Constructs Quotes - Page 21

• It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.

  Bertrand Russell

  Art, Destiny, Numbers

  Bertrand Russell (2014). “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell”, p.162, Routledge

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• Gender is a social construct, but everyone likes to cuddle.

  Danielle Henderson

  Likes, Gender, Social

  Danielle Henderson (2012). “Feminist Ryan Gosling: Feminist Theory as Imagined from Your Favorite Sensitive Movie Dude”, p.17, Running Press

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• When we remember something, we're taking bits and pieces of experience - sometimes from different times and places - and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction.

  Elizabeth Loftus

  Together, Remember Something, Different

  "I Could Have Sworn". Interview with Alison George, www.slate.com. September 8, 2013.

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• I fell in love. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a state of unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I did not believe in romantic love at the time, thinking it a human construct, an invention of fourteenth century Italian poets. I was as unprepared for love as I had been for goodness and beauty. Suddenly, my heart seemed swollen, too large for my chest.

  Philip Yancey

  Fall, Believe, Heart

  Philip Yancey (1997). “What's So Amazing about Grace?”, p.41, Harper Collins

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• Materialists try to live in the lower story NON-MATERIAL WORLD Subjective, Superstitious, Mental Constructs MATERIAL WORLD Objective, Scientific, Knowable Facts

  Nancy Pearcey

  Trying, Stories, World

  Nancy Pearcey (2015). “Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes”, p.105, David C Cook

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• Mental disorders don't really live 'out there' waiting to be explained. They are constructs we have made up - and often not very compelling ones.

  Allen Frances

  Waiting, Made, Disorder

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• In our culture, the Oedipal drama succeeds in making us assume either a male or female sexual position. Certainly this is an ancient construct that's rapidly coming apart.

  John Maus

  Drama, Males, Female

  Interview with Jenn Pelly, pitchfork.com. August 10, 2012.

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• Those are my enemies: they want to overthrow and to construct nothing themselves. They say: "All that is worthless"--and want to create no value themselves.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Enemy, Nihilism, Want

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• Lofty words cannot construct an alliance or maintain it; only concrete deeds can do that.

  John F. Kennedy

  Alliances, Deeds, Concrete

  Kennedy, John F. (1964). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963”, p.520, Best Books on

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• Taking to pieces is the trade of those who cannot construct.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Criticism, Pieces, Trade

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871”, p.73, University of Georgia Press

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• Your brand image is primarily an emotional construct. Emotion is probably always more powerful in swaying people than reason, but people like to be able to rationalize their choices.

  Drayton Bird

  Powerful, Emotional, People

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• Mankind invented the atomic bomb,
  but no mouse would ever construct
  a mousetrap.

  Albert Einstein

  Bombs, Atomic Bomb, Mankind

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• The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax

  Thomas Paine

  America, Liberty, Syntax

  The Rights of Man pt. 1 (1791)

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• We cannot, even given our most imaginative efforts, construct a concept of Self that does not impute some causal influence of prior mental states on later ones.

  Jerome Bruner

  Self, Effort, Doe

  Jerome S. Bruner (1996). “The Culture of Education”, p.15, Harvard University Press

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• Human beings do not carry civilization in their genes. All that we do carry in our genes are certain capacities- the capacity to learn to walk upright, to use our brains, to speak, to relate to our fellow men, to construct and use tools, to explore the universe, and to express that exploration in religion, in art, in science, in philosophy.

  Margaret Mead

  Art, Philosophy, Men

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• Talk about painting: there's no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can't be said but are always the most important.

  Gerhard Richter

  Important, Quality, Painting

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

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• Give me extension and motion and I will construct the universe.

  Rene Descartes

  Math, Giving, Give Me

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• The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct.

  Timothy Leary

  Reality, Brain, Robots

  Timothy Leary (2009). “Change Your Brain”, p.58, Ronin Publishing

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• The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.

  Raoul Vaneigem

  Mean, Organization, Everyday

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• We may wonder at the choice of Israel and Rome as the archetypes of the new nation, in view of the long history of suffering of the former and the decline of the latter. We may wonder that our ancestors over-looked the darker days of those earlier nations. They did not. They hoped to construct a republic on principles to sound that if we should decline in piety and public virtue we would meet the inexorable fate of nations, which are as but dust in the hands of God.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Fate, Israel, Views

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• It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Book, Simple, Simplicity

  Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" (1903).

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• It’s a beauty one isn’t born with, but must fight to construct at great sacrifice.

  Leslie Feinberg

  Fighting, Sacrifice, Born

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• The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything which is already finished, already made, already existing in the world - it is a symbol of a new world, which is being built upon and which exists by way of people.

  El Lissitzky

  Art, People, World

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• A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.

  Bernard Malamud

  Men

  Bernard Malamud, Lawrence M. Lasher (1991). “Conversations with Bernard Malamud”, p.62, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Magicians are manipulating your consciousness. They are showing you something impossible. They're getting you to construct a narrative, which simply isn't true. So that means they know how to make you aware of certain things and blind to other things. What I'm hoping is that magic, this entertainment vehicle that has been around for a long time, will give us a real insight into the deep mysteries of consciousness

  Richard Wiseman

  Real, Mean, Long

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