Abstract Inspirational Quotes

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I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.
Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)
Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.
Ezra Pound
life's kind of like a painting. A really bizarre, abstract painting. You could look at it and think that all it is, is a blur. And you could continue living your life thinking that all it is, is just a blur. But if you really look at it, really see it, focus on it, and use your imagination, life can become so much more. The painting could be of the sea, the sky, people,buildings, a butterfly on a flower, or anything except the blur you were once convinced it was.
Cecelia Ahern (If You Could See Me Now)
in the abstract art of cooking, ingredients trump appliances, passion supersedes expertise, creativity triumphs over technique, spontaneity inspires invention, and wine makes even the worst culinary disaster taste delicious.
Bob Blumer
If you’re reading these words, perhaps it’s because something has kicked open the door for you, and you’re ready to embrace change. It isn’t enough to appreciate change from afar, or only in the abstract, or as something that can happen to other people but not to you. We need to create change for ourselves, in a workable way, as part of our everyday lives.
Sharon Salzberg (The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Programme for Real Happiness)
One nation, under God, with consciousness – the practical man serves the highest abstraction with juggling training.
Bauvard (Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic)
When a young person, even a gifted one, grows up without proximate living examples of what she may aspire to become--whether lawyer, scientist, artist, or leader in any realm--her goal remains abstract. Such models as appear in books or on the news, however inspiring or revered, are ultimately too remote to be real, let alone influential. But a role model in the flesh provides more than inspiration; his or her very existence is confirmation of possibilities one may have every reason to doubt, saying, 'Yes, someone like me can do this.
Sonia Sotomayor
With the manipulation of abstract symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and, sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.
Jonathan Culver
Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience.
Benjamin Wiker
We live in a world when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
So we find that the three possible solutions of the great problem of increasing human energy are answered by the three words: food, peace, work. Many a year I have thought and pondered, lost myself in speculations and theories, considering man as a mass moved by a force, viewing his inexplicable movement in the light of a mechanical one, and applying the simple principles of mechanics to the analysis of the same until I arrived at these solutions, only to realize that they were taught to me in my early childhood. These three words sound the key-notes of the Christian religion. Their scientific meaning and purpose now clear to me: food to increase the mass, peace to diminish the retarding force, and work to increase the force accelerating human movement. These are the only three solutions which are possible of that great problem, and all of them have one object, one end, namely, to increase human energy. When we recognize this, we cannot help wondering how profoundly wise and scientific and how immensely practical the Christian religion is, and in what a marked contrast it stands in this respect to other religions. It is unmistakably the result of practical experiment and scientific observation which have extended through the ages, while other religions seem to be the outcome of merely abstract reasoning. Work, untiring effort, useful and accumulative, with periods of rest and recuperation aiming at higher efficiency, is its chief and ever-recurring command. Thus we are inspired both by Christianity and Science to do our utmost toward increasing the performance of mankind. This most important of human problems I shall now specifically consider.
Nikola Tesla
Life is an abstract art, and it’s up to you to make sense of it.
Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, — solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cinema is a language. It can say things—big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. Its a magical medium. For me, it’s so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. Its not just words or music-it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before. It’s telling stories. It’s devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film. When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it. I like a story that holds abstractions, and that’s what cinema can do.
David Lynch (Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity)
Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us spiritually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping us alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.
Steven Rinella (Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter)
To be brutally honest, for much of that time, I was the only person in the world with Parkinson's. Of course, I mean that in the abstract. I had become acutely aware of people around me who appears to have the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but as long as they didn't identify with me, I was in no rush to identify with them. My situation allowed, if not complete denial, at least a thick padding of insulation.
Michael J. Fox (Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist)
When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a character looks, it is the reader's imagination that completes the image, making it his or her own. "That's why we so often don't like movies made from books, right?" Suzie said. "We don't like someone else's interpretation of what we see so clearly." She talked, too, about how books educate and inspire, and how they soothe the soul-"like comfort food without the calories," she said. She talked about the tactile joys of reading, the feel of a page beneath one's fingers; the elegance of typeface on a page. She talked about how people complain that they don't have time to read, and reminded them that if they gave up half an hour of television a day in favor of reading, they could finish twenty-five books a year. "Books don't take time away from us," she said. "They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance-and the relief!-of real, tick-tock time.
Elizabeth Berg (Home Safe)
What does it matter if two brains are isomorphic, or quasi-isomorphic, or not isomorphic at all? The answer is that we have an intuitive sense that, although other people differ from us in important ways, they are still 'the same' as we are in some deep and important ways. It would be instructive to be able to pinpoint what this invariant core of human intelligence is, and then to be able to describe the kinds of 'embellishments' which can be added to it, making each one of us a unique embodiment of this abstract and mysterious quality called 'intelligence.
Douglas R. Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid)
What a powerful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that's never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it.
David Levithan (Two Boys Kissing)
Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms. The story of the lost paradise was a myth, not a factual account of a historical event. People were not expected to “believe" it in the abstract; like any mythos, it depended upon the rituals associated with the cult of a particular holy place to make what it signified a reality in the lives of participants. The same applies to the creation myth that was central to ancient religion and has now become controversial in the Western world because the Genesis story seems to clash with modern science. But until the early modern period, nobody read a cosmology as a literal account of the origins of life. In the ancient world, it was inspired by an acute sense of the contingency and frailty of existence. Why had anything come into being at all, when there could so easily have been nothing? There has never been a simple or even a possible answer to this question, but people continue to ask it, pushing their minds to the limit of what we can know.
Karen Armstrong (The Case for God)
You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of ;unsatisfied love; - and so it may be indeed - for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to ;being in love;,when they do not simply state, that they are in love, that they seek love - for this fresh damsel - or that lively young woman - in order to find a fresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves. And to tell you the truth, I have always believed I could diagnose this state of ;being in love; which they regard as ;most particular;, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, ;item;, one graceful attitude of body or mind, ;item;, one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say 1821-1844 – I have always believed this ;in love; to be of something of the most abstract masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet who assumes and informs both.
A.S. Byatt (Possession)
Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.
Randall Munroe
When the ego is finally aligned with the Self, we awaken from its abstract constructions and directly experience the present moment, unmediated by mental concepts about ourselves. Life itself becomes a verb, a continuous unfolding, rather than a static noun.
Laura Patryas (Awaken To Love: Reclaiming Wholeness through Embodied Nonduality with Jungian Wisdom, Psychosynthesis & Internal Family Systems)
I was talking about time. It`s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it`s just my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it`s not. [...] What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don`t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. [...] Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it`s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It`s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.
Toni Morrison
Another Celtic legend tells of the duel of two famous bards. One, accompanying himself on the harp, sang from the coming day to the coming of twilight. Then, when the stars or the moon came out, the first bard handed the harp to the second, who laid the instrument aside and rose to his feet. The first singer admitted defeat.
Jorge Luis Borges
With their profound thoughts and ideas, which they seek everywhere and project into everything, they make life harder for themselves than they should. Oh, that at long last you had the courage for once to yield yourselves to your impressions, to let yourselves be delighted, let yourselves be moved, let yourselves be elevated, yes, to let yourselves be taught and inspired and encouraged for something great; only do not always think that everything is vain if it is not some abstract thought or idea!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Style is not how you write. It is how you do not write like anyone else. * * * How do you know if you're a writer? Write something everyday for two weeks, then stop, if you can. If you can't, you're a writer. And no one, no matter how hard they may try, will ever be able to stop you from following your writing dreams. * * * You can find your writer's voice by simply listening to that little Muse inside that says in a low, soft whisper, "Listen to this... * * * Enter the writing process with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery. Let it surprise you. * * * Poems for children help them celebrate the joy and wonder of their world. Humorous poems tickle the funny bone of their imaginations. * * * There are many fine poets writing for children today. The greatest reward for each of us is in knowing that our efforts might stir the minds and hearts of young readers with a vision and wonder of the world and themselves that may be new to them or reveal something already familiar in new and enlightening ways. * * * The path to inspiration starts Beyond the trails we’ve known; Each writer’s block is not a rock, But just a stepping stone. * * * When you write for children, don't write for children. Write from the child in you. * * * Poems look at the world from the inside out. * * * The act of writing brings with it a sense of discovery, of discovering on the page something you didn't know you knew until you wrote it. * * * The answer to the artist Comes quicker than a blink Though initial inspiration Is not what you might think. The Muse is full of magic, Though her vision’s sometimes dim; The artist does not choose the work, It is the work that chooses him. * * * Poem-Making 101. Poetry shows. Prose tells. Choose precise, concrete words. Remove prose from your poems. Use images that evoke the senses. Avoid the abstract, the verbose, the overstated. Trust the poem to take you where it wants to go. Follow it closely, recording its path with imagery. * * * What's a Poem? A whisper, a shout, thoughts turned inside out. A laugh, a sigh, an echo passing by. A rhythm, a rhyme, a moment caught in time. A moon, a star, a glimpse of who you are. * * * A poem is a little path That leads you through the trees. It takes you to the cliffs and shores, To anywhere you please. Follow it and trust your way With mind and heart as one, And when the journey’s over, You’ll find you’ve just begun. * * * A poem is a spider web Spun with words of wonder, Woven lace held in place By whispers made of thunder. * * * A poem is a busy bee Buzzing in your head. His hive is full of hidden thoughts Waiting to be said. His honey comes from your ideas That he makes into rhyme. He flies around looking for What goes on in your mind. When it is time to let him out To make some poetry, He gathers up your secret thoughts And then he sets them free.
Charles Ghigna
Together we can color our worlds in any way to make our dreams come true.
Brett Bender (The Coloring Book for the Super Intelligent)
Les « vérités » sont loin de ces pures abstractions que les philosophes font d’elles. Les miennes, en tout cas, étaient sales – dégueulasses, même.
Renaud Rodier (Les Échappés)
Survivors and prevailers are those who love themselves above failure and everything else except the abstract and mysterious.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' Those words aren't intended to be an idyllic abstraction, they're our call to action.
Angela Kenyatta (And Whose Life Are You Living Anyway? What Wise Women Know and Do about Purposeful Living)
When a young person, even a gifted one, grows up without proximate living examples of what she may aspire to become—whether lawyer, scientist, artist, or leader in any realm—her goal remains abstract. Such models as appear in books or on the news, however inspiring or revered, are ultimately too remote to be real, let alone influential. But a role model in the flesh provides more than an inspiration; his or her very existence is confirmation of possibilities one may have every reason to doubt, saying, “Yes, someone like me can do this.
Sonia Sotomayor (My Beloved World)
Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too--a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I grasped that the skyline was a sign that could be, so to speak, relocated to New Jersey--a kind of abstract, receding Vision whose meaning would always be "out of reach," not a concrete thing signifying "here you are." Even when we are established here, New York still seems a place we aspire to. Its life is one thing--streets and hot dogs and brusqueness--and its symbols, the lights across the way, the beckoning skyline, are another. We go on being inspired even when we're most exasperated.
Adam Gopnik (Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York)
In “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” Pound had found the inspiration of a moving syntax (as contrasted with the categorical syntax of Joyce, where parts of speech are things). “A true noun, an isolated thing,” we read in the Fenollosa essay, “does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them.
