Patterns Quotes - Page 25

• History is not ended. It will sooner or later take up the threads apparently broken off forever and knit them together in a new pattern.

  Rudolf Hess

  Broken, Forever, Together

  Rudolf Hess (1954). “Prisoner of Peace”

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• A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.

  Erich Fromm

  Character, Simple, Order

  Erich Fromm (2013). “To Have or To Be?”, p.131, Open Road Media

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• Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.

  Tara Brach

  Dream, Years, Tragedy

  "Embracing Life With Radical Acceptance' by Alivia Hall, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 6, 2016.

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• Human life cannot be formless. We live by patterns. We move in comradeships. Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu - and a recognizable part - unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return. The sensible thing is to use hard thinking to find the right way to live and then to live that way. What matters is living with dignity, with decency, and without fear.

  Herman Wouk

  Strong, Moving, Men

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• As NVC replaces our old patterns of defending, withdrawing or attacking in the face of judgment and criticism. We come to perceive ourselves and others, as well as our intentions and relationships, in a new light. Resistance, defensiveness, and violent reactions are minimized.

  Marshall B. Rosenberg

  Communication, Light, Criticism

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• If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this.

  William James

  Irrelevance, Numbers, Tables

  William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.438, Courier Corporation

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• We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.
  A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message.

  Norbert Wiener

  Rivers, Water, May

  Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.96, Da Capo Press

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• Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves

  Norbert Wiener

  Air, Rivers, Water

  Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.96, Da Capo Press

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• Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Alternatives, Information, Recognition

  Marshall McLuhan (1969). “Counter blast [by] Marshall McLuhan”

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• Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Men, Experts, Professionalism

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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• Trust to God to weave your thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.

  George MacDonald

  Thread, Shows

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• When we cling, often forever, to our old patterns of thinking and behaving, we fall to negotiate any crisis, to truly grow up, and to experience the joyful sense of rebirth that accompanies the successful transition into greater maturity.

  M. Scott Peck

  Growing Up, Fall, Successful

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• We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.

  Harriet Lerner

  Steps, Persons, Ifs

  Harriet Lerner (2014). “The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships”, p.17, Harper Collins

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• When we struggle to change ourselves we, in fact, only continue the patterns of self-judgement and aggression. We keep the war against ourselves alive.

  Jack Kornfield

  War, Struggle, Self

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• Here then is the pattern in my carpet, the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes.

  Arthur Machen

  Eye, Glowing, Looks

  "The London Adventure". Book by Arthur Machen, p.25, 1924.

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• Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

  Learned Hand

  Upset, Taste, Furniture

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

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• Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase ones taxes.

  Learned Hand

  Patriotic, Advice, Pay

  Helvering v. Gregory (1934)

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• Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on a significant bases of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.

  August Strindberg

  Memories, Reality, Imagination

  August Strindberg (2014). “Strindberg Plays: 2: Dream Play; Dance of Death; The Stronger”, p.175, A&C Black

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• But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there.

  Knut Hamsun

  Fall, Men, Space

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• Christians often equate holiness with activism and spiritual disciplines. And while it's true that activism is often the outgrowth of holiness and spiritual disciplines are necessary for the cultivation of holiness, the pattern of piety in the Scripture is more explicitly about our character. We put off sin and put on righteousness. We put to death the deeds of the flesh and put on Christ. To use the older language, we pursue mortification of the old man and the vivification of the new.

  Kevin DeYoung

  Christian, Spiritual, Character

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• Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.

  Arthur Koestler

  What Matters, Data, Facts

  Arthur Koestler (1964). “The Act of Creation”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit -- unless you find new routines -- the pattern will unfold automatically.

  Charles Duhigg

  Fighting, Focus, Decision

  Charles Duhigg (2012). “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change”, p.20, Random House

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• In the first grade, I already knew the pattern of my life. I didn't know the living of it, but I knew the line… From the first day in school until the day I graduated, everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus.

  Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

  Art, School, Lines

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• How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god?  And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment - from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies - how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Eye, Jewels

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• Year after year, we have had to explain from mid-year onwards why the global growth rate has been lower than predicted as little as two quarters back. This pattern of disappointment and downward revision sets up the first, and the basic, challenge on the list of issues policymakers face in moving ahead: restoring growth, if that is possible.

  Stanley Fischer

  Disappointment, Moving, Years

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