Play

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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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• I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.

  Anton Chekhov

  Integrity, Believe, Russia

  Letter to I.I. Orlov, February 22, 1899.

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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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