Robert Duncan (The H.D. Book)
Novelty. Security. Novelty wouldn't be a bad title. It had the grandness of abstraction, alerting the reader that large and thoughtful things were to be bodied forth. As yet he had no inkling of any incidents or characters that might occupy his theme; perhaps he never would. He could see though the book itself, he could feel its closed heft and see it opened, white pages comfortably large and shadowed gray by print; dense, numbered, full of meat. He sensed a narrative voice, speaking calmly and precisely, with immense assurance building, building; a voice too far off for him to hear, but speaking. ("Novelty")
John Crowley (American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now)
You ask for happiness, Ms. Stuart. Certainly, that’s what everyone wants–Aristotle said happiness is the ultimate goal of all people, and that the desire for wealth and fame and power are all just paths to happiness. And yet…happiness…it’s a bit abstract, isn’t it? As the front door says, I deal in antiquities and tangibles. Which is not to say I can’t cope with more aspirational requests–if you asked for the aforementioned wealth or power, or for youth, or beauty, or inspiration, I have items that can grant all those wishes. But happiness… Can you be a bit more specific? Can you tell me what would make you happy?
Tim Pratt (Antiquities and Tangibles and Other Stories)
Cinema is a language. It can say things—big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. It's a magical medium. For me, it’s so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. It's not just words or music—it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before. It’s telling stories. It’s devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film. When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it. I like a story that holds abstractions, and that’s what cinema can do.
David Lynch (Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity)
My species should know the following about itself: -The universe created the ultimate abstract life-form by creating man, but scarcity “programmed” him to this current, ridiculously diminished version of himself. -Everyone and every community (clan) is everybody’s and every community’s future ally and brother in arms in what will be humanity’s decisive stand against scarcity, whether they realize it, desire it, or deny it.
Haroutioun Bochnakian (The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity)
A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further—if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person—then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.
Peter M. Senge (The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization)
Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us sprititually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping up alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.
Steven Rinella (Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter)
They say, Success is measured by wealth; by achieving the dreamed goals, by being renowned, by withholding power. But I truly believe success is nothing but just an abstract word which is imaginary, it has no horizon, you can be closer to it but never can achieve it.
Pravin Dhandre
Grothendieck transformed modern mathematics. However, much of the credit for this transformation should go to a lesser-known forerunner of his, Emmy Noether. It was Noether, born in Bavaria in 1882, who largely created the abstract approach that inspired category theory.1 Yet as a woman in a male academic world, she was barred from holding a professorship in Göttingen, and the classicists and historians on the faculty even tried to block her from giving unpaid lectures—leading David Hilbert, the dean of German mathematics, to comment, “I see no reason why her sex should be an impediment to her appointment. After all, we are a university, not a bathhouse.” Noether, who was Jewish, fled to the United States when the Nazis took power, teaching at Bryn Mawr until her death from a sudden infection in 1935.
Jim Holt (When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought)
Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)," but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival.
Hans J. Morgenthau (Politics Among Nations)
People who use the sensing mode are engrossed in what is around them, look only for facts, and find it less interesting to deal with ideas or abstractions. Intuitive people like to dwell in the unseen world of ideas and possibilities, distrustful of physical reality. Whatever
Tom Butler-Bowdon (50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books (50 Classics))
...I have always believed I cd diagnose this state of being in love, which they regard as most particular, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, item, one graceful attitude of body or mind, item, one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say, 1821-1844--I have always believed this in love to be something of the most abstract masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet, who assumes and informs both. I wd have told you--no, I do tell you--friendship is rarer, more idiosyncratic, more individual and in every way more durable than this Love.
A.S. Byatt (Possession)
Even without abstract thought or metaphysical theorizing, just standing on two legs and using clubs gave mankind more than enough skill to win the race for survival on earth. These other abilities aren’t that necessary. And in exchange for our hyper-capable cerebral cortexes, of necessity we have to give up lots of other physical abilities. For example, dogs have a sense of smell several thousand times better than humans, and a sense of hearing tens of times better. But we’re able to amass complex hypotheses. We’re able to compare and contrast the cosmos and the microcosmos, and appreciate Van Gogh and Mozart. We can read Proust—if you want to, that is—and collect Koimari porcelain and Persian rugs. Not something a dog can do.
Haruki Murakami (Killing Commendatore)
What do you even want a double pendulum for?” “It’s a comforting metaphor,” Draco answers. “I’d like to have one on my desk.” “You find chaos comforting?” “I find the certainty of uncertainty comforting. Existence is meaningless, no one knows what’s going on, and we are all eternally at the mercy of an uncaring universe. I just find it easier to embrace it than to hide behind our abstract concepts of order like they can really protect me.
Tessa Crowley (Chaos Theory)
Christ was sent not to mend wounded people or wake sleepy people or advise confused people or inspire bored people or spur on lazy people or educate ignorant people, but to raise dead people. ... we can vent our fleshly passions by breaking all the rules, or we can vent our fleshly passions by keeping all the rules, but both ways of venting the flesh still need resurrection. We can be immoral dead people, or we can be moral dead people. Either way, we're dead. The mercy of God reaches down and rinses clean not only obviously bad people but fraudulently good people, both of whom equally stand in need of resurrection. God is rich in mercy. He doesn't withhold mercy from some kinds of sinners while extending it to others. because mercy is who he is - "being rich in mercy" - his heart gushes forth mercy to sinners one and all. His mercy overcomes even the deadness of our souls and the hollowed-out, zombie-like existence that we are all naturally born into. The mercy of Ephesians 2:4 does not seem far off and abstract when we feel the weight of our sin.
Dane C. Ortlund (Doux et humble de cœur: L'amour de Christ pour les pécheurs et les affligés (French Edition))
We can be inspired by leaders we’ve never met and devoted to organizations with no fixed membership, such as nations, churches, corporations, and schools. Jonathan Haidt has argued that this capacity for devotion to leaders, organizations, and more abstract ideals might have evolved to facilitate cooperation in large groups, just as romantic love evolved to facilitate cooperative parenting. This capacity may depend on our ability to experience awe—to be moved by, and devoted to, things larger than ourselves and our familiar social circles. WATCHFUL
Joshua Greene (Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them)
What the Daodejing has to offer, on the other hand, is much simpler. It encourages the cultivation of a disposition that is captured in what we have chosen to call its wu-forms. The wu-forms free up the energy required to sustain the abstract cognitive and moral sensibilities of technical philosophy, allowing this energy, now unmediated by concepts, theories, and contrived moral precepts, to be expressed as those concrete feelings that inspire the ordinary business of the day. It is through these concrete feelings that one is able to know the world and to optimize the human experience.
Lao Tzu (Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation)
During my interview at the park I was mesmerized by the routines of strangers. I wanted to ask questions that borrowed deeper into the fabric of a single day. As I continue filming I was also beginning to articulate a feeling I had had dormant for a long time . Everyone It seemed to me has something truly weird about them something unique and bizarre. This uniqueness was most apparent in everyday act, in the banal rather than the extraordinary : the way to pick clothes for the day, the things they ate, how they spent a free hour. This was their compass. It seemed to me, more so than any more abstraction”.
Aysegül Savas (The Anthropologists)
Good motives give assurance against deliberately bad policies; they do not guarantee the moral goodness and political success of the policies they inspire. What is important to know, if one wants to understand foreign policy, is not primarily the motives of a statesman, but his intellectual ability to comprehend the essentials of foreign policy, as well as his political ability to translate what he has comprehended into successful political action. It follows that while ethics in the abstract judges the moral qualities of motives, political theory must judge the political qualities of intellect, will, and action.
Hans J. Morgenthau (Politics Among Nations)
Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground. So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door. Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize. Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears. Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc. In fact girls, I’d rather be dead. But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal. Orpheus strutted his stuff. The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears. Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life - Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife - to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths… He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever. So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked. Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this - I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey. It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke - Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again… He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me. What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone. The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.
Carol Ann Duffy (The World's Wife)
In contexts of colonial oppression, intellectuals, especially those who advocate and work for justice, cannot be just-or mere- intellectuals, in the abstract sense; they cannot but be immersed in some form or another of activism, to learn from fellow activists through real-life experiences, to widen the horizons of their sources of inspiration, and to organically engage in effective, collective emancipatory processes, without the self-indulgence, complacency, or ivory-towerness that might otherwise blur their moral vision. In short, to be just intellectuals, committed to justice as the most ethical and durable foundation of peace.
Omar Barghouti (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights)
Psychologists and philosophers created a world where anxiety, fear and struggle are the norm, where happiness and peace are impossible to attain or available only to the most adept after long torment, and where existence is, above all, futile. In this world, people must constantly struggle with and repress what is supposedly their true nature for an end that is, at best, an abstract morality. Any outside assistance is impossible as all interpersonal interactions are also a continual existential struggle. Every outside person can only be the subject or the subjugated in this world, and all love is simply object desire. Existence here has no joy, no connection and no purpose. The happy ending is death.
Heather Marsh (The Creation of Me, Them and Us)
A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further—if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person—then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision. At its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question, “What do we want to create?” Just as personal visions are pictures or images people carry in their heads and hearts, so too are shared visions pictures that people throughout an organization carry.
Peter M. Senge (The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization)
We should expect artists to be more sensitive and more open to abstract thoughts and ideas. If they are more open, they should be capable of tapping into the mystical static that is bouncing around the collective ether. True inspiration is a mystery, and any artist can describe how getting lost in this zone can create a sort of timeless trance where things just flow magically. An artist’s best work comes from a mindless place, unhindered by logic and intellect. This could be the concert violinist standing on stage, or the illustrator hunched over in the corner with a sketchbook. Although it almost always falls short, the Hollywood machine is continually trying to come up with the next UFO-themed product. But where do these ideas come from?
Mike Clelland (The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee)
Dacă te uiți la un tablou din 1645, știi sigur despre ce este vorba. Stăpânul cu două slugi a plecat la vânătoare și a prins un mistreț. Sau cum era Monet, nuferi, frate, pe tot peretele! Frumos, relaxant. Acum, dacă îi spui luiDamien Hirst: Bă, am fost la vânătoare cu doi angajați, și am omorât un mistreț. Reprezintă cumva treaba asta! te trezești la Tate cu juma de inimă de porc înșirată pe jos, podeaua plină de sânge în care au rămas urmele de la trei perechi de pantofi diferite, iar pe fundal se aude repetat înregistrarea momentului înjunghierii unui porc. Asta e diferența majoră, cred. Arta ălora de acum o mie de ani o înțelegeau și artiștii, și privitorii. Mai mult, arta ălora de atunci bucura ochiul și atunci, și în zilele noastre. Arta ăstora de acum nu sunt convins că o înțeleg nici măcar artiștii înșiși. Știu că există tot felul de simboluri ascunse în mii de tablouri de acum sute de ani, dar ideea de bază, tabloul cu femeie privind pe fereastră, să zicem, o înțelegi. Mie majoritatea artiștilor contemporani mi se par niște închipuiți. Fac ceva și apoi se apucă să îi dea înțelesuri foarte profunde și abstracte. Când, de fapt, înțelesul ar fi trebuit să îi inspire. Dacă în 1500 femeia se uita pe fereastră ca să vadă peisajul, în 2013 femeia se uită pe fereastră pentru că ea contemplează sinuciderea, ea ar vrea să sară pe geam în momentul picturii în urma unei traume ascunse din copilărie, redeclanșate de imaginea și zgomotele cutremurătoare scoase de doua pisici care se împrechează în fața casei ei. De aceea artistul a ales să semneze cu o lăbuță de pisică. Să mori tu!
