Coherence Quotes - Page 4

• 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.

  Daniel Taylor

  Pain, Mean, Past

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• No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we (anyone) get through adolescence without some form of song? Song is only a version of lyric poetry that is carried more by melody than by internal coherence and unity. but lyric and song - they are the same.

  Gregory Orr

  Song, Lyric Poetry, Unity

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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.

  Gabriel Mann

  Character, Order, Together

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• 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.

  Marci Shimoff

  Heart, Feelings, Care

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• There's nobody on a normal income who can afford to live anywhere centrally, so everything becomes displaced and decentralized. The city [of London] becomes incongruent. It doesn't have any coherence anymore.

  Alasdair MacLean

  Cities, Income, London

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• ...assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain.

  Robert Adams

  Art, Pain, Goal

  Edward Weston, Peter C. Bunnell, David Featherstone, Robert Adams (1986). “EW:100: centennial essays in honor of Edward Weston”

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• 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.

  Robert Reich

  Mean, Obscurity, Gone

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• 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.

  Daniel Levitin

  Integrity, Sea, Brain

  Daniel J. Levitin (2011). “This Is Your Brain On Music: Understanding a Human Obsession”, p.18, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.

  Dana Spiotta

  Satisfaction, Authenticity, Should

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• All around us, aspects of the modern world - diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology - have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence. Whether they can arrive before the natural world is damaged beyond repair and madness destroys humanity, we cannot tell.

  Paul Shepard

  Art, Philosophy, Exercise

  Paul Shepard (2013). “Coming Home to the Pleistocene”, p.170, Island Press

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• 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.

  Lewis Mumford

  Art, Times Like These, Voice

  Lewis Mumford (2000). “Art and Technics”, p.21, Columbia University Press

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• 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.

  Samuel Johnson

  Writing, Ideas, Chance

  Samuel Johnson (1825). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With Murphy's Essay”, p.106

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• 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

  Luc Delahaye

  Real, Thinking, Order

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

  Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

  Creating, Groups, World

  "Outer Peace" by Lily Koppel, www.nytimes.com. October 8, 2006.

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• 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.

  Kenneth Tynan

  Art, Spring, Different

  Kenneth Tynan (1961). “Curtains: Selections from the Drama Criticism and Related Writings”

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• 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.

  Daniel J. Siegel

  Philosophy, Compassion, Practice

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• 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.

  Francois Hollande

  Country, Justice, Effort

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• 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.

  David Abram

  Expression, Australia, Vitality

  David Abram (2012). “The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World”, p.179, Vintage

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• It began with one act of madness, and it ended with another. John Brown heard history's clock strike in the night and tried to hurry dawn along with gunfire; now John Wilkes Booth heard the clock strike, and he tried with gunfire to restore the darkness. Each man stood outside the human community, directed by voices the sane do not hear, and each kept history from going logically... The line from Harper's Ferry to Ford's Theater is a red thread binding the immense disorder of the Civil War into an irrational sort of coherence.

  Bruce Catton

  War, Night, Men

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• All right, so there he is, our representative to the world, Mr. Western Civilization, in codpiece and pantyhose up there on the boards, firing away at the rapt groundlings with his blank verses, not less of a word-slinger and spellbinder than the Bard himself and therefore not to be considered too curiously on such matters as relevance, coherence, consistency, propriety, sanity, common decency.

  Marvin Mudrick

  Civilization, Common Decency, Consistency

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• In such systems, there is unquestioning respect for authority. Faith trumps evidence. But if indeed this is broadly the explanation for how co-operative behaviour has evolved and been maintained in human societies, it could be very bad news. Because although such authoritarian systems seem to be good at preserving social coherence and an orderly society, they are, by the same token, not good at adapting to change.

  Robert May, Baron May of Oxford

  Behaviour, News, Social

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• 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.

  Jane Jacobs

  Life, Art, Order

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• When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?

  David Hume

  World, Stones, Eternity

  David Hume (1824). “The Philosophical Works of David Hume ... Containing Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Essays on the Immortality of the Soul, Suicide ... &c. A New Edition”, p.6

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• 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.

  Benjamin Cardozo

  Philosophy, Giving, Judging

  Benjamin N. Cardozo (2012). “The Nature of the Judicial Process”, p.8, Courier Corporation

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• Rarely has a collection of essays from a dozen scholars created a whole greater than the sum of its parts, but Capitalism Takes Command conveys with detail, coherence, and sophistication the changes in the American economy in the nineteenth century under the multiple imperatives of capitalism.

  Joyce Appleby

  Details, Dozen, Economy

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