Discrete Quotes - Page 2

• There is almost no evidence that diagnoses such as 'schizophrenia' and 'bipolar disorder' correspond to discrete entities ('natural kinds' in the language of philosophy).

  Richard Bentall

  Philosophy, Bipolar, Diagnosis

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Thought creates things by slicing up reality into small bits that it can easily grasp. Thus when you are think-ing you are thing-ing. Thought does not report things, it distorts reality to create things, and as Bergson noted, "In so doing it allows what is the very essence of the real to escape." Thus to the extent we actually imagine a world of discrete and separate things, conceptions have become perceptions, and we have in this manner populated our universe with nothing but ghosts.

  D.T. Suzuki

  Real, Thinking, Essence

  79 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you must be indiscrete, be discrete in your indiscretion.

  Mark Twain

  Moderation, Ifs

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  11 Copy quote

• Innocence could be considered a discrete state of mind.

  John Shirley

  Mind, Innocence, States

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...[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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  10 Copy quote

• 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)

  74 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  171 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  61 Copy quote

• 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.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  54 Copy quote

  Show source