Regularity Quotes - Page 3

• To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

  Richard Lewontin

  Miracle, May, Deities

  "Billions and Billions of Demons". www.nybooks.com. January 9, 1997.

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• He who studies it [Nature] has continually the exquisite pleasure of discerning or half discerning and divining laws; regularities glimmer through an appearance of confusion; analogies between phenomena of a different order suggest themselves and set the imagination in motion; the mind is haunted with the sense of a vast unity not yet discoverable or nameable.

  John Robert Seeley

  Running, Nature, Science

  "Natural Religion".

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• We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

  Albert Einstein

  Life, Order, Profound

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.24, Open Road Media

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• Thus ordered thinking arises out of the ordered course of nature in which man finds himself, and this thinking is from the beginning nothing more than the subjective reproduction of the regularity according to the law of natural phenomena. On the other hand, this reproduction is only possible by means of the will that controls the concatenation of ideas.

  Wilhelm Wundt

  Mean, Men, Thinking

  Wilhelm Max Wundt (1912). “An Introduction to Psychology”

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• The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused, set of appearances, is necessarily tentative; we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it ; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make in our assumption.

  John Stuart Mill

  Confused, Real, Science

  John Stuart Mill (1856). “A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation”, p.16

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• The party belongs to the millions of the rank and file. It does not belong to the handful of politicians who have assumed fraudulently to upset the will of the rank and file. The action of these men is in no sense "regular," as they claim it to be.... theft and dishonesty cannot give and never shall give a title to regularity.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Party, Men, Giving

  Theodore Roosevelt (1926). “The Works of Theodore Roosevelt”

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• Before games are played in common, no rules in the proper sense can come into existence. Regularities and ritualized schemas are already there, but these rites, being the work of the individual, cannot call forth that submission to something superior to the self which characterizes the appearance of any rule.

  Jean Piaget

  Self, Games, Common

  Jean Piaget (1997). “The Moral Judgement of the Child”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

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• What is called chance is the instrument of Providence and the secret agent that counteracts what men call wisdom, and preserves order and regularity, and continuation in the whole, for ... I firmly believe, notwithstanding all our complaints, that almost every person upon earth tastes upon the totality more happiness than misery; and therefore if we could correct the world to our fancies, and with the best intentions imaginable, probably we should only produce more misery and confusion.

  Horace Walpole

  Believe, Men, Order

  Horace Walpole (1904). “The letters of Horace Walpole: fourth earl of Orford”

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• You can't blame your opponents for applying a strategy that beats your brains out with regularity.

  William J. Clinton

  Brain, Opponents, Losing

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• Of course, they (i. e., demons) had always been observed with some regularity, but that could usually be ascribed to an overabundance of piety or wine or imagination. Take your pick.

  Jack McDevitt

  Wine, Imagination, Demon

  "Omega". Book by Jack McDevitt, 2003.

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• I see that time divided is never long, and that regularity abridges all things.

  Abel Stevens

  Time, Long, All Things

  Abel Stevens (1881). “Madame de Staël, a Study of Her Life and Times: The First Revolution and the First Empire”

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• What really does work to increase the feeling of having a home and its comforts is housekeeping. Housekeeping creates cleanliness, order, regularity, beauty, the conditions for health and safety, and a good place to do and feel all the things you wish and need to do and feel in your home. Whether you live alone or with a spouse, parents, and ten children, it is your housekeeping that makes your home alive, that turns it into a small society in its own right, a vital place with its own ways and rhythms, the place where you can be more yourself than you can be anywhere else.

  Cheryl Mendelson

  Children, Home, Order

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• Fiction -- at least for me -- requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Morning, Block, Sunday

  Samuel R. Delany, Carl Howard Freedman (2009). “Conversations with Samuel R. Delany”, p.94, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Choose one meditation and then put all your effort in it. That effort has to be very regular because will is created only out of regularity. It has to be very persistent and a continuity has to be maintained. Even to miss for one day is to destroy much - and at least one hour every day has to be given to it.

  Rajneesh

  Missing, Effort, Meditation

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• But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.

  Marvin Minsky

  Science, Discovery, Astrology

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• The effect of civilization is to impose human law upon environment until it becomes machine-like in its regularity. The objectionable is eliminated, the inevitable is foreseen. One is not even made wet by the rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of stalking about gruesome and accidental, becomes a prearranged pageant, moving along a well-oiled groove to the family vault, where the hinges are kept from rusting and the dust from the air is swept continually away.

  Jack London

  Rain, Moving, Air

  Jack London (2015). “Love of life and Other Stories by Jack London”, p.68, Editora Dracaena

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• Although I am even now still a layman in the area of mathematics, and although I lack theoretical knowledge, the mathematicians, and in particular the crystallographers, have had considerable influence on my work of the last twenty years. The laws of the phenomena around us--order, regularity, cyclical repetition, and renewals--have assumed greater and greater importance for me. The awareness of their presence gives me peace and provides me with support. I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems.

  M. C. Escher

  Beautiful, Years, Law

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• To be faithful in prayer it is indispensable that we arrange all the activities of the day with a regularity that nothing can disturb

  Francois Fenelon

  Prayer, Faithful, Indispensable

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• Regularity chauvinists are people who insist that you have got to do the same thing every time, every day, which drives some of us nuts. Attention Deficit Disorder - we need a more positive term for that. Hummingbird mind, I should think.

  Ted Nelson

  Thinking, Nuts, People

  "The Curse of Xanadu" by Gary Wolf, www.wired.com. June 01, 1995.

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• There are spiritual patterns at work in the universe and these announce themselves with impressive regularity wherever human minds and hearts attempt to attune themselves to the cosmos in all its radiant dimensions.

  Ken Wilber

  Spiritual, Heart, Unity

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• The human understanding of its own nature is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.

  Francis Bacon

  Order, Understanding, World

  Francis Bacon (2012). “The Great Instauration”, p.34, Simon and Schuster

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• To a large extent, the American church has become merged with the world. It has adopted so many of the world's ideals and standards that it has lost its ability to stem the tide of crime, deception and immorality that is sweeping the nation. For millions of church members there is no deep commitment to the cause of Christ, no regularity of attendance at public worship, no sacrificial giving, no personal religious discipline.

  Billy Graham

  Christian, Religious, Commitment

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• [Critical social science attempts] to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed.

  Jurgen Habermas

  Principles, Frozen, Action

  "Knowledge and Human Interests". Book by Jürgen Habermas, 1971.

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• Perhaps there is no greater test of a man's regularity and easiness of conscience than his readiness to face the postman. Blessed is he who is made happy by the sound of a rat-tat! The good are eager for it; but the naughty tremble at the sound thereof.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Blessed, Men, Naughty

  William Makepeace Thackeray (2015). “The History of Pendennis: Christie's Collections”, p.537, 谷月社

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• Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.

  Paul Bowles

  Errors, Years, Another Year

  Paul Bowles (1979). “Collected stories, 1939-1976”

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