Coherence Quotes

The best everyday example of relativity, the finest symptom of human intelligence, is humor. (...) Design without humor is not human. The word 'beautiful' does not mean anything. Only coherence counts. An object, design or not, is primarily an object that meets the parameters of human intelligence, which reconciles opposites. The lack of humor is the definition of vulgarity.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Don't be concerned with other people's impressions of you. They are dazzled and deluded by appearances. Stick with your purpose. This alone will strengthen your will and give your life coherence.

Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.

And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot.

Detachment, lack of sentimentality, originality, a lot of things that sound rather empty. I know what they mean. Let's say, "visual impact" may not mean much to anybody. I could point it out though. I mean it's a quality that something has or does not have. Coherence. Well, some things are weak, some things are strong.

There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals.

What the French want is coherence, stability and justice. If I am in a favorable position today, it's because my fellow citizens want to make the effort to straighten out the country, and at the same time they want it to be just and equitable.

My coherence-creating groups are going to put out all this mischief-mongership in the world.

No writer can be fully convicted of imitation except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are copied.

Similarly, dance is not just a raging sea of unrelated bodily movements; the relationship of those movements to one another is what creates integrity and integrality, a coherence and cohesion that the higher levels of our brain process.

I mean, you hear the word 'globalization' over and over and over again. Globalization, globalization, globalization. Rarely has a word gone so directly from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence.

One of the things that happens when we're feeling more love and care is that we go into what's called "heart rhythm coherence," which you can actually measure and monitor on a computer screen. It's also possible to train yourself to go into heart rhythm coherence at will.

The craft of putting together a performance on film or television is incredibly intricate; you're putting together a story that is completely out of order, that you have to make some sense of, that you have to keep some coherence to the story, to the character.

The least livable life is the one without coherence-nothing connects, nothing means anything. Stories make connections. They allow us to see our past, our present, and our future as interrelated and purposeful.... The stories we value most reassure us that life is worth the pain, that meaning is not an illusion, and that others share our experience with us.

There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

Democracy is self-creating coherence.

I am doubtful that there will be any sort of real coherence of Muslim societies into a single political system run by an elected or non-elected group of leaders.

Those heart-hammering nightmares that start to lose coherence even as you're waking up from them, but that still manage to leave their moldering fingerprints all across your day.

In our view any awareness is an increment to consciousness, an added light, a reinforcement of psychic coherence. Its swiftness or instantaneity can hide this growth from us. But there is a growth of being in every instance of awareness. Consciousness is in itself an act, the human act.

Nowadays, the process of growth and development almost never seems to manage to create this subtle balance between the importance of the individual parts, and the coherence of the environment as a whole. One or the other always dominates.

People who turn to philosophy expecting to harvest a crop of formulas of wisdom or understanding do not understand-philosophy has such things, but they are merely incidental, not the essence of the matter. Philosophy is about subtilizing and tuning up the coherence and acuity of one's seeing, it is about opening new dimensions for insight, learning to think about what one is doing when one thinks instead of just blundering through the processes of putting thoughts together.

Happiness is not the shallow state of feeling pleased and chipper all the time. Happiness is the state of a human being that has achieved cross-level coherence within herself, and between herself and the people, challenges, and institutions around her. Happiness comes from between.

I do think that the long poem speaks for an inner need for continuity. We live in a time of so many losses, disruptions, and distractions, that the need for a sense of the ongoing is quite real. The long poem is very satisfying in offering the psyche a model of coherence.

Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.

Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the English language.

In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.

Recent studies of mindfulness practices reveal that they can result in profound improvements in a range of physiological, mental, and interpersonal domains in our lives. Cardiac, endocrine, and immune functions are improved with mindfulness practices. Empathy, compassion, and interpersonal sensivity seem to be improved. People who come to develop the capacity to pay attention in the present moment without grasping on to their inevitable judgments also develop a deeper sense of well-being and what can be considered a form of mental coherence.

When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British.

People in power tend to find poetry dangerous to them because it is dislocating, they can't catch it, can't control it. They prefer coherence, what's blunt and has clarity.

Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.

Every human being is a raindrop. And when enough of the raindrops become clear and coherent they then become the power of the storm.

To believe in explanations is good, because it means you may believe also that beneath the chaotic, mindless jumble of everything, beneath the horrible disjunction you feel at every moment between you and all you are not, there dwells in the universe a secret harmony, a coherence and rightness like a balanced equation that’s out of reach for now but some day will reveal itself in its entirety.

You have to record as many details as possible and achieve an order, without taking away the complexity of the real. To voice the real and at the same time to create an image that is a world in itself, with its own coherence, its autonomy and sovereignty; an image that thinks

We have power... Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems... they have power... but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.

In my view the structure of the whole atom was that of an individual, with all its parts interconnected, and the emission of a spectral line appeared to me to be the result of the coherence and co-operation of several electric quanta.

The developing coherence of Asian regional thinking is reflected in a disposition to consider problems and loyalties in regional terms, and to evolve regional approaches to development needs and to the evolution of a New World Order.

In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.

Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.

Whoever considers the study of anatomy, I believe will never be an atheist; the frame of man's body, and coherence of his parts, being so strange and paradoxical, that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of nature.

By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy. [Photography calls] into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author, the coherence of the oeuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self-expression.

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

With acknowledgement of residues, we can be more easily prepared to grant the unit of science, the overlapping of disciplines, and the total coherence of all facts.

I have a strong spiritual commitment, and I try to express that in my work. Salvation cannot be worked out in human terms. The point of my writing is to touch upon the systematics of prayer and on how we arrive at a method of achieving spiritual coherence in our lives.

It sounds superficially fair. But it presupposes that that there is something in Christian theology to be ignorant about. The entire thrust of my position is that Christian theology is a non-subject. It is empty. Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content. I imagine that McGrath would join me in expressing disbelief in fairies, astrology and Thor's hammer. How would he respond if a fairyologist, astrologer or Viking accused him of ignorance of their respective subjects?

When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.

For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.