Preconceptions Quotes - Page 3

• Nothing you become will disappoint me; I have no preconception that I'd like to see you be or do. I have no desire to forsee you, only to discover you. You can't disappoint me.

  Mary Donnelly-Haskell

  Unconditional Love, Over You, Desire

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• Hardly any one is able to see what is before him, just as it is in itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through the veil of his preconception, he criticizes before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself.

  Arthur Symons

  Vision, Veils, Able

  Arthur Symons (1924). “The collected works of Arthur Symons”

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• We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.

  Walter Lippmann

  Perception, World, Imagine

  Walter Lippmann (2012). “Public Opinion”, p.49, Courier Corporation

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• But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective scientific method, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Thinking, Self, Robots

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• Like this gas tank, you are overflowing with preconceptions, full of useless knowledge. You hold many facts and opinions, yet know little of yourself. Before you can learn, you'll have to first empty your tank.

  Dan Millman

  Tanks, Useless, Littles

  Dan Millman (2009). “Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives”, p.28, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Once you free your mind about the concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want. So nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do.

  Giorgio Moroder

  Free Your Mind, Want, Harmony

  FaceBook post by Giorgio Moroder from Nov 21, 2013

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• If you asked people, "Do you like jazz?" they would be like, "not at all." But I think that if you're really putting yourself out there and really communicating, music can put you beyond people's preconceptions, beyond their playlist.

  Kamasi Washington

  Thinking, People, Would Be

  "A New Standard: Kamasi Washington's Modern Jazz Revolution". Interview with Ian Cohen, pitchfork.com. June 9, 2015.

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• Science starts with preconception, with the common culture, and with common sense. It moves on to observation, is marked by the discovery of paradox, and is then concerned with the correction of preconception. It moves then to use these corrections for the designing of further observation and for more refined experiment. And as it moves along this course the nature of the evidence and experience that nourish it becomes more and more unfamiliar; it is not just the language that is strange [to common culture].

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Moving, Science, Discovery

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• An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.

  John Cage

  Errors, Events, Actuality

  Silence 1961 45' for a Speaker

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• Truth" is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.

  Jack Vance

  Organization, Ideas, World

  Jack Vance (1958). “The Languages of Pao”, p.97, Spatterlight Press

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• When the sovereign spirit within us is true to nature, it stands poised and ready to adjust to every change in circumstances and to seize each new opportunity. It doesn't approach an object with prejudice or preconception, but handles each thing dispassionately before embracing it and, if necessary, finds advantage in what opposes it. It is like fire in this regard. Whereas a feeble flame might suffocate under a pile of dry sticks, a robust fire consumes everything it touches. The more objects of any kind heaped on it, the higher it rises, the hotter it burns.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Opportunity, Fire, Flames

  Marcus Aurelius, C. Scot Hicks, David Hicks (2002). “The Emperor's Handbook: A New Translation of The Meditations”, p.41, Simon and Schuster

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• Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon provided we observe nature as a child does, without prejudices and preconceptions, but with that clear and candid vision which adults lose and scientists must strive to regain.

  Peter Medawar

  Children, Discovery, Vision

  Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

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• When Jesus came to earth, demons recognized him, the sick flocked to him, and sinners doused his feet and head with perfume. Meanwhile he offended pious Jews with their strict preconceptions of what God should be like. Their rejection makes me wonder, could religious types be doing just the reverse now? Could we be perpetuating an image of Jesus that fits our pious expectations but does not match the person portrayed so vividly in the Gospels?

  Philip Yancey

  Religious, Jesus, Feet

  Philip Yancey (2010). “The Jesus I Never Knew Study Guide”, p.82, Harper Collins

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• Travel opens different eyes to different things, shows things we've never seen before, shows the world from entirely different angles. That's the power of drawing and the power of travel. They both make the familiar unfamiliar and vice versa. They show what we all have in common and what we may have missed thanks to preconceptions that may have marred our vision.

  Danny Gregory

  Eye, Drawing, Vision

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• When our intellect has shaken off its many opinions about created things, then the inner principle of truth appears clearly to it, providing it with a foundation of real knowledge and removing its former preconceptions as though removing scales from eyes, as happened in the case of St. Paul (cf. Acts 9:18). For an understanding of Scripture that does not go beyond the literal meaning, and a view of the sensible world that relies exclusively on sense perception, are indeed scales, blinding the soul's visionary faculty and preventing access to the pure Logos of truth.

  Maximus the Confessor

  Christian, Real, Eye

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• We know great art by its effect on us. If we are prepared to look without preconceptions, without defenses, without haste, then art will change us.

  Wendy Beckett

  Art, Haste, Defense

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• We need many more intrepid women who set out to expand both their and our concepts of the world. We need them in writing just as we need them in politics. We need that sense of adventure, of reaching wider, delving deeper, pushing further afield, whether that field be geographical, intellectual, political, personal, or all of these and more. Enough with decorousness. Let us risk preconceptions and treasured philosophies, bodies and souls. Let us be big and bawdy and full of courage. Let's go.

  Lesley Hazleton

  Philosophy, Writing, Adventure

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• Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

  Jessamyn West

  Nature, Memories, Women

  Jessamyn West (1979). “The life I really lived: a novel”, Harcourt

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• Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are huge traditions of enormous importance, and they aren't monotheistic. Again, this reflects the fact that our preconceptions about what religion is are so influenced by Protestantism - either real Protestantism or the secularized Protestantism that dominates our culture - and its assumption that beliefs are the most important thing.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Real, Buddhism, Important

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• Too often cartoonists just look at other cartoonists and, after a lot of inbreeding, everyone has the same funny look. The challenge of drawing is that there is no one right way to visually describe something. It's a good thing to confront your limitations and preconceptions every so often.

  Bill Watterson

  Drawing, Challenges, Inbreeding

  Source: www.tcj.com

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• The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table, ... the collection is so tantalizingly incomplete, and the specimens themselves often so fragmented and inconclusive, that more can be said about what is missing than about what is present. ...but ever since Darwin's work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man.

  John Reader

  Men, Convincing Evidence, Missing

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• Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and be willing to challenge their own preconceptions. They also need to be conscientious. An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer ... But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable ... They are people willing to take social risks-to do things that others might disapprove of.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Creativity, Persistence, Ideas

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• When you research someone, you actually get beyond your own preconceptions and become aware of the human being other than the image. You become empathetic and sympathetic in turn.

  Jim Broadbent

  Research, Sympathetic, Turns

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• I've covered Avril Lavigne. I like good pop songs, and I don't think there should be any kind of preconceptions about where good pop songs come from.

  Ben Gibbard

  Song, Thinking, Kind

  "Postal service album keeps on delivering" by Rodrigo Perez, www.mtv.com. September 16, 2004.

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• We are dying of preconceptions, outworn rules, decaying flags, venomous religions, and sentimentalities. We need a new world. We've wrenched up all the old roots. The old men have no roots. They don't know it. They just go on talking and flailing away and falling down on the young with their tons of dead weight and their power. For the power is still there, in their life-in-death. But the roots are dead, and the land is poisoned for miles around them.

  Josephine Winslow Johnson

  Fall, Power, Men

  Josephine Winslow Johnson (1996). “The Inland Island”, Writer's Digest Books

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