Finite Quotes - Page 18

• Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

  David Lodge

  Communication, Creativity, Degrees

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• But how can finite grasp Infinity?

  John Dryden

  Infinity

  John Dryden (1811). “The Poetical Works of John Dryden: Containing Original Poems, Tales, and Translations”, p.20

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• I'm not comfortable with categories, and I distrust most definitions. The word 'definition' is based on the word 'finite,' which would seem to indicate that once we've defined something, we don't need to think about it anymore.

  Artie Shaw

  Thinking, Needs, Definitions

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• The physical laws, in their observable consequences, have a finite limit of precision.

  Kurt Gödel

  Law, Limits, Precision

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• My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incurable-rather like unrequited love, like a symptom of the hopelessness of trying to grasp what is boundless, or unite what cannot be joined; a reminder of how finite, how curtailed, our experience on earth must be

  Andrei Tarkovsky

  Unrequited Love, Irritation, Attachment

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• An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Laughter, Laughing, Giving

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “A Circle of Quiet”, p.21, Open Road Media

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• Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

  Salman Rushdie

  World, Possibility, Spills

  Salman Rushdie (1989). “The Satanic Verses”, New York, N.Y. : Viking

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• In the end mortals always expired before faeries. They were such finite creatures. Their first heartbeat and breath were but a blink from death. To add the weight of nourishing his insatiable court in a time of peace was to hasten that unconscionably.

  Melissa Marr

  Add, Weight, Firsts

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• What do believers in the Absolute mean by saving that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute finite evil is ‘overruled’ already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.

  William James

  Holiday, Mean, Responsibility

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• We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.

  Michael Chabon

  Children, Believe, Ambition

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• Take the so-called standard of living. What do most people mean by "living"? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives.

  e. e. cummings

  Mean, People, Wife

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• Man-made computers are limited in their performance by finite processing speed and memory. So, too, the cosmic computer is limited in power by its age and the finite speed of light.

  Paul Davies

  Memories, Men, Light

  "Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn't mean that a god fixed it" by Paul Davies, www.theguardian.com. June 25, 2007.

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• All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known.

  Max Weber

  Reality, Mind, Important

  Max Weber (2015). “On the Methodology of the Social Sciences”, p.104, Lulu Press, Inc

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• There are three reasons, . . . apart from scientific considerations, mankind needs to travel in space. The first . . . is garbage disposal; we need to transfer industrial processes into space so that the earth may remain a green and pleasant place for our grandchildren to live in. The second . . . to escape material impoverishment: the resources of this planet are finite, and we shall not forego forever the abundance of solar energy and minerals and living space that are spread out all around us. The third . . . our spiritual need for an open frontier.

  Freeman Dyson

  Spiritual, Moon, Grandchildren

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• One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.

  Nicholson Baker

  Book, Tunnels, Affiliation

  Nicholson Baker (2012). “The Way the World Works”, p.314, Simon and Schuster

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• You need to have a reader's sympathy in order to accomplish anything. It's like at a reading, I find it's better to read something funny than to read something tragic. It just goes over better because you have a finite amount of time with somebody. Of course, in a book, you have a lot of time. But you still do want to make a certain impression right when you begin.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Book, Reading, Order

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Interesting, Attention, Worthy

  "The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel". Book by Henri-Frédéric Amiel, translated by Mary Augusta Ward, 1882.

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• Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Taken, May, Influence

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• Man is a mixed being, made up of a spiritual soul and of a fleshly body; the angels are pure spirits, herein nearer to God, only that they are created and finite in all respects, free from decay, free from the power of death, whereas God is infinite and uncreated.

  Augustus Hare

  Spiritual, Angel, Men

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• The common ground where the activities of God and man become one is the motive of perfect love; for in the last resolve love is the essence of God's nature. When he thinks, love is his thought; when he wills, love is the product of his will. To the degree, therefore, that man thinks and wills the good--to the degree that he realizes love in his finite dealings--he interfuses himself with God.

  Frank C. Lockwood

  Love Is, Men, Thinking

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• Nature is boundless in her powers, exhausting in her variety: the powers of Art and its capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature herself, the infinite, has circumscribed the bounds of finite Art. The one is the divinity; the other the priestess.

  Anna Brownell Jameson

  Art, Nature, Divinity

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• The nature will continue, it's our existence that is finite and you are given this gift of life and you make your way with it, but fate and natural disasters will continue on.

  Larry Fessenden

  Fate, Way, Natural

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• It [going from mini-series to series] was never even discussed because it [The Starter Wife] was, you know, an adaptation of a novel. And we - the mini-series encompassed the whole novel. And so it was always going to be a finite sort of event. And then I imagine when people started to really respond to the show and then we got ten Emmy nominations, USA sort of said, "Oh, I think maybe we have something here."

  Debra Messing

  Thinking, Usa, People

  Source: www.movieweb.com

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• If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.

  Freeman Dyson

  Reality, Imagination, Would Be

  "Infinite in All Directions". Book by Freeman Dyson, 1988.

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• Human beings, because we're so clever, have removed every single one of those population limiting factors... So nothing controls our increase in numbers except our own wish. Since I first started making television programs, the population of the world has increased three times. That's an extraordinary notion. Can it increase four times? Can it increase five times? The Earth is a finite size. So a point will eventually come when we run out of food, when we run out of space and when we will have destroyed most of the natural world. So ought we to do something about it before that happens?

  David Attenborough

  Running, Clever, Numbers

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