Multiplicity Quotes - Page 4

• Any attempt to shape the world and modify human personality in order to create a self-chosen pattern of life involves many unknown consequences. Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back. The multiplicity of determinants which affect biological systems limits the power of the experimental method to predict their trends and behavior.

  Rene Dubos

  Destiny, Self, Order

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• As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Communication, Home, Voice

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars: but we must distinguish; it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced these wars; it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Religious, War, Spirit

  "Persian Letters" by Baron de Montesquieu, No. 65, 1721.

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• Just as the plurality of the human soul's life of imagination, feeling, and will has a focus, a center, around which it orders and orientates itself, so also does the multiplicity of the appearances of the world have ONE center, which orders and holds everything together.

  Valentin Tomberg

  Order, Imagination, Focus

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• My life will have been a succession of lives, as if I have had several lives, a multiplicity of stories and roles. I have not ceased to have changes of life.

  Bernard Stiegler

  Life Changing, Roles, Stories

  Bernard Stiegler, David Barison (2009). “Acting out”, Stanford Univ Pr

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• Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.

  Peter Redgrove

  Book, Reality, Assuming

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• Abraham Lincoln was on the side of the social scientists when he said, "God must have loved the people of lower and middle socioeconomic status, because he made such a multiplicity of them.

  Edwin Newman

  People, Sides, Scientist

  Edwin Newman (1974). “Strictly Speaking: Will america be the Death of English?”

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• The most important thing I think teachers can do for young people is to make them inquiring, is to ensure that they know how to gather information, that they check information and they take their information from a multiplicity of sources.

  David Puttnam

  Teacher, Thinking, People

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• The voter does not vote only on one issue, the voter votes on a multiplicity of issues.

  P. Chidambaram

  Issues, Doe, Voters

  "Tax Residency clause may have been clumsily worded: P Chidambaram". Interview with Supriya Shrinate, Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, economictimes.indiatimes.com. Mar 1, 2013.

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• I used to refer to my photos as free radicals - and maybe that has to do with this idea of navigating history. I think of the works as having this dormant illness that can really latch on to different histories. So they can exist in a world pretending to be neatly encapsulated, already framed, and fixed. But actually they are these parasites dependent on the failure of modernist history and on multiplicity.

  Elad Lassry

  Thinking, Different, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I give a concert, I know they're not going to hear everything; there might be a lot going on. My individual perceptual and cognitive path through the music is just that: one path through music. My experience will be probably at some level different from other people's, and that multiplicity of experience has to be supported by the music. I might just focus on the cowbell the whole time - maybe I have a fever for more cowbell!

  Vijay Iyer

  Giving, Focus, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There are records I'll listen to one time and zero in on what's happening, and then I'll listen again to something I didn't notice the first time. The art of making records is something like this: you want to provide a multiplicity of experience in a single object, which is to say you want layers so that people can revisit and have something revealed to them that wasn't apparent the first time. We often will listen to the same music over and over again, and that tells you something, too.

  Vijay Iyer

  Art, People, First Time

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I am attracted to looking at the different things language can mean even in one sometimes quite ordinary utterance. Writing is partly about listening closely to yourself as you think or compose and being aware of the different tensions and weights among the words, the different directions any one of them could lead. I like to play with the multiplicity and instability of meaning partly out of a sense of adventure, to see where that takes me and partly in a whistling past the graveyard kind of way because, of course, sensing stable meaning fall away can be scary.

  Rae Armantrout

  Fall, Adventure, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The only legitimate interpretation of the concept of the "public" is that it's a highly heterogeneous group of people, and I cannot imagine who has the right to speak on their behalf using a "public" voice. If the multiplicity of the environment is its true nature, then my works defend this truthfulness. The greatest fairness in society is to defend the difference between each individual - the fairness and truthfulness of their inconsistency and differentiation.

  Wang Jianwei

  People, Fairness, Speak

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Every aspect of the novel is - or should be - an arrow pointed towards its ultimate meaning, or a multiplicity of possible meanings. But I also value the readers' autonomy, their right to both read and misread.

  C.E. Morgan

  Arrows, Should, Aspect

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• I really wanted to be allowed to the [writer's] table. So it makes me happy to be at the table. It sounds a little shallow, but if I imagine the shadow life, where I didn't get that chance, and all the ways my negative inclinations would have bloomed if I hadn't gotten the attention, but also the creative outlet ... I'm not actually that happy. I have multiplicities. My happiness blooms and it wilts.

  George Saunders

  Creative, Shadow, Sound

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.

  George Saunders

  Thinking, Doe, Fiction

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• No matter what, I'm never going to get an anthology from an actual publisher, though I could always score another music anthology. But if this is going to be a document of a multiplicity of my writings, it'll do. It feels like a birthday party or something.

  Richard Meltzer

  Party, Writing, Matter

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The photographic image has great possibilities. The magical photograph attempts to go beyond the immediate context of the recorded experience into the realm of the indefinable. The photographer as magician is acutely aware of the multiplicity of associations submerged in the appearance of the objective world.

  Arthur Tress

  World, Association, Photographer

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• I think being from Iran sharpened my eye as an art dealer. This is why, today, I think the true definition of so-called postmodernism is the acceptance that we cannot go by old models any longer. The old models were based upon a single narrative of development that happened along a singular path. In the 20th century, you have electricity, you have transportation by plane, you have the telephone and all the various media that developed, you have a multiplicity of events and voices and creativities that are happening all around the world-and that multiplicity escalated after the war.

  Tony Shafrazi

  Art, War, Creativity

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• One possessed a thousand and three women (in Spain alone), the other only one. But it is multiplicity that is impoverished, whilethe entire world is concentrated in a single being infinitely possessed. Tristan no longer needs the world--because he loves! While Don Juan, always loved, cannot love in return. Hence his anguish and his frenzied course.

  Denis de Rougemont

  Spain, Three, Needs

  Denis de Rougemont (1963). “Love Declared: Essays on the Myths of Love”

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• I kept saying that I want to be a singer, singer, singer. Someone told me, "Noooo, you move as an actress!" I believe that happens to a lot of people. People have a multiplicity of gifts, but I think people in your life are telling you which one you should focus on. I just got done talking with my group of water walkers about this. If you focus on one of your gifts, that one gift will be the catalyst to open up opportunities for the other gift.

  Brely Evans

  Believe, Moving, Thinking

  Source: www.parlemag.com

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• With ordinary men the moments which are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few, and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from afar; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not been gathered up and stored.

  Otto Weininger

  Men, Rivers, Ordinary

  Otto Weininger (1906). “Sex & Character”, p.124, Рипол Классик

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• I took a break from acting for four years to get a degree in mathematics at UCLA, and during that time I had the rare opportunity to actually do research as an undergraduate. And myself and two other people co-authored a new theorem: Percolation and Gibbs States Multiplicity for Ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller Models on Two Dimensions, or Z2.

  Danica McKellar

  Opportunity, Ucla, Years

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• For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam's front parlor? What is imagination without common sense, but the aspiration to out-dandy Beau Brummell with nothing but a bit of faded muslin and a limp cravat? What is Creation without common sense, but a scandalous thing without form or function, like a matron with half a dozen unattached daughters? And God looked upon the Creation in all its delightful multiplicity, and saw that, all in all, it was quite Amiable.

  Vera Nazarian

  Daughter, Order, Imagination

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