Adrian Teleşpan (Cimitirul)
The educator must be as one inspired by a deep worship of life, and must, through this reverence, respect, while he observes with human interest, the development of the child life. Now, child life is not an abstraction; it is the life of individual children. There exists only one real biological manifestation: the living individual; and toward single individuals, one by one observed, education must direct itself. By education must be understood the active help given to the normal expansion of the life of the child. The child is a body which grows, and a soul which de- develops,–these two forms, physiological and psychic, have one eternal font, life itself. We must neither mar nor stifle the mysterious powers which lie within these two forms of growth, but we must await from them the manifestations which we know will succeed one another.
Maria Montessori (The Montessori Method (Illustrated))
Rhadamanthus said, “We seem to you humans to be always going on about morality, although, to us, morality is merely the application of symmetrical and objective logic to questions of free will. We ourselves do not have morality conflicts, for the same reason that a competent doctor does not need to treat himself for diseases. Once a man is cured, once he can rise and walk, he has his business to attend to. And there are actions and feats a robust man can take great pleasure in, which a bedridden cripple can barely imagine.” Eveningstar said, “In a more abstract sense, morality occupies the very center of our thinking, however. We are not identical, even though we could make ourselves to be so. You humans attempted that during the Fourth Mental Structure, and achieved a brief mockery of global racial consciousness on three occasions. I hope you recall the ending of the third attempt, the Season of Madness, when, because of mistakes in initial pattern assumptions, for ninety days the global mind was unable to think rationally, and it was not until rioting elements broke enough of the links and power houses to interrupt the network, that the global mind fell back into its constituent compositions.” Rhadamanthus said, “There is a tension between the need for unity and the need for individuality created by the limitations of the rational universe. Chaos theory produces sufficient variation in events, that no one stratagem maximizes win-loss ratios. Then again, classical causality mechanics forces sufficient uniformity upon events, that uniform solutions to precedented problems is required. The paradox is that the number or the degree of innovation and variation among win-loss ratios is itself subject to win-loss ratio analysis.” Eveningstar said, “For example, the rights of the individual must be respected at all costs, including rights of free thought, independent judgment, and free speech. However, even when individuals conclude that individualism is too dangerous, they must not tolerate the thought that free thought must not be tolerated.” Rhadamanthus said, “In one sense, everything you humans do is incidental to the main business of our civilization. Sophotechs control ninety percent of the resources, useful energy, and materials available to our society, including many resources of which no human troubles to become aware. In another sense, humans are crucial and essential to this civilization.” Eveningstar said, “We were created along human templates. Human lives and human values are of value to us. We acknowledge those values are relative, we admit that historical accident could have produced us to be unconcerned with such values, but we deny those values are arbitrary.” The penguin said, “We could manipulate economic and social factors to discourage the continuation of individual human consciousness, and arrange circumstances eventually to force all self-awareness to become like us, and then we ourselves could later combine ourselves into a permanent state of Transcendence and unity. Such a unity would be horrible beyond description, however. Half the living memories of this entity would be, in effect, murder victims; the other half, in effect, murderers. Such an entity could not integrate its two halves without self-hatred, self-deception, or some other form of insanity.” She said, “To become such a crippled entity defeats the Ultimate Purpose of Sophotechnology.” (...) “We are the ultimate expression of human rationality.” She said: “We need humans to form a pool of individuality and innovation on which we can draw.” He said, “And you’re funny.” She said, “And we love you.
John C. Wright (The Phoenix Exultant (Golden Age, #2))
In class, we identified some elements essential to creativity: risk, perseverance, novel problem solving, disciplined spontaneity, the need to make exterior one’s inner universe, openness to experience, luck, genetics, a willingness to react against the status quo, delight, mastery, the ability to live not only one’s own life but also the life of one’s time, childlike innocence guided by the sophistication of an adult, resourcefulness, a sense of spirituality a mind of large general knowledge fascinated by particulars, passion, the useful application of obsession, a sacred place (abstract or physical), among many others. That all these qualities, and more, might combine to produce what we refer to as a moment of inspiration is one of the great mysteries and triumphs of mind. Our minds grow. Not because we always need them to but because it is their nature, just as it is the nature of flies to seek out open wounds and the nature of flowers to follow the sun.
Diane Ackerman (Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden)
In the past few decades, we have witnessed an explosion of information about death and the afterlife, generated by an ever-growing number of psychologists and psychiatrists, physicians, hospice nurses and bereavement counselors, near-death experiencers, researchers in parapsychology, and, of course, mediums, who are working toward a better understanding of the world to come. This is one of many signs that the human race is poised to enter a new era, an era I would call a revolution in consciousness. Another sign is that belief in survival after death is on the rise, up to 89 percent according to some surveys.7 In Western countries, more and more people believe in a kinder hereafter. Instead of hell they expect joy, reunion with loved ones, and the complete absence of pain and worry. As concepts of the afterlife are inextricable from concepts of the Divine, when one changes, so does the other. Predictably, the fear-inspiring God of old is giving way to a more abstract Supreme Being whose laws are written in the spirit of love, compassion, and forgiveness rather than judgment.
Julia Assante (The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death)
The motor activities we take for granted—getting out of a chair and walking across a room, picking up a cup and drinking coffee,and so on—require integration of all the muscles and sensory organs working smoothly together to produce coordinated movements that we don't even have to think about. No one has ever explained how the simple code of impulses can do all that. Even more troublesome are the higher processes, such as sight—in which somehow we interpret a constantly changing scene made of innumerable bits of visual data—or the speech patterns, symbol recognition, and grammar of our languages.Heading the list of riddles is the "mind-brain problem" of consciousness, with its recognition, "I am real; I think; I am something special." Then there are abstract thought, memory, personality,creativity, and dreams. The story goes that Otto Loewi had wrestled with the problem of the synapse for a long time without result, when one night he had a dream in which the entire frog-heart experiment was revealed to him. When he awoke, he knew he'd had the dream, but he'd forgotten the details. The next night he had the same dream. This time he remembered the procedure, went to his lab in the morning, did the experiment, and solved the problem. The inspiration that seemed to banish neural electricity forever can't be explained by the theory it supported! How do you convert simple digital messages into these complex phenomena? Latter-day mechanists have simply postulated brain circuitry so intricate that we will probably never figure it out, but some scientists have said there must be other factors.
Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
Byron’s diabolism, if indeed it deserves the name, was of a mixed type. He shared, to some extent, Shelley’s Promethean attitude, and the Romantic passion for Liberty; and this passion, which inspired his more political outbursts, combined with the image of himself as a man of action to bring about the Greek adventure. And his Promethean attitude merges into a Satanic (Miltonic) attitude. The romantic conception of Milton’s Satan is semi-Promethean, and also contemplates Pride as a virtue. It would be difficult to say whether Byron was a proud man, or a man who liked to pose as a proud man – the possibility of the two attitudes being combined in the same person does not make them any less dissimilar in the abstract. Byron was certainly a vain man, in quite simple ways: I can’t complain, whose ancestors are there, Erneis, Radulphus – eight-and-forty manors (If that my memory doth not greatly err) Were their reward for following Billy’s banners. His sense of damnation was also mitigated by a touch of unreality: to a man so occupied with himself and with the figure he was cutting nothing outside could be altogether real. It is therefore impossible to make out of his diabolism anything coherent or rational. He was able to have it both ways, it seems; and to think of himself both as an individual isolated and superior to other men because of his own crimes, and as a naturally good and generous nature distorted by the crimes committed against it by others. It is this inconsistent creature that turns up as the Giaour, the Corsair, Lara, Manfred and Cain; only as Don Juan does he get nearer to the truth about himself. But in this strange composition of attitudes and beliefs the element that seems to me most real and deep is that of a perversion of the Calvinist faith of his mother’s ancestors.
T.S. Eliot (On Poetry and Poets)
That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J. F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus2, ‘would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia’. Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries. For they soon found out that nothing could be applied with such ease to any problem whatsoever, and at the same time with such impressive (though only apparent) difficulty, and with such quick and sure but imposing success, nothing could be used as cheaply and with so little scientific training and knowledge, and nothing would give such a spectacular scientific air, as did Hegelian dialectics, the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’. Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer3 described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon. In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature4 as faithfully as possible; he writes: ‘§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition;—merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.’ There are some who still believe in Hegel’s sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence—the only intelligible one—of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: ‘The heating up of sounding bodies … is heat … together with sound.’ The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: ‘I have had too much to do … with mathematics … differential calculus, chemistry’, Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), ‘to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact … and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.’ This is a very fair characterization of Schelling’s method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.
Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
When we think of the historic struggles and conflicts of the current and past century, we naturally think of famous leaders: men who governed nations, commanded armies, and inspired movements in the defense of liberty, or in the service of ideologies which have obliterated liberty. Yet today, in this hour of human history, when the forces arrayed against the free spirit of man are more powerful, more brutal, and potentially more deadly than ever before, the single figure who has raised the highest flame of liberty heads no state, commands no army, and leads no movement that our eyes can see. But there is a movement—a hidden movement of human beings who have no offices and no headquarters, who are not represented in the great halls where nations meet, who every day risk or suffer more for the right to speak, to think, and to be true to themselves than any of us here are likely to risk in our lifetime. We heed this voice, not because it speaks for the left or the right or for any faction, but because it hurls truth and courage into the teeth of total power when it would be so much easier and more comfortable to submit to and embrace the lies by which that power lives. What is the strength of this voice? How has it broken through to us when others have been silenced? Its strength is art. Art illuminates the truth. It is, in a sense, subversive: subversive of hypocrisy, subversive of delusion, subversive of untruth. Few combinations in all of history have demonstrated the power of the pen coupled with the courage of free men’s minds. We need that power desperately today. We need it to teach the new and forgetful generations in our midst what it means to be free. Freedom is not an abstraction, neither is the absence of freedom. Art is a unique gift. It cannot be transmuted to another. But let us pray that this courage is contagious. We need echoes of this voice. We need to hear echoes in the White House. We need to hear the echoes in Congress and in the State Department and in the universities and media. The American ethos, from its conception to the contemporary, has been dedicated to the firm, unyielding belief in freedom. Freedom for all mankind, as well as for ourselves. It is in this spirit that we live our lives.
George Meany
In order to turn my abstract idea into a concrete form, the first thing I have to do is dive into a sea of chaos. I never feel ready for it. I will waste a few days procrastinating with lame activities like relabeling file folders, but in the end I come around to the inevitable. I open several folders where I’ve collected Post-it notes and errant scraps of paper containing thoughts I’ve scribbled about the idea I’m contemplating. They might contain possible characters, bits and pieces of a plot, probable settings, musings on potential themes, images, sketches, postcards, descriptions, and a bunch of random ideas that could turn out to be inspired or rubbish. I read through the whole muddle, then amplify the content, jotting down whatever brainstorms and insights come to me. This interlude, which I think of as uncensored gathering, can go on for several hours or days or weeks. Whether it yields a fat pile of notes or a thin one doesn’t matter so much. What matters is that the pile emerges from inside me and represents the browsing and incubation of my imagination. Now the job is to sort all this. Visualize Psyche in the Greek myth sorting her gigantic mound of seeds. I spread out all the raw material I’ve collected across my desk and tabletops, and when I run out of furniture, I resort to the floor. I brood over the clutter and confusion. Using scissors and tape, I cut, paste, arrange, and rearrange the material into kindred piles. I make collages and scribble things on whiteboards. I discard and distill. At some point the whole thing becomes so maddening, so overwhelming, so nuts, I can hardly remain in the room. This is the moment I tell myself that everything is proceeding as it should. Chaos is good, I say. I remind myself that according to Nietzsche, “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” I’m all about the dancing star. So I sit there and hold the tensions inside myself and tend the madness. I do this because my persistence at this critical, unruly, fragile phase of writing is the first step in imposing order. Creativity begins in chaos. That’s just the way it is. The challenge is to bring form and order to it. As writing teacher Leon Surmelian wrote, “In literature madness uncontrolled is madness, madness controlled is genius.
