Logic Quotes - Page 14

• The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.

  Georg Cantor

  Mind, Myopia, Ontology

  "Infinity and the Mind". Book by Rudy Rucker, 1982.

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• Philosophy is based on speculation, on logic, on thought, on the synthesis of what we know and on the analysis of what we do not know. Philosophy must include within its confines the whole content of science, religion and art.

  P.D. Ouspensky

  Art, Philosophy, Analysis

  "A New Model of the Universe: Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art". Book by P.D. Ouspensky, 1931.

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• [John Brown's] zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light, his was as the burning sun... I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave.

  Frederick Douglass

  War, Light, Government

  Frederick Douglass' Lecture on John Brown, memory.loc.gov.

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• Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.

  Albert Camus

  Forever, Psychology, Existential

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.19, Vintage

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• You reason colour more than you reason drawing Colour has a logic as severe as form.

  Pierre Bonnard

  Drawing, Reason, Form

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• Understanding the often unconscious nature of genetic control is the first step toward understanding that—in many realms, not just sex—we’re all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer.

  Robert Wright

  Sex, Understanding, Trying

  Robert Wright (2010). “The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology”, p.48, Vintage

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• The subtleties of mathematics defecate the grossness of our apprehension, and supply the elements of a sounder and severer logic.

  William Godwin

  Elements, Statistics, Mathematics

  William Godwin (2006). “Thoughts on Man, His Nature, Productions and Discoveries”, p.589, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• It was our use of probability theory as logic that has enabled us to do so easily what was impossible for those who thought of probability as a physical phenomenon associated with "randomness". Quite the opposite; we have thought of probability distributions as carriers of information.

  Edwin Thompson Jaynes

  Opposites, Probability Theory, Use

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• Mathematics and logic have been proved to be one; a fact from which it seems to follow that mathematics may successfully deal with non-quantitative problems in a much broader sense than was suspected to be possible.

  Alfred Korzybski

  May, Facts, Problem

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• The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.

  Michael Pollan

  Happy Life, Thinking, Unhappy

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.39, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it
  take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip
  the bottom out of their boat.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Rip, Mean, Intelligence

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• To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression. And this organization, this precision, will always escape you, if you do not appreciate what a picture is, if you do not understand that the composition, the logic, the equilibrium of the surfaces and values are the only ways of giving meaning to all that is continuously appearing and vanishing before our very eyes.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Eye, Expression

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• I read one or two other books which gave me a background in mathematics other than logic.

  Stephen Cole Kleene

  Book, Two, Surfing

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• You are nothing if not exhaustive in your self-congratulatory made-up logic.

  Brandon Sanderson

  Self, Made, Ifs

  "Warbreaker". Book by Brandon Sanderson, 2009.

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• Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Brain, Anything Goes, Movement

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.22, Simon and Schuster

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• Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green?’ How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?

  Stan Brakhage

  Baby, Adventure, Eye

  Philip Taaffe, Stan Brakhage (1998). “Philip Taaffe: composite nature : a conversation with Stan Brakhage”, Blumarts

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• As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read.

  Michiko Kakutani

  Philosophical, Writing, Self

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• This matter of two sides to every question is bad logic and bad practice: sometimes there are no sides; sometimes there are a hundred.

  Mort Sahl

  Practice, Two Sides, Matter

  Mort Sahl (1976). “Heartland”, New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

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• In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.

  Lin Yutang

  Common Sense, Spirit, Contrast

  Lin Yutang (1937). “The Importance of Living”

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• Schools train people to be ignorant, with style. They give you the equipment that you need to be a functional ignoramus. American schools* do not equip you to deal with things like logic; they don't give you the criteria by which to judge between good and bad in any medium or format; and they prepare you to be a usable victim for military-industrial complex that needs manpower.

  Frank Zappa

  Military, School, People

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• The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, Thinking, Long

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• The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]

  Siri Hustvedt

  Book, Reading, Doors

  Siri Hustvedt (2011). “The Summer Without Men”, p.71, Hachette UK

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• His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical 'limitations' did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this - or more accurately, because of this - his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz - at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form.

  Gunther Schuller

  Inspiration, Thinking, Color

  "All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century". Book by John Rockwell, 1983.

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• All beauty, resonance, integrity,
  Exist by deprivation or logic
  Of strange position.

  John Ashbery

  Inspirational, Life, Integrity

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”

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• Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.

  Colum McCann

  Art, Recovery, Joy

  "Author, author: Stories are there to be told" by Colum McCann, www.theguardian.com. September 4, 2009.

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