Regularity Quotes - Page 4

• Superstitions typically involve seeing order where in fact there is none, and denial amounts to rejecting evidence of regularities, sometimes even ones that are staring us in the face.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Order, Denial, Superstitions

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• We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut know that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience.

  Max Black

  Children, Cutting, Fire

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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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• 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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• 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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• What's better these days, television or film? It's a dead heat. In fact, one could argue for television with more regularity.

  Joseph McGinty Nichol

  Television, Facts, Heat

  Source: collider.com

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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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• The split between religion and science is relatively new. Isaac Newton, who first worked out the laws by which gravity held the planets and even the stars in their traces, was sufficiently impressed by the scale and regularity of the universe to ascribe it all to God.

  Seth Shostak

  Stars, Law, Firsts

  "Who or What Built the Universe?" by Seth Shostak, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 5, 2010.

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• A great factory with the machinery all working and revolving with absolute and rhythmic regularity and with the men all driven by one impulse, and moving in unison as though a constituent part of the mighty machine, is one of the most inspiring examples of directed force that the world knows. I have rarely seen the face of a mechanic in the action of creation which was not fine, never one which was not earnest and impressive.

  Thomas Nelson Page

  Moving, Men, World

  Thomas Nelson Page (2008). “John Marvel, Assistant”, p.354, Wildside Press LLC

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• There is beauty in space, and it is orderly. There is no weather, and there is regularity. It is predictable. Just look at our little Explorer; you can set your clock by it-literally; it is more accurate than your clock. Everything in space obeys the laws of physics. If you know these laws, and obey them, space will treat you kindly.

  Wernher von Braun

  Law, Weather, Space

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• And there is a lot of idiosyncrasy. But there are also regularities and phenomena. And what the data is going to be able to do - if there's enough of it - is uncover, in the mess and the noise of the world, some lines of music that actually have harmony. It's there, somewhere.

  Esther Duflo

  Data, World, Lines

  "The Poverty Lab". Interview with Ian Parker, www.newyorker.com. May 17, 2010.

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• The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

  Sylvia Plath

  Broken Heart, Moon, Thinking

  Sylvia Plath (2010). “Ariel”, p.45, Faber & Faber

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• Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.

  Lewis Mumford

  Doe, May, Patterns

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• And that we cannot go to space with our feet in the mud. Nor can we in fact turn ourselves into an eco-sensitive hallucinogenic-based culture on Earth unless we fuse these dichotomous opposites. It is only in a coincidencia oppositorum, a union of opposites, that does not strive for closure, that we are going to find cultural sanity. And this is the thing that the entheogens, the hallucinogens, deliver with such clarity and regularity. They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade.

  Terence McKenna

  Opposites, Feet, Space

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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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• More and more I like to take a train. I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling it is so much more sociable, and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating.

  Gertrude Stein

  Adventure, These Days, Courses

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Wars I Have Seen”, p.136, Random House

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• As I grew up I became increasingly interested in philosophy, or which [his family] profoundly disapproved. Everytime the subject came up they repeated with unfailing regularity, "What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind." After some fifty or sixty repititions, this remark ceased to amuse me.

  Bertrand Russell

  Philosophy, Mind, Fifty

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• There is something in such laws that takes the breath away. They are not discoveries or inventions of the human mind, but exist independently of us. In a moment of clarity, one can at most discover that they are there and take them into account. Long before there were people on the earth, crystals were already growing in the earth's crust. On one day or another, a human being first came across such a sparkling morsel of regularity lying on the ground or hit one with his stone tool and it broke off and fell at his feet, and he picked it up and regarded it in his open hand, and he was amazed.

  M. C. Escher

  Spiritual, Lying, Discovery

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• What humans do with the language of mathematics is to describe patterns... To grow mathematically children must be exposed to a rich variety of patterns appropriate to their own lives through which they can see variety, regularity, and interconnections.

  Lynn Steen

  Children, Teaching, Math

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• The regularity with which we conclude that further advances in a particular field are impossible seems equaled only by the regularity with which events prove that we are of too limited vision. And it always seems to be those who have the fullest opportunity to know who are the most limited in view. What, then, is the trouble? I think that one answer should be: we do not realize sufficiently that the unknown is absolutely infinite, and that new knowledge is always being produced.

  Willis R. Whitney

  Knowledge, Science, Opportunity

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• We ourselves introduce that order and regularity in the appearance which we entitle "nature". We could never find them in appearances had we not ourselves, by the nature of our own mind, originally set them there.

  Immanuel Kant

  Order, Perception, Mind

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• Science is not a system of certain, or -established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality... And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover-discover. Like Bacon, we might describe our own contemporary science-'the method of reasoning which men now ordinarily apply to nature'-as consisting of 'anticipations, rash and premature' and as 'prejudices'.

  Karl Popper

  Nature, Science, Men

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• Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.

  Russell Kirk

  Organization, Perfect, Mind

  Russell Kirk (1963). “Confessions of a bohemian Tory: episodes and reflections of a vagrant career”

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• Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

  Henri Matisse

  Dream, Art, Mean

  Henri Matisse, Jack D. Flam (1995). “Matisse on Art”, Univ of California Press

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• In terms of writing, I think something happens to you, and you think, "Oh I'm going to write about that. That's an emotional event." But obviously, if you keep going, and it's something you do with regularity, you've got to find other ways to write.

  David Gray

  Writing, Emotional, Thinking

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