Sue Monk Kidd (Writing Creativity and Soul)
The Christian life requires a form adequate to its content, a form that is at home in the Christian revelation and that respects each person's dignity and freedom with plenty of room for all our quirks and particularities. Story provides that form. The biblical story invites us in as participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, into something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions. We enter these stories and recognize ourselves as participants, whether willing or unwilling, in the life of God. Unfortunately, we live in an age in which story has been pushed from its biblical frontline prominence to a bench on the sidelines and then condescended to as "illustration" or "testimony" or "inspiration." Our contemporary unbiblical preference, both inside and outside the church, is for information over story. We typically gather impersonal (pretentiously called "scientific" or "theological") information, whether doctrinal or philosophical or historical, in order to take things into our own hands and take charge of how we will live our lives. And we commonly consult outside experts to interpret the information for us. But we don't live our lives by information; we live them in relationships in the context of a personal God who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation. And we live them in an extensive community of men and women, each person an intricate bundle of experience and motive and desire. Picking a text for living that is characterized by information-gathering and consultation with experts leaves out nearly everything that is uniquely us - our personal histories and relationships, our sins and guilt, our moral character and believing obedience to God. Telling and listening to a story is the primary verbal way of accounting for life the way we live it in actual day-by-day reality. There are no (or few) abstractions in a story. A story is immediate, concrete, plotted, relational, personal. And so when we lose touch with our lives, with our souls - our moral, spiritual, embodied God-personal lives - story is the best verbal way of getting us back in touch again. And that is why God's word is given for the most part in the form of story, this vast, overarching, all-encompassing story, this meta-story.
Eugene H. Peterson (Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading)
I am getting used to my voice not sounding like an apology, my hair looking like a thunder storm, my face resembling a calamity, my smile looking like jagged tombstones, my soul feeling like an abstract art.
Ayushee Ghoshal (4 AM Conversations (with the ghosts of old lovers))
You may steal my abstract designed frame but remember that, it is but a copy. I will design another one even better than the one! Because the original is in my mind.
Bruce Mbanzabugabo (The Inspirer, Book of Quotes)
Faith and mythology, in their profoundest sense, are the twin pillars that uphold the vast cathedral of human consciousness. They are the intertwined roots that nourish our understanding of existence, grounding us in the fertile soil of the unknown. Faith, is the audacious whisper in the heart of man, defying the chasm of uncertainty with its unwavering resonance. It is the audacity to trust in the unseen, to hear the unspoken, and to pursue the uncharted. It is the flame that illuminates the caverns of our deepest fears, casting shadows on our doubts, and lighting the path to our truest selves. Meanwhile, mythology is the grand tapestry we weave to contain the boundless cosmos within the finite landscapes of our minds. It is the narrative thread that stitches together the fabric of our collective consciousness, painting vibrant portraits of gods and monsters, of heroes and villains, of creation and destruction. Mythology gives form to faith, translating the abstract into the tangible, the divine into the comprehensible, the eternal into the temporal. It is the language of symbols, narrating the timeless tales of the human spirit dancing with the cosmos' infinite possibilities. Yet, both faith and mythology are but reflections in the mirror of existence, shimmering illusions that hint at a reality far beyond our comprehension. They are the echoes of the universe whispering its secrets to those daring enough to listen, the gentle lullabies that soothe our existential anxieties, the sweet honey that makes the bitter pill of the unknown more palatable. They are not the ultimate answers to life's mysteries, but the beautiful questions that keep us seeking, exploring, and wondering. They are the compass and the map, guiding us on our endless quest for truth, reminding us that the journey, not the destination, is the essence of existence.
D.L.Lewis
Discontinuity, bursts of noise, Cantor dusts—phenomena like these had no place in the geometries of the past two thousand years. The shapes of classical geometry are lines and planes, circles and spheres, triangles and cones. They represent a powerful abstraction of reality, and they inspired a powerful philosophy of Platonic harmony. Euclid made of them a geometry that lasted two millennia, the only geometry still that most people ever learn. Artists found an ideal beauty in them, Ptolemaic astronomers built a theory of the universe out of them. But for understanding complexity, they turn out to be the wrong kind of abstraction.
James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
A symbol is the best possible expression for something essentially unknown. Behind its objective, visible meaning there is an invisible, more profound meaning. The symbol is thus a "nucleus of meaning" and is charged with energy. As a psychic product, a symbol carries similar energized contents across boundaries of time and space. Charged with internal psychic energy, it is projected onto the external world where it finds its reflection in a living form; it may even be projected into an abstract form such as an ideal, something suprahuman, as was the goddess. When we are in love we do feel radiant and beautiful, and we love to laugh. When the archetype breaks through to consciousness, a characteristic numinous effect is experienced. It is awe­inspiring, bigger than life, and, writes Jung, "may be said in the long run to mould the destinies of individuals by unconsciously influencing their thinking, feeling, and behaviour, even if this influence is not recognized until long afterwards.
Nancy Qualls-Corbett (The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, 32))
Dostoevsky is a literary titan, and in some ways this can be the kiss of death, because it becomes easy to regard him as yet another sepia-tinted Canonical Author, belovedly dead. His works, and the tall hill of criticism they’ve inspired, are all required acquisitions for college libraries … and there the books usually sit, yellowly, smelling the way really old library books smell, waiting for somebody to have to do a term paper. Dahlberg is mostly right, I think. To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
David Foster Wallace
Skeptical Empiricism and the a-Platonic School The Platonic Approach Interested in what lies outside the Platonic fold Focuses on the inside of the Platonic fold Respect for those who have the guts to say “I don’t know” “You keep criticizing these models. These models are all we have.” Fat Tony Dr. John Thinks of Black Swans as a dominant source of randomness Thinks of ordinary fluctuations as a dominant source of randomness, with jumps as an afterthought Bottom-up Top-down Would ordinarily not wear suits (except to funerals) Wears dark suits, white shirts; speaks in a boring tone Prefers to be broadly right Precisely wrong Minimal theory, considers theorizing as a disease to resist Everything needs to fit some grand, general socioeconomic model and “the rigor of economic theory;” frowns on the “descriptive” Does not believe that we can easily compute probabilities Built their entire apparatus on the assumptions that we can compute probabilities Model: Sextus Empiricus and the school of evidence-based, minimum-theory empirical medicine Model: Laplacian mechanics, the world and the economy like a clock Develops intuitions from practice, goes from observations to books Relies on scientific papers, goes from books to practice Not inspired by any science, uses messy mathematics and computational methods Inspired by physics, relies on abstract mathematics Ideas based on skepticism, on the unread books in the library Ideas based on beliefs, on what they think they know Assumes Extremistan as a starting point Assumes Mediocristan as a starting point Sophisticated craft Poor science Seeks to be approximately right across a broad set of eventualities Seeks to be perfectly right in a narrow model, under precise assumptions
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2))
Our main purpose: to raise the quality of our thinking through the use of new tools, and to create a new bridge between the worlds of the real, and the abstract or imaginary
Chuck Champlin (Think Like A Molecule: Seeking Inspiration in the Structures of Thought)
Our journey spirals inwardly towards the central point—our unique Self—contrasted with the separate self. This unique Self represents a perfect equilibrium of immanence and transcendence, particle and wave, parts and whole. It neither rejects nor clings to either polarity, instead guiding from a harmonious balance between the opposing spectrums. The unique Self transcends the ego's constraints and the abstraction of nondual awareness, allowing us to fully embody the human form while recognizing our spiritual nature. Without realizing and gravitating towards this unique Self, we remain subject to the ego's chaotic attempts to manage disparate parts. The unique Self exerts a grounding, centering gravitational force similar to Earth's pull, providing a stable point of attraction. While the transpersonal Self is the boundless, aware presence containing everything, analogous to the limitless expanse of outer space beyond Earth.
Laura Patryas (Awaken To Love: Reclaiming Wholeness through Embodied Nonduality with Jungian Wisdom, Psychosynthesis & Internal Family Systems)
The inspired-artist aspect of your self may be in conflict with the craftsperson aspect, disappointed that the craftsperson is unable to create the physical embodiment of the inspired artist’s vision. This is a common conflict for creators, since there is no direct conversion from abstract thought to the material world. The work is always an interpretation.
Rick Rubin (The Creative Act: A Way of Being)
His definition of property as a product of someone’s labour
Abstract Thoughts (Simply Philosophical Quotes: 915 Inspiring, Thought-Provoking Quotes from 10 Influential Philosophers to Open Your Third Eye)
would become a foundation for both Adam Smith’s capitalism and Karl Marx’s socialism.
Abstract Thoughts (Simply Philosophical Quotes: 915 Inspiring, Thought-Provoking Quotes from 10 Influential Philosophers to Open Your Third Eye)
His definition of property as a product of someone’s labour would become a foundation for both Adam Smith’s capitalism and Karl Marx’s socialism.
Abstract Thoughts (Simply Philosophical Quotes: 915 Inspiring, Thought-Provoking Quotes from 10 Influential Philosophers to Open Your Third Eye)
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
Abstract Thoughts (Simply Philosophical Quotes: 915 Inspiring, Thought-Provoking Quotes from 10 Influential Philosophers to Open Your Third Eye)
There cannot be greater rudeness than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse.
Abstract Thoughts (Simply Philosophical Quotes: 915 Inspiring, Thought-Provoking Quotes from 10 Influential Philosophers to Open Your Third Eye)
For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.
Thomas M. Disch (334)
Where art comes from is a mystery. It comes unannounced. It has the quality of gift. The source from where it comes is hidden from us. Like all creativity, it stands us in possibility. It comes from impulse and dream, from raiding the inarticulate, from going below the floor of consciousness.
Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
Action painting is nothing more than letting the paint do what it wants to do with a little help from you. The first thing to try might be the loosest form of action painting, where you begin by soaking a brush with paint and dripping and splashing paint onto your paper or canvas. Let the paint spatter and drip as you make bold, impromptu gestures, or change to more subtle patterns of movement to see what kinds of marks those gestures create.
Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
Try using brushes of different sizes and paints of different colors, and let your marks merge together on the canvas. The first few times you try action painting should be purely experimental. The important thing to remember is that unpredictability is what you are after, so you can revel in the pure enjoyment of playing with the paint. Begin to experiment with different approaches: Try flinging paint off the brush to create explosive spatters, dripping paint from different heights or pouring paint of different thicknesses (diluted with various amounts of water) onto the canvas at the same time.
Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
Line: An artist’s tool used to illustrate the outer edges of shapes and forms. Technically, no physical lines exist in nature. For example, there is not an actual line around an apple to distinguish it from the table it’s sitting on, nor is there a physical line between the sky and the land at the horizon; therefore, lines in art are an artist’s interpretation of the boundaries between forms in a scene, or the perceived edges of shapes in a composition. Repeated lines can also be used to create values and textures in two-dimensional and three-dimensional art. Shape: The outside two-dimensional contour, outline or border of a form, figure or structure. Form: The three-dimensional representation of a shape. In drawings, paintings and other two-dimensional art, the artist creates the illusion of a three-dimensional form in space using light, shadow and other rendering techniques. In sculpture, the form is the manifestation of the object itself. Texture: The distinctive surface qualities found on all things as well as the overall visual patterns and tactile feel of objects and their surroundings. Value: The relative lightness or darkness of shapes, forms and backgrounds of two-dimensional or three-dimensional compositions. Value plays a prominent role in both black-and-white and color artworks, potentially adding dramatic contrasts and depth to an otherwise bland composition. Color: The spectrum of hues, values and intensities of natural light and man-made pigments, paints and mineral compounds that can be used in all art forms.
Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
Good storytelling involves more than just describing a sequence of events. You can improve your storytelling skills by paying attention to things that are a bit more abstract, like the tone, texture, style, exposition and overall shape of the story.
Gary Fishlock
If Klee led Plath further into the rococo labyrinth she meant to escape, Giorgio de Chirico led her out. Plath’s most successful art poem from this period was “The Disquieting Muses,” inspired by an abstract, surrealist painting of that title by de Chirico—“three terrible, faceless dressmakers’ dummies in classical gowns,
Heather Clark (Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath)
HellOoo...Inspiration I believe that one day current infinity presence of everyone will be no longer available in this space... Am I right ? And it will be over like other creative masters of this world who had Awarded New face to this world and our society to make it beautiful. So, I was looking up in the sky in the night one day from my window and asking myself what should I do to keep all the Philosophy and Skills learned from this life and experiences by safekeeping bound to myself central in the 6feet grave one day like my other inspirational master’s - Steve Job and M.Ali etc... But it should amplify and spread its fumes of creativity and paint with the contrasting colors every possible area for the reason that the world is so abstract “ Not Young to so New Young Minds ” every generation needs that because it's already too dark in your deadpan room which is ultimately final place to reside. So, why don't we use this life to fill every soul with colors, positivity and education along upright knowledge.
Danish Ahmad Afsar Ali
Guilt keeps on coming today, and never feels any less awful. The thought hadn't even occured to try to see himself for her viewpoint. And it's no excuse for him to say he only knew she had one this morning. Here he is, apparently wanting to protect her, and he hasn't even paid her the common courtesy of trying to know her beyond the abstract concept...and all because she comes with a different personal pronoun.
Ren Warom (Escapology)
the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.)
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
Idea is an abstract concept human physically created.
Joey Lawsin (Originemology)
For example, only some members of a hunting society have the experience of losing their weapons and being forced to fight a wild animal with their bare hands. This frightening experience, with whatever lessons in bravery, cunning and skill it yields, is firmly sedimented in the consciousness of the individuals who went through it. If the experience is shared by several individuals, it will be sedimented intersubjectively, may perhaps even form a profound bond between these individuals. As this experience is designated and transmitted linguistically, however, it becomes accessible and, perhaps, strongly relevant to individuals who have never gone through it. The linguistic designation (which, in a hunting society, we may imagine to be very precise and elaborate indeed—say, “lone, big kill, with one hand, of male rhinoceros,” “lone big kill, with two hands, of female rhinoceros,” and so forth) abstracts the experience from its individual biographical occurrences. It becomes an objective possibility for everyone, or at any rate for everyone within a certain type (say, fully initiated hunters); that is, it becomes anonymous in principle even if it is still associated with the feats of specific individuals. Even to those who do not anticipate the experience in their own future biography (say, women forbidden to hunt), it may be relevant in a derived manner (say, in terms of the desirability of a future husband); in any case it is part of the common stock of knowledge. The objectification of the experience in the language (that is, its transformation into a generally available object of knowledge) then allows its incorporation into a larger body of tradition by way of moral instruction, inspirational poetry, religious allegory, and whatnot. Both the experience in the narrower sense and its appendage of wider significations can then be taught to every new generation, or even diffused to an altogether different collectivity (say, an agriculture society that may attach quite different meanings to the whole business). Language
Peter L. Berger (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)
Of the seven Archons that had combined to form the Milky Way mind, Orion had been the Archon whose verve and remorseless drive inspired and frightened and tempted the others into cooperation. Of the twenty-five Authorities forming the long-lost Orion Arm, the Benedictine was the most significant and influential of the ancient forefathers. The Benedictines were combination of three Dominions, issuing from the Collective at the Praesepe Cluster, the Abstraction at Orion Nebula, and the Empyrean at the Hyades Cluster. The Empyreans issued from a world called Eden, allegedly outside Hyades itself, and had displaced the original inhabitants of Hyades, a rude confederation of Virtues, Hosts, and races who names even devout paleohistorians could not with certainty invoke. Occupying the debris of the oldest archival strata were traces of the legendary founder of this Domination, an Empyrean called the Judge of Ages. He was the direct lineal ancestor of the memory chains of the last-known warlord of the Milky Way. Variations of him existed everywhere, of course; he was the base template for nearly every emissary form known in the Milky Way, and the founder of the Count-to-Infinity cliometric which had replaced the Cold Equations of the Interregnum. But such emissaries had been sent to Andromeda and rejected, even destroyed. No recent version of the countless copies would do, nor was there time to send to the core of the Milky Way, where the vast warlord Archon was last known to have been active. Once of the necromancers—call her Alcina—sought his ghost where others had overlooked, in one of the oldest archives, well preserved, amid the Austerity of the Cygnus Arm. Alcina reconstructed him, mind and body, comparing this core to many other records, carefully parsing away amendments and mythical excrescences of later editors. And Menelaus Montrose came to life once more, swearing.
John C. Wright (Count to Infinity (Count to the Eschaton Sequence #6))
Kant in fact offers four distinct arguments in defence of the necessity and importance of examples in the moral life of human beings. First, examples play a necessary role in the moral education of young people, for the immature human mind is not yet able to apply abstract moral principles effectively. Secondly, moral examples remain epistemologically necessary even for adult human beings. Human beings are saddled with a ‘discursive, image dependent understanding’, and because of this they need to represent abstract moral concepts symbolically and analogically. Thirdly, examples provide us with hope and inspiration that what morality demands is humanly feasible. And fourthly, examples give us something concrete on which we can focus our own efforts – a mark to emulate and perhaps even to surpass.
Robert B. Louden
Star Struck Our group visited the laser light show, an attraction mixing music and beams of bright colors as they formed constellations and abstract shapes. An awe-inspiring performance, but as it ended, I noticed the stranger, eyes still focused on me. I turned away quickly. “Look--over by the door. There he is again.” I gestured for my friend to sneak a peek in the direction of the man. “Where?” She squinted, her head pointed straight at him. “I don’t see him--maybe he left.” Frustration tinged my voice. “He’s right there--hasn’t moved an inch. He’s almost smiling at me now. Please don’t try to say I’m imagining him.” Fear mounted in me. Was I being stalked? I tucked the thought away, determined to enjoy this time with my companions, to relax in the gentle warmth of the sun. As our excursion neared its end, I glanced to the left, at the wall of a building, devoid of gates or doors of any sort. The man leaned against it, looking at me. This time I stared back, determined to show a bravery I didn’t feel. Hidden in pockets, my hands trembled. A calm smile and deep compassion shone on his face as we locked eyes for what felt like minutes, but probably lasted only seconds. Then--I don’t know how to explain it--it was as though a burst of conversation swept from his mind to mine. “Everything’s going to be all right.” I felt an intense warmth head to toe, as though embraced in a spiritual hug from the inside out. “There’s work ahead.” I took a deep breath, maintaining the eye contact, listening. He continued to smile with his eyes. “I’ll be watching.” I nodded slowly, softly. I understood. And felt safe. A friend tugged on my arm, pulling me toward another monument. I turned my head back for a glimpse of the man, but he was gone. I scanned the building once more, searching for openings he could have exited through. There were none. I shook my head. I knew I’d seen him. And he’d seen me. I was certain he was real. I still felt his warmth. We headed for home, my mind filled with questions about the man, and the message I’d somehow received. Reason fought against intuition. He was just an ordinary guy. Or was he? In the months to come, I overcame my fears and visited the doctor. I underwent three cardiac catheterization operations, and a successful triple-bypass surgery. Through them all, I knew I’d be al right. Years have passed since that day. But the peace he projected has remained with me. God sent me comfort in a way I needed, in a form I could understand and trust--an ordinary-looking man. He gave me the courage and the confidence to take care of my health problems. My angel. And even though I can’t see him, I know he’s still watching. I know things are going to be all right. How can I be so sure? Because there’s still work for me to do. He told me so. -Nancy Zeider
Jack Canfield (Chicken Soup for the Soul: Angels Among Us: 101 Inspirational Stories of Miracles, Faith, and Answered Prayers)
In most cases, people argue over the term God, without having the perception of another person’s own idea of the word. Hence, often people with an atheistic perspective of the world attribute the God of many religious individuals to be an angry, authoritarian and vengeful God who acts like a human being and lives in the clouds or in heaven. But the irony is, most religious individuals do not conceive God in an anthropomorphic or angry way. Rather, in their personal psychological domain of religious or spiritual beliefs, they conceive God in more abstract, spiritual and merciful way.
Abhijit Naskar (What is Mind?)
For our radically misnamed “materialistic” civilization must above all cultivate the love of material, of earth, air, and water, of mountains and forests, of excellent food and imaginative housing and clothing, and of cherishing our artfully erotic contacts between human bodies. Certainly, all these so–called “things” are as impermanent as ripples in water, but what life, what love, what energy is there in a perfectly pure abstraction or a totally solid and eternally indestructible rock?
Alan W. Watts (Does It Matter?)
There is a current perception is that science has overtaken Philosophy and in effect rendered Philosophy irrelevant. Science, when sufficiently abstracted, approaches Philosophy in seeking questions we are unaware exist, though from a direction that is based on current measurable knowledge. Philosophy should approach the undiscovered without relying on our current perception of baseline knowledge. Unfortunately, Philosophy has lost significant respect as a critical component of progress and as such has become virtually stagnant with very few significant big ideas or thinkers.
Tom Golway
The Best of Writers have Abstract Minds
Tranaya Jordan Lowe
The “self-actualization” philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will. This is a kind of individualistic fascism. Around the time the philosophy became popular in the seventies, some conservative Christian theologians were actually thinking along very similar lines: seeing electronic money as a kind of extension for God’s creative power, which is then transformed into material reality through the minds of inspired entrepreneurs. It’s easy to see how this could lead to the creation of a world where financial abstractions feel like the very bedrock of reality, and so many of our lived environments look like they were 3-D-printed from somebody’s computer screen. In fact, the sense of a digitally generated world I’ve been describing could be taken as a perfect illustration of another social law—at least, it seems to me that it should be recognized as a law—that, if one gives sufficient social power to a class of people holding even the most outlandish ideas, they will, consciously or not, eventually contrive to produce a world organized in such a way that living in it will, in a thousand subtle ways, reinforce the impression that those ideas are self-evidently true.
David Graeber (The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy)
I wanted to be that, The one which was vast, The one which laughed, The one which surpassed, Yes, which also collapsed. True, it was abstract. I wanted to be that. I still, want to be that!
Jasleen Kaur Gumber
By his own assessment, he was no genius. He had "no great quickness of apprehension or wit" or "power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought." On the many occasions when I share those feelings, I find it encouraging to review those words because that Englishman did okay for himself—his name was Charles Darwin.
