Patterns Quotes - Page 38

• Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our lives against that which we thought it would be by now.

  Claire Vaye Watkins

  Memories, Wife, Kitchen

  Claire Vaye Watkins (2012). “Battleborn”, p.26, Granta Books

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• Raymond Hendler exhibited a group of abstract paintings that displayed rare high spirits. Using a great deal of fresh white, Hendler devised extremely simple symbols which he dispersed felicitously on his shining grounds. These bright, often linear hieroglyphs serve both as pictorial animators-they often flow in winding patterns or like fluent handwriting-and as references to the plentitude of the artist's existence. Gardens and sky and human joy are read in these exceedingly compressed forms.

  Dore Ashton

  Artist, Simple, Garden

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• There are millions of people who can get things done. There are very, very few people who will change the pattern in the whole field.

  Bill Drayton

  People, Done, Fields

  "Celebrating The Life Of A Changemaker: Steve Muthee" by Michael Chertok, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 10, 2014.

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• Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.

  Henry Steele Commager

  Government, Effort, Disloyalty

  "Who is Loyal to America?". "Harper's Magazine", Vol. 195, No. 1168, 1947.

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• I guess, and it may be a flaw, that I think about rhythm more [than anything else]. I'm always wanting to find something unusual. I've started to try and write more traditionally, but for whatever reason, I tend toward trying to find something that sounds more like a pattern to me.

  Dave Matthews

  Writing, Thinking, Guitar

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• I'm sure every pattern has been covered, but it's nice to think you might dwell on some that other people don't.

  Richard Thompson

  Funny, Inspiring, Nice

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• Don't just dream about grandiose acts of doing good. Every day do small ones, that add up over time to positive patterns.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Inspirational, Dream, Add

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• With the first step, the number of shapes the walk might take is infinite, but then the walk begins to define itself as it goes along, though freedom remains total with each step: any tempting side road can be turned into an impulse, or any wild patch of woods can be explored. The pattern of the walk is to come true, is to be recognized, discovered.

  A. R. Ammons

  Journey, Hiking, Numbers

  A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities.

  Carl Sagan

  Caring, Thinking, Wind

  "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage". TV Series (Episode 11: The Persistence of Memory), 1990.

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• Man is the microcosm of the macrocosm ; the God on earth is built on the pattern of the God in nature. But the universal consciousness of the real Ego transcends a million fold the self-consciousness of the personal for false ego.

  Carl Jung

  God, Real, Men

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• The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

  Henry James

  Country, Knowing, Judging

  Henry James (2003). “The Portable Henry James”, p.435, Penguin

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• A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.

  G. H. Hardy

  Science, Ideas, Lasts

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• When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh grass. Instead, we wrap ourselves in our own dark environment, where our only companion is the smell of our own sweat. In the cocoon, there is no dance, no walking or breathing. It is comfortable and sleepy, an intense and very familiar home.

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Change, Home, Dark

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• The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations--to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Science, Math, Simple

  Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew Sands (2015). “The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat”, p.45, Basic Books

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• Only the human brain can deliberately change perceptions, change patterns, invent concepts and tolerate ambiguity.

  Edward de Bono

  Thinking, Perception, Brain

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• Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.

  Bertrand de Jouvenel

  Democracy, Shapes, Given

  Bertrand de Jouvenel (1949). “On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth”

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• For every habit we have, for every experience we go through over and over, for every pattern we repeat, there is a NEED WITHIN US for it.

  Louise Hay

  Needs, Habit, Repeats

  Louise L. Hay (2009). “You Can Heal Your Life”, p.87, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• How can a modern anthropologist embark upon a generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion? By thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as a mathematical pattern.

  Edmund Leach

  Hope, Math, Thinking

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• In our civilization, there are permanent forms which are part of every epoch and every culture. They are not especially difficult to detect. A minimal knowledge of physics, astrophysics, and perhaps mathematics, brings to light certain patterns that make these subjects easier to understand. It is striking to see the extreme similarity between these scientific propositions and the forms that recur in all times, places and civilizations.

  Philippe Starck

  Light, Civilization, Design

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• But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?

  Walter Lippmann

  Men, Effort, Propaganda

  Walter Lippmann (2012). “Public Opinion”, p.14, Courier Corporation

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• I usually base my characters on composites of people I know. One trumpet player in SIDE MAN is really a mix of four different guys I knew growing up. Patsy , the waitress, is a mix