Coherence Quotes - Page 3

• 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.

  Ben Lerner

  Art, Reading, Offering

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• 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.

  Richard Grossman

  Spiritual, Strong, Prayer

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• 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.

  Rosalind E. Krauss

  Photography, Art, Self

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• Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment.

  Michael Polanyi

  Judgment, Criteria, Conclusion

  Michael Polanyi, Harry Prosch (2008). “Meaning”, p.100, University of Chicago Press

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• 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.

  Elia Suleiman

  People, Clarity, Blunt

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Theology is a serious quest for the true knowledge of God, undertaken in response to His self-revelation, illumined by Christian tradition, manifesting a rational inner coherence, issuing in ethical conduct, resonating with the contemporary world and concerned for the greater glory of God.

  John Stott

  Christian, Self, World

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• You're suddenly seeing the coherence and the interconnectedness of everything, left to right, top to bottom, front to back. It's all connected, and, somehow, it's all in balance. And that's, of course, when you go, 'Yes!'.

  Henry Wessel, Jr.

  Photography, Balance, Bottom

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• The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Believe, Men, Essence

  "The White House Years". Book by Henry Kissinger, 1979.

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• From the dim morning hours of history when the father was king and priest down to this modern time of history's high noon when nations stand forth full grown and self-governed, the law of coherence and continuity in political development has suffered no serious breach.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Morning, Kings, Father

  Woodrow Wilson (1895). “The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics. A Sketch of Institutional History and Administration”

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• 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.

  Kenny Smith

  Wisdom, Philosophy, Thinking

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• 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.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Loyalty, Thinking, Nwo

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• 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.

  Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury

  Christian, Atheist, Believe

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• 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.

  Christopher Alexander

  Growth, Balance, Development

  Christopher Alexander (1975). “The Oregon Experiment”, p.12, Oxford University Press, USA

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• 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.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Light, Views, Psychics

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• The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell . . .

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Spiritual, Men, Soul

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.194, Simon and Schuster

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• 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.

  Mike Carey

  Heart, Wake Up, Waking

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

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Character, Should Have, Stories

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• Freedom! To fill people's mailboxes, eyes, ears and brains with commercial rubbish against their will, television programs that are impossible to watch with a sense of coherence. Freedom! To force information on people, taking no account of their right not to accept it or their right of peace of mind. Freedom! To spit in the eyes and souls of passersby with advertisements.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Eye, Mind Freedom, People

  "The Exile Returns" by David Remnick, www.newyorker.com. February 14, 1994.

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• 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.

  Samuel P. Huntington

  Running, Real, Leader

  Interview with Amina Chaudary, www.theislamicmonthly.com. 2006.

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• 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.

  A. S. Byatt

  Falling In Love, Desire, Plot

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• Democracy is self-creating coherence.

  Mary Parker Follett

  Creating, Self, Intelligence

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• 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.

  Johan Huizinga

  Past, Simple, History

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• Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Quality, Depth, Culture

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• If there is to be responsible party government, the party label must be something more than a mere device for securing office. Unless those who are elected under the same party designation are willing to assume sufficient responsibility and exhibit sufficient loyalty and coherence, so that they can cooperate with each other in the support of the broad general principles, of the party platform, the election is merely a mockery, no decision is made at the polls, and there is no representation of the popular will.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Loyalty, Party, Responsibility

  Presidential Inaugural Address, delivered 4 March 1925

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• 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.

  Virginia Woolf

  Shining, Rubies, Fleeting

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.322, Wordsworth Editions

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