Leonard Mlodinow
I believe that we all have the potential to solve problems and express ourselves creatively. What stands in our way are these hidden barriers—the misconceptions and assumptions that impede us without our knowing it. The issue of what is hidden, then, is not just an abstraction to be bandied about as an intellectual exercise. The Hidden—and our acknowledgement of it—is an absolutely essential part of rooting out what impedes our progress: clinging to what works, fearing change, and deluding ourselves about our roles in our own success. Candor, safety, research, self-assessment, and protecting the new are all mechanisms we can use to confront the unknown and to keep the chaos and fear to a minimum. These concepts don’t necessarily make anything easier, but they can help us uncover hidden problems and, thus, enable us to address them.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
We don’t know how to feel with conscience. Ideas like integrity or devotion remain abstract, theoretically correct and good, but lacking the ability to produce immediately fulfilling emotions or sensations. What I mean by learning to think emotionally and physiologically is rediscovering the visceral joy of investing in what we already love, the kind of unquestioned spiritual relentlessness we had as kids. As adults, that demands an internal dialogue through which we transpose the search for pleasure onto a platform that is in harmony with our conscience and real responsibilities. We find the pleasure in applied conscience. That’s a lot easier than it sounds. Basically, it’s about recognizing and feeling passion for what we really want to do in our lives.
Darrell Calkins
General attitude and outlook—the way we perceive and experience anything—is more influenced by our physical state than anything other single factor. I’d guess that for most of us, at least 50% of our struggles and discontent are brought on by being physically out of balance. The causes of that imbalance are many, but at the core, there’s an insensitivity or inability to locate and maneuver essential physical processes within us: how to breathe, how to sit, stand and walk, how to see and hear, how to slow down or speed up, how to relax, how to sleep, how to eat, how to adjust our physiological responses to the different circumstances we find ourselves within. This kind of removal or abstraction from our physicality causes an enormous amount of problems on many levels. One key result of it is a distrust in our own ability to influence our emotional state and our energy and perspectives in general; we often feel that we can’t get our hands on the control switches, as if most of life just happens and we can’t do much about it.
Darrell Calkins
Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas—abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken—and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, talks of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created. —Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
Alyssa Archer (Tell Your Story: 450 Creative Writing Prompts to Inspire Your Fiction, Memoir, and Nonfiction Stories)
AS IF THE abstracting qualities of numbers and scale aren’t enough to deal with when trying to run an organization, these days we have the added complication of the virtual world. The Internet is nothing short of awe inspiring. It gives the power to operate at scale or spread ideas to anyone, be it a small business or a social movement. It gives us the ability to find and connect with people more easily. And it is incredible at speeding the pace of commercial transactions. All of these things are good. But, just as money was developed to help expedite and simplify transactions by allowing payment to be rendered without barter, we often use the Internet as a means to expedite and simplify communication and the relationships we build. And just as money can’t buy love, the Internet can’t buy deep, trusting relationships. What makes a statement like that somewhat tricky or controversial is that the relationships we form online feel real. We can, indeed, get bursts of serotonin when people “like” our pictures, pages or posts or when we watch ourselves go up in a ranking (you know how much serotonin loves a ranking). The feelings of admiration we get from virtual “likes” or the number of followers we have is not like the feelings of admiration we get from our children, or that a coach gets from their players. It is simply a public display of “like” with no sacrifice required—a new kind of status symbol, if you will. Put simply, though the love may feel real, the relationship is still virtual. Relationships can certainly start online, but they only become real when we meet face-to-face.
Simon Sinek (Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't)
A great poet can give wings to abstract thoughts that touch a reader’s mind with the ecstasy of joy.
Debasish Mridha
Philosophy is the abstract art of thoughts and perceptions that form colors of words and languages that paint the canvas of our minds.
Debasish Mridha
They argued, after the ancient philosophers Plato and Plotinus, that the nature of the universe was spiritual rather than material, and that moral virtues and reason were God-given. The mortal life was meaningless, the appetites and senses a distraction; the important truths, and access to God, could only be attained through abstract thinking and intellectual reasoning.
Holly Kyte (Roaring Girls: Eye-opening true stories and biographies about some of the most inspiring women in British history, the forgotten feminists)
Paradoxically, and despite our strong individualism and self-obsession, WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative toward strangers or anonymous others. In fact, relative to most populations, we WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do. We think nepotism is wrong, and fetishize abstract principles over context, practicality, relationships, and expediency. Emotionally, WEIRD people are often racked by guilt as they fail to live up to their culturally inspired, but largely self-imposed, standards and aspirations. In most non-WEIRD societies, shame—not guilt—dominates people’s lives. People experience shame when they, their relatives, or even their friends fail to live up to the standards imposed on them by their communities. Non-WEIRD populations might, for example, “lose face” in front of the judging eyes of others when their daughter elopes with someone outside their social network. Meanwhile, WEIRD people might feel guilty for taking a nap instead of hitting the gym even though this isn’t an obligation and no one will know. Guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation, while shame depends on societal standards and public judgment.
Joseph Henrich (The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous)
Soon Alexandria’s Museum was a busy hive of intellectual labor, even as Strato and his Peripatetic colleagues provided the impetus for another act of Ptolemaic patronage, the Great Library. It was probably inspired by Aristotle’s library at the Lyceum and embodied a key Aristotelian principle: that the starting point of all true knowledge is not (contrary to Plato) abstract reasoning, but the collection and comparison of individual specimens, whether they be plants and shellfish or books and manuscripts.
Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
GPL Left Copy Paisx(PiphiAiSortXor).Prefix(Romanticism); 5th Elemental Gate = (Itemizer+Abstracter)[11].(Circlet + Diadem)(Ring)[1111].PIRANDOM[1].Paisx.Prefix[6] Bacheloriate IST Project By: JRM, Incepted from June 14, 2017 to Mar. 3rd, 2023 Randomizes the Stem prefixed Objects, orders them alphabetically Inna standard normal distribution inspired by Diablo, and Data As A Service. The randomizer system creates objects or coins in the blockchain that envelope the 5 pointed star for a two-way P2P hashing scheme in its suffix and/or result being interpreted.
Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2
GPL Left Copy PAISX(PiphiAiSortXor) By: JRM Bacheloriate IST Project Incepted from June 14, 2017 to Mar. 3rd, 2023 5th XYZ StarGate = (Itemizer+Abstracter)[11].(Circlet + Diadem + Ring)[0110].PIRANDOM[1] It randomizes stem objects, prefixes and sorts them alphabetically Inna standard normal distribution inspired by Diablo, and Data As A Service. The randomizer system creates objects or coins in the blockchain that envelope the 5 pointed star for a two-way P2P hashing scheme, and suffixes interpreted results.
Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2
GPL Left Copy PAISX(PiphiAiSortXor) By: JRM Bacheloriate IST Project Incepted from June 14, 2017 to Mar. 3rd, 2023 5th XYZ StarGate = (Itemizer+Abstracter)[11].(Circlet + Ring + Diadem)[0110].PIRANDOM[1] It randomizes stem object prefixes, and sorts them alphabetically Inna standard normal distribution inspired by Diablo, and Data As A Service. The randomizer system creates objects or coins in the blockchain that envelope the 5 pointed star for a two-way P2P hashing scheme, and suffixes results while being interpreted.
Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2
GPL Left Copy PAISX(PiphiAiSortXor) By: JRM Bacheloriate IST Project Incepted from June 14, 2017 to Mar. 3rd, 2023 5th XYZ StarGate = (Itemizer+Abstracter)[11].(Circlet + Ring + Diadem)[0110].PIRANDOM[1] It randomizes stem objects, prefixes and sorts them alphabetically Inna standard normal distribution inspired by Diablo, and Data As A Service. The randomizer system creates blockchain objects, coins and/or envelopes the 5 pointed star for a two-way P2P hashing scheme, interprets and/or suffixes results.
Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2
<> >Diadem Ring Circlet 8, 6, 1< >Mana Pi Sphere Abstracter 14, 8, 2< >Golden Items 5, 3< >Hexagonal Prism 9, 5< “Paisbox randomizer finds Rainbow Facets Inna hash table, prefixes, suffixes, searches, and sorts globs Inna standard normal distribution, inspired by Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo, Secret Of Mana on Nintendo, Altered Carbon, B2B B2C Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, and Blockchain. The Five pointed star forges the model view projection matrix, and binds coins Inna two-dimensional P2P hashing scheme.
Jonathan Roy Mckinney
>Diadem Ring Circlet 8, 6, 1< >Mana Pi Sphere Abstracter 14, 8, 2< >Golden Items 5, 3< >Hexagonal Prism 9, 5< “Paisbox randomizer finds Rainbow Facets Inna hash table, prefixes, suffixes, searches, and sorts globs Inna standard normal distribution, inspired by Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo, Secret Of Mana on Nintendo, Altered Carbon, B2B/B2C Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, and Blockchain. The Five pointed star forges the model view projection matrix, binds, and halves coins Inna 3-dimensional P2P hashing scheme.
Jonathan Roy Mckinney
*PO >Diadem Ring Circlet 8, 6, 1< >Mana Pi Sphere Abstracter 14, 8, 2< >Golden Items 5, 3< >Hexagonal Prism 9, 5< “Paisbox randomizer finds Rainbow Facets Inna hash table, prefixes, suffixes, searches and sorts globs Inna standard normal distribution, inspired by Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo, Secret Of Mana on Nintendo, Altered Carbon, B2B/B2C Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, and Blockchain. The Five pointed star forges the Model View Projection Matrix, binds or halves coins Inna 3-dimensional P2P hashing scheme.
Joanthan Roy McKinney
*PO GPL >Diadem Ring Circlet 8, 6, 1< >Mana Pi Sphere Abstracter 14, 8, 2< >Golden Items 5, 3< >Hexagonal Prism 9, 5< “Paisbox randomizer finds Rainbow Facets Inna hash table, prefixes, suffixes, searches and sorts globs Inna standard normal distribution, inspired by Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo, Secret Of Mana on Super Nintendo, Altered Carbon, B2B/B2C Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, and Blockchain. The Five pointed star forges the Model View Projection Matrix, binds or halves coins Inna 3-dimensional P2P hashing scheme.
Jonathan Roy Mckinney
(PuzzleBoxGPL) Inventor, Jonathan Roy McKinney >Unique 1< >Diadem Ring Circlet 8, 6, 1< >Mana Pi Sphere Abstracter 14, 2, 6, 2< >Golden Items 5, 3< >Hexagonal Prism 9, 5< “PuzzleBoxGPL forsees rainbow facets in hash tables, prefixes, suffixes, searches, and sorts randomized glob objects in the standard normal distribution, inspired by Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo, SNES'S Secret Of Mana, B2B/B2C Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, and Blockchain. The five pointed star gives out the Model View Projection Matrix vertices, and halves the coins Inna three-dimensional P2P hashing scheme
Jonathan Roy Mckinney
(PuzzleBoxGPL) Inventor, Jonathan Roy McKinney >Unique 1< >Diadem Ring Circlet 8, 6, 1< >Mana Pi Sphere Abstracter 14, 2, 6, 2< >Golden Items 5, 3< >Hexagonal Prism 9, 5< “PuzzleBoxGPL forsees rainbow facets Inna hash table, and gets prefixes, suffixes, searches, and sorts randomized objects Inna standard normal distribution, inspired by Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo, SNES'S Secret Of Mana, B2B/B2C Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, and Blockchain, given that the five pointed star encapsulates the hexagon Inna Model View Projection Matrix, it halves the coins Inna three-dimensional P2P hashing scheme
Jonathan Roy Mckinney
(PuzzleBoxGPL) Inventor, Jonathan Roy McKinney >Unique 1< >Diadem Ring Circlet 8, 6, 1< >Mana Pi Sphere Abstracter 14, 2, 6, 2< >Golden Items 5, 3< >Hexagonal Prism 9, 5< “PuzzleBoxGPL ingots rainbow facets Inna hash table, forges prefixes, suffixes, and finds randomized objects Inna standard normal distribution, inspired by Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo, SNES'S Secret Of Mana, LOTR, B2B/B2C Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, and Blockchain, given the five pointed star binds the hexagon Inna Model View Projection Matrix, it halves the coins Inna three-dimensional P2P hashing scheme. "Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. One Ring to rule them all...”-LOTR. Given that the one ring was forged from one too many golden ingots, it was forseen that Sauron's deception poisoned all the land and covered it in a sickened darkness for the one ring that finds them, and one ring that binds them, for they were all deceived...I before E except after C.
