Incoherence Quotes

• Incoherence is a common hazard for journalists who dabble in ethical judgments.

  Andrew Ferguson

  Hazards, Common, Judgment

  "Scotty". www.weeklystandard.com. February 24, 2003.

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• When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Luxury, Adam, Term

  P.J. O'Rourke (2009). “On The Wealth of Nations: A Book that Shook the World”, p.33, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence.

  Deborah Levy

  Believe, Want, Impossible

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• Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?

  Paul Valery

  Real, Boredom, People

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• Since I've become a central banker, I've learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.

  Alan Greenspan

  Misunderstood, Bankers, I've Learned

  1987 Address to Congress, Sep. Quoted by Jonathan Marshall in the San Francisco Chronicle, 9 Jun 1995.

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• Defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom, and above all futility.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Failure, Boredom, Defeat

  Antoine de Saint Exupery (1942). “Flight to Arras”

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• It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

  Oscar Wilde

  Hurt, Real, Style

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.78, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.

  Judith Butler

  Identity, Connections, May

  Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory Judith Butler (2011). “Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex”, p.75, Taylor & Francis

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• And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call 'sustained incoherence.

  David Bohm

  Struggle, Thinking, Trying

  Professor Chris Jenks, David Bohm (2004). “Thought as a System”, p.11, Routledge

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• Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Believe, Sweat, People

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• Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

  William Butler Yeats

  Ideas, Breakfast, Poet

  William Butler Yeats (1994). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. V: Later Essays”, p.228, Simon and Schuster

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• All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

  Wallace Stevens

  Political, Poetic, Economic

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.17, Vintage

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• No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself

  Paul Auster

  Simple, Opaque, Gains

  Paul Auster (2008). “The New York Trilogy”, p.249, Faber & Faber

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• The aggressive incoherence of our common surroundings can be described as entropy made visible. The way we have disposed things on the landscape leads us in the direction of disorder and death. They are categorically evil. These dispositions are destroying our only home-planet and other organisms that share it. They defeat our need to care about where we are and the things in place there. They prompt us to feel that civilization is not worth carrying on. They rob us of our identity and our will to live. These things are not about personal taste or style.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Home, Civilization, Evil

  Interview With Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org.

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• We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

  Paul Auster

  Simple, Goes On, Opaque

  Paul Auster (2008). “The New York Trilogy”, p.249, Faber & Faber

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• In my incoherence I was grateful that for a few moments I had known what it was to suffer-or so I thought. But nothing is less like a thing that that which is closest to it. A man who had been near to death thinks how he knows death. When the day finally comes for him to meet it, he does not recognise it. 'This is not it,' he says, as he dies.

  Raymond Radiguet

  Grateful, Thinking, Men

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• Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating the enemies . . . despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent; all are familiar images of American society. They are signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climaxes where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems - private nightmares expanded to a social level.

  Paul Shepard

  Technology, Broken, Historical

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• In trying to explain our political paralysis, analysts cite President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for important legislation. These are large factors to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit of all: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

  Jacob Weisberg

  Ignorance, Political, Important

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• It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e. the Book of Revelations), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Dream, Religious, Book

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• Any time one person makes an effort to contact a deeper part of him or herself, balance his or her emotions, and deflect the stress momentum, others benefit. As more individuals learn to maintain their poise and balance and refrain from adding to the incoherence around them, they help to counterbalance the frequency of stress

  Howard Martin

  Stress, Effort, Balance

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• The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

  James Gleick

  Reading, Past, Mirrors

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• Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Boredom, People

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• Wrangel pretended to combat the Bolsheviks, Bolshevism is Jewry. In order to retain the favor of the Jews holding the real power in England, France and the United States, Wrangel showed to the Jews signs of his submission to them. Thereafter the Russian masses abandoned Wrangel as a traitor or as a comedian. It is impossible simultaneously to be an auxiliary of the Jew and an enemy of the Bolsheviki who are Jews. Be it incoherence or treason, Wrangel deserved the same fate as Denikin and he got it.

  Boris Brasol

  Real, Fate, Order

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• Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God's hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

  Steven Weinberg

  Country, Islamic, Flames

  "Islam and science – the 'hideous' way". www.the-tls.co.uk. January 18, 2007.

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• Any writer who could handle all these different voices would deserve high praise, but to do so without any sense of jarring or incoherence is an extraordinary accomplishment.

  Philip Kitcher

  Voice, Accomplishment, Different

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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