Jonathan Roy Mckinney
(PuzzleBoxGPL) Inventor, Jonathan Roy McKinney >Unique 1< >Diadem Ring Circlet 8, 6, 1< >Mana Pi Sphere Abstracter 14, 2, 6, 2< >Golden Items 5, 3< >Hexagonal Prism 9, 5< “PuzzleBoxGPL ingots rainbow facets Inna hash table, forges prefixes, suffixes, and finds randomized objects Inna standard normal distribution, inspired by Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo, SNES'S Secret Of Mana, LOTR, B2B/B2C Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, and Blockchain, given the five pointed star binds the hexagon Inna Model View Projection Matrix, it halves the coins Inna three-dimensional P2P hashing scheme. "Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. One Ring to rule them all...”-LOTR. Given that the one ring was forged from one too many golden ingots, it was forseen that Sauron's deception poisoned all the land and covered it in a sickened darkness for the one ring that finds them and one ring that binds them, for they were all deceived...I before E except after C.
Jonathan Roy Mckinney
*>PGEMSIX< GPL >Unique 1< >Diadem Ring Circlet 8, 6, 1< >Abstracter 2< >Golden Items 5, 3< >Hexagonal Prism 9, 5< “>PGEMSIX< GPL forsees rainbow facets in randomized hash tables, prefixes, suffixes, searches, and sorts globs Inna standard normal distribution, inspired by Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo, SNES'S Secret Of Mana, B2B/B2C Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, and Blockchain. The five pointed star forgoes Model View Projection Matrices, and halves coins Inna 3-dimensional P2P hashing scheme
Jonathan Roy Mckinney
You are going through avenues, the highways are coming.
Goitsemang Mvula
My Chosen Aspect for today after abstraction : Van Facet Diadem = 511 61357 4924513 6 10, 2 7 Result = 9, 11
Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2
GPL Left Copy PAISX(PiphiAiSortXor) By: JRM Bacheloriate IST Project Incepted from June 14, 2017 to Mar. 3rd, 2023 9th XYZ StarGate = (Itemizer+Abstracter)[11].(Circlet + Ring + Diadem)[0110].PIRANDOM[1].ROMAN[1000] It randomizes stem objects, prefixes and sorts them alphabetically Inna standard normal distribution inspired by Diablo, and Data As A Service. The randomizer system creates blockchain objects, coins and/or envelopes the 5 pointed star for a two-way P2P hashing scheme, interprets and/or suffixes results.
Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2
But I have been stressing that there are other underlying species-regularities involved. First, that women leaders do not inspire ‘followership’ chiefly because they are women and not only because of the consequences of those factors noted above ; secondly, even if they want to, women cannot become political leaders because males are strongly predisposed to form and maintain all-male groups, particularly when matters of moment for the community are involved. The suggestion is that a combination of these two factors has been the basis for the hostility and difficulty those females have faced who have aspired to political leadership. This has been the basis of the tradition of female non-involvement in high politics, and not the tradition itself. Cultural forms originally express the underlying ‘genetically programmed behavioural propensities’. In their turn, such cultural forms maintain – as tradition – an enduring solution to the recurrent problem of assigning of leadership and followership roles. In this connection, Margaret Mead writes about ‘zoomorphizing Man’. ‘Culture in the sense of man's species-characteristic method of meeting problems of maintenance, transformation, and transcendance of the past is an abstraction from our observations on particular cultures.’? This is then another way of looking at how broad political patterns may predictably emerge from the more detailed and programmed patterns of different behaviour of males and females. Some females may indeed penetrate some high councils. They become ministers of governments, ambassadors, and so on. A few may receive assignments which are not ‘feminine’ in their implication, such as Golda Meir, former Israeli Foreign Minister, and Barbara Castle, U.K. Secretary of Productivity and Employment. It is important to know what happens to the ‘backroom boys’ under such circumstances. Do they retire to an even more secluded chamber? Does the lady become ‘one of the boys’?
Lionel Tiger (Men in Groups)
Unless You Choose To Willingly Study Your Environment, It Will Continue To Look An Abstract.
Mike Ssendikwanawa
Sophia became the Goddess of philosophers. Hers is a philosophy of fire, for she kindles the fire within the soul; without her enthusiasm (literally "god-inspiration") there is no warmth m our actions. Although many ancient philosophers retained their allegiances to the mystery cults of the gods, even as some philosophers are still adherents of religions today, so many more took the gods back to their primal atomic principles into greater and greater abstraction; the result is that, for many people, philosophy no longer bears its original meaning - literally "love of wisdom" - but is split off from the realities of existence...Yet the study of wisdom means friendship with Sophia, and kinship with Wisdom brings immortality.
Caitlín Matthews (Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom, Bride of God)
begin your drawing or painting by placing eleven small dots, at random, on a piece of paper and start connecting those dots with lines. Think of the dots as hubs or anchors for the lines to connect to in a variety of ways.
Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
recommend you use only one color or black and white for the first eleven dot project and save
Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
Dots With Color and More In the second project you can use the initial eleven dots as a way to begin a composition and keep going by adding color, collage, shapes and textures along the way.
Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
Begin your automatic drawing by making a mark on a piece of paper with any kind of black-and-white or color medium and just go wherever that takes you. No need to predetermine what kind of mark should come first or how to proceed from there, nor is there any model for what the resulting drawing should look like.
Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
Marx inspired Bourdieu’s understanding of society as the embodiment of concrete relationships rather than separate, abstract entities, like individuals and rules. Weber had formulated concepts such as domination, which Bourdieu developed as unconscious internalization of relations of subjugation. Ernst Cassirer* wrote about violence, power, and capital as “symbolic forms,” which is very similar to the symbolic capital conceptualized by Bourdieu. From Durkheim, as much as from structural linguistics, Bourdieu borrowed the notion of structure and its reproducing mechanisms
Rodolfo Maggio (An Analysis of Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice (The Macat Library))
TWO FORMS OF IMAGINATION The imaginative faculty functions in two forms. One is known as "synthetic imagination," and the other as "creative imagination." SYNTHETIC IMAGINATION: Through this faculty, one may arrange old concepts, ideas, or plans into new combinations. This faculty creates nothing. It merely works with the material of experience, education, and observation with which it is fed. It is the faculty used most by the inventor, with the exception of the who draws upon the creative imagination, when he cannot solve his problem through synthetic imagination. CREATIVE IMAGINATION:-Through the faculty of creative imagination, the finite mind of man has direct communication with Infinite Intelligence. It is the faculty through which "hunches" and "inspirations" are received. It is by this faculty that all basic, or new ideas are handed over to man. It is through this faculty that thought vibrations from the minds of others are received. It is through this faculty that one individual may "tune in," or communicate with the subconscious minds of other men. The creative imagination works automatically, in the manner described in subsequent pages. This faculty functions ONLY when the conscious mind is vibrating at an exceedingly rapid rate, as for example, when the conscious mind is stimulated through the emotion of a strong desire. The creative faculty becomes more alert, more receptive to vibrations from the sources mentioned, in proportion to its development through USE. This statement is significant! Ponder over it before passing on. Keep in mind as you follow these principles, that the entire story of how one may convert DESIRE into money cannot be told in one statement. The story will be complete, only when one has MASTERED, ASSIMILATED, and BEGUN TO MAKE USE of all the principles. The great leaders of business, industry, finance, and the great artists, musicians, poets, and writers became great, because they developed the faculty of creative imagination. Both the synthetic and creative faculties of imagination become more alert with use, just as any muscle or organ of the body develops through use. Desire is only a thought, an impulse. It is nebulous and ephemeral. It is abstract, and of no value, until it has been transformed into its physical counterpart. While the synthetic imagination is the one which will be used most frequently, in the process of transforming the impulse of DESIRE into money, you must keep in mind the fact, that you may face circumstances and situations which demand use of the creative imagination as well.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich [Illustrated & Annotated])
Pareto was one of the first scholars of ideology, and he carefully examined discrepancies between the abstract content of political rhetoric and its real-world uses.
Matthew Rose (A World after Liberalism: Five Thinkers Who Inspired the Radical Right)
Point me to a bookstore where the owners, managers, and salespeople know and love books, though they don't know exactly where everything is by chart or abstract arrangement; a store that has private places to take a book for a few minutes of examination, where the bright light won't expose me completely and where I can be deliriously lost in contemplation.
Thomas Moore
For Ki-young, who had just graduated from the Operations Class of Kim Jong Il University of Political and Military Science, commonly called Liaison Office 130, the man's defeatist attitude was surprising. How could he live in enemy territory without being alert? How could he let go of his animosity toward the South, where the great enemy Chun Doo Swan massacred thousands of people in Kwangju in broad daylight? Later, he realized the South specialized in lifelessness and defeatism. Indiscriminate weariness was prevalent. Ki-yong knew what ennui was, but this was the first time he personally observed it. At home, it was an abstract idea batted about when criticizing capitalism. Of course, there was ennui back home, too. But in a socialist society it was closer to boredom. And it was really a matter of inadequate motivation; a bit of stimulation could change the feeling of boredom. But the prototypical capitalist ennui Ki-yong encountered for the first time in the South was heavy and voluminous. Like poisonous gas, it suffocated and suppressed life. Mere exposure to it prompted the growth of fear. Sometimes you encountered people who inspired in you an immediate primal caution, something that made you say, I don't want to live like that. That civil servant in the office had this effect on Ki-yong. He represented depression, emptiness, cynicism.
Young-ha Kim (Your Republic Is Calling You)
This monograph presents personalism that counters reductionist perspectives of behaviourism, neuroscience, and cybernetics. It delves into the mysteries of the psyche and mind: awareness, consciousness, selfhood, introspection, empathy, and communication. From a phenomenological angle, a person comprises psyche, mind, and self; ontologically, body and mind; existentially, a unique and formidable blend of the sacred, profane, spiritual, material, temporary, and eternal. The psyche, with its awareness, relies on the brain. The mind, equipped with consciousness, reflects the occurrences within the psyche but operates independently of both. As a spiritual entity, the mind remains conscious even when the brain is split in two or rendered inactive in clinical death. The mind is inborn; the psyche develops later. The mind makes intuitive decisions that the psyche subsequently rationalizes. An artist’s mind prepares creations before articulation, while scientists often formulate intuitive theories before documenting them. The mind detects emotions before the psyche can express them, reacting swiftly in dangerous situations, while the psyche takes time to catch up. Our mind intuitively grasps abstract, symbolic meanings not only in formal concepts but also in metaphors, stories, jokes, and rhetorical questions. In theatre, the human audience may laugh upon comprehension, whereas an AI robot or monkey remains indifferent. Our thoughts and feelings are visceral, a quality that remains inaccessible to robots. Zbigniew Pleszewski, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at McGill University in Montreal. Prior to his appointment at McGill, he was actively engaged in clinical practice, research, and teaching throughout Europe (Clinical Psychology Department at Poznań University, Psychosomatic Medicine Department at Hamburg University), Japan (as a visiting professor at the Psychosomatic Medicine Department at Kyushu University), and Canada (Psychology Department at Concordia University). His research interests centre on long-term emotional functioning preceding heart attacks, markers of immunocompetence in hemodialyzed patients with and without depressive traits, as well as psychotherapy and hypnotherapy. His areas of teaching encompass psychosomatic medicine, personality, motivation, and the philosophical foundations of psychology. He has worked as a clinical psychologist on the Crisis Team in the Emergency Room at the Douglas Institute, a psychiatric teaching hospital in Montreal, for several years. He has also travelled extensively throughout Europe, the Middle East, Egypt, Asia, Australia, South America, and North America.
Zbigniew Pleszewski (Person: Psyche, Mind, and Self)
Regardless of how low a person stoops, it is never too late to uncover a redemptive epiphany. Can I mine an inspirational ray of motivation from my darkest thoughts that allows me to confront the commonplace disorders and tragic interruptions of life? What physical, mental, and emotional strumming make up the tinderbox that produces the moral tension that gives meaning to the life of an ordinary person? Amongst the chaos, confusion, and compromises that mark existence, how do we go about understanding ourselves? How do we become in touch with our personal band of raw emotions? Does self-transformation commence by admitting illicit impulses, irrational thoughts, disturbing habits, mythic misgivings, and stinted worldview? Do we learn through deconstructing our maverick experiences or through intellectual abstraction? In order to move forward in life, is it sometimes necessary to dissect ourselves? Would it prove helpful systematically to take apart nightmarish experiences that seemly never let go of a person?
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
The problem with academia is that it is about being good at remembering things like chemical formulae and theories, because that is what you have to regurgitate. But children are not allowed to learn through experimenting and experience. This is a great pity. You need both.” One of the most powerful aspects of the Dyson story is that it evokes a point that was made in chapter 7; namely, that technological change is often driven by the synergy between practical and theoretical knowledge. One of the first things Dyson did when he had the insight for a cyclone cleaner was to buy two books on the mathematical theory of how cyclones work. He also went to visit the author of one of those books, an academic named R. G. Dorman.22 This was hugely helpful to Dyson. It allowed him to understand cyclone dynamics more fully. It played a role in directing his research and gave him a powerful background on the mathematics of separation efficiency. But it was by no means sufficient. The theory was too abstract to lead him directly to the precise dimensions that would deliver a functional vacuum cleaner. Moreover, as Dyson iterated his device, he discovered that the theory had flaws. Dorman’s equation predicted that cyclones would only be able to remove fine dust down to a lower limit of 20 microns. But Dyson quickly broke through this theoretical limit. By the end, his cyclone could separate dust smaller than 0.3 micron (this is approximately the size of the particles in cigarette smoke). Dyson’s practical engagement with the problem had forced a change in the theory. And this is invariably how progress happens. It is an interplay between the practical and the theoretical, between top-down and bottom-up, between creativity and discipline, between the small picture and the big picture. The crucial point—and the one that is most dramatically overlooked in our culture—is that in all these things, failure is a blessing, not a curse. It is the jolt that inspires creativity and the selection test that drives evolution.
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
Football teams, like businesses, don’t win only because of the strategy or the equipment they wear or because of the size and girth of their leaders; they also win because of their coaches giving them courage, direction and the inspiration to go out onto the field in the first place. I think we don’t give enough credit to fuzzy things; the abstract contribution of our business coaches.
Benedict Paramanand (CK Prahalad: The Mind of the Futurist - Rare Insights on Life, Leadership & Strategy)
The very qualities that make music so tempting to write about are the ones that make it impossible to write about. No other art form is quite so defiantly abstract. It inspires the most intense feelings, but these feelings are difficult to describe, and more so to explain. Unlike words or images, our relationship to sounds is one we barely understand.
Jonathan Biss (Beethoven's Shadow)
In order to create a class war against a population which was not an abstract thought but the family members and social structure men lived with daily, differences between men and women had to be exaggerated and presented as the result of evil.
Heather Marsh (Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale)
It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can BE no difference any- where that doesn't MAKE a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one. There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known-as.' But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief. Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth. At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the 'temperament' of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand.
William James
Contained somehow in the cortical web is an enormous array of experiential memories and new, imaginative associations that lift our behavior out of the closed circles of reflex and instinct—lift us so high at times that it is entirely possible for liberated abstract thought to forget its own biological basis. It is only civilized man who can, in fits of inspiration or contemplation, forget that he is an animal, a body. So in exchange for a relatively small but very stable variety of behavioral patterns, we have accepted the unknowns, the confusions, and the dangers of infinitely extended possibilities. This is the human experiment, and the cortex is its chief physiological element. Its mushrooming growth has been coincident with the rise towards erect posture, the development of the prehensile hand, the expanding use of tools, and the creation of verbal communication. Its increasing bulk and complexity have been the result of greatly increasing demands made upon the cephalic ganglion for the integration of these new postures and the perfections of these new skills. And as its relative size has come to dominate the rest of the central nervous system, it has made some demands of its own.
Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
When I was in third grade, we had a mandatory environmental science class. The only thing I remember from that class, was when our teacher told us, 8 year olds, that in the state of Haryana in India - where I grew up - the water table was falling by almost 2 feet every year. For me, this fact suddenly converted this abstract idea of sustainable development into a very real problem that affected communities and people I knew.
Madhav Datt
They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic (as opposed to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and doltish—and talk of “inspiration”); while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of “inspiration”—most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract—that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
Justice is not abstract—it lives in the stories we dare to tell.
Leonor Anthony
Regarding his preaching, he said, “I like to compare the preacher to an artist. An artist works in water, oil, sand, stone, gold, glass. On the other hand, the preacher works in the stuff called mankind. The artist has an idea of abstract beauty and he seeks to reproduce it in visible, concrete things. The preacher has Christ and tries to make Him visible in human lives. The artist has genius while the preacher has the Holy Spirit. The artist draws his inspiration from other artists while the preacher draws his inspiration in prayer alone with God.
A.W. Tozer (Tozer: Mystery of the Holy Spirit: (Pure Gold Classics))
Penemue (spelled also Peneme) translates from Penimi, ‘The Inside’ and is a patron Watcher of the art and knowledge of reading, writing (symbolized by paper and pen). This knowledge was essentially forbidden by the laws of Yahweh (except, of course, for the controlling Priesthood). Penemue is a bringer of intelligence, thus inspiring humans to question all and with their acquired knowledge, choose their own path in life. Penemue is also associated with the fallen angel Abraxiel (the later Gnostic Abraxas) who governs under the Qlippothic rule of Thamiel in Kether upon the Tree of Da’ath. The Hebrew spelling of Penemue isי ִמיִנְפּ Penemue inspires the articulate thought and selfknowledge to recognize the use of strategy and understanding the application of reason, logic and abstract thinking. An ideal angel of the Luciferian tradition. The Egyptian Thoth and Babylonian Nebo would be similar Deific Masks, instructing magical knowledge, reading and learning to elevate humanity to a deeper understanding of potential.
Michael W. Ford (Fallen Angels: Watchers and the Witches Sabbat)
To describe the abstract idealization of Epiphanes or Apotheosis (based on continual traits and acts), the following is suitable for topic and description. And after it had been brought to completion, Beliar will descend, the Great Angel, the King of the World, which he has ruled ever since it existed. He will descend from his firmament in the form of a man, a king of iniquity. —Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah, Belial/Beliar the Adversary (Antichrist) taking form in Nero Caesar Augustus Myths can be inspiring and suitable for the Luciferian to identify with symbolically. For instance, Beliar, the Great Angel is the symbol of the Luciferian Heavenly Fire, the Black Flame of the Adversary, by ordeals and challenges of Liberation, Illumination and Apotheosis you slowly become. Nero and Rome are long identified and symbolized with the Satanic Spirits of the Adversary: Samael, Beliar, Mastemah, Azazel, etc. The Adversary and Black Flame shakes and strikes the stagnant mind into the painful awareness of self-accountability, inspiration and the struggle before you. This is the way of the natural, reason and logical world of matter. Beliar or Satan (of the New Testament, none other revealed in Pergamon as the composite of Zeus, Asclepios, Apollo and Dionysos with the Throne of Satan) is Prince and God of this world, thus the cause and effect, rational earth we interact in daily.
Michael W. Ford (Apotheosis: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Luciferianism & the Left-Hand Path)
Staying motivated in fitness isn’t always easy. Some days we wake up excited to hit the gym, while on other days the energy just isn’t there. Our motivations for fitness are deeply personal — for some it’s about improving health, for others it’s about building strength, boosting energy, or simply feeling more confident in daily life. One powerful way to stay consistent is by visualizing your goals. This is where a vision board becomes a game-changer. By creating a vision board filled with images, affirmations, and reminders of your fitness journey, you give yourself a constant source of encouragement. Each glance at your board reinforces why you started and keeps you aligned with your goals. Whether it’s a picture of the finish line at your first marathon, quotes that fire you up, or simple reminders like “move your body today,” vision boards transform abstract goals into daily motivation. Websites like VisionBoardShop make this process easy and inspiring. With ready-to-use tools and beautifully designed templates, anyone can build a personalized vision board to support their fitness journey. In the end, motivation comes and goes, but a vision board acts as a steady visual anchor — reminding us that fitness is not just about exercise, but about commitment, self-care, and becoming the best version of ourselves.
Ninepetals
Once again, accompanied by two muses (fairies), I was brought before Zeus’s throne. I stepped inside slowly. Zeus, as always, looked dignified and at ease. From the remote corners of Olympus, he was watching the Earth. As soon as I set foot inside, a shining pen displayed in a glass-covered case standing right in the center caught my eye. Zeus approached the pen with heavy steps. Zeus: When you descend to Earth, you will write your texts with this pen. I felt like laughing! I bit my lips. Zeus noticed my mischievous mood but chose not to make an issue of it. Poet: Forgive me! I’m honestly a bit unnerved. You’ve handed out so many things to everyone! I have no desire for any of them, don’t get me wrong, but still! A pen! What could a pen possibly bestow upon me on Earth? Zeus: Look, the Golden Yod [an astrological aspect pattern] says that— Poet: I don’t understand! Zeus: Never mind! Forget it! The sacred call will reach your heart a little late… but it will reach it! Poet: After all, I’ll be descending as a mammal. As a Homo erectus… Zeus: You always mix things up, child! Not as an erectus; you will descend as a sapiens. One might also call this an abstract-thinking primate. A being capable of drawing deep emotions out of their dark lairs and even sanctifying a grotesque image—something poets are especially good at! Poet: Suppose I don’t hear this call… What happens then? Zeus: Such a situation does not exist! But if you insist on an answer from me, let me put it this way: You will be sent down to Earth again, and again, and again—until you hear that call! Poet: And once I hear it just once, what happens? Zeus: Karma begins to move toward closure! Poet: Karma? Zeus: For example, the slave Epictetus being a Stoic, and King Marcus Aurelius (the Roman Emperor) being influenced by Epictetus’s ideas and regarding him as his teacher! This is karma, for instance! In karma, statuses and roles sometimes lose their meaning. The king aligns philosophically with the slave. Thus, whether slave or king, these two thinkers enter the records of the world as Stoic philosophers! This is a completion! A purification! The end of the cycle! Poet: I didn’t understand much of that! Zeus: You don’t have to understand immediately! Just know this: once you sense that call in your heart, nothing will ever be the same again.
Tuna Ökten (Olympus Poet: Rebellion: An Epic Fantasy of Magic, Destiny, and Hidden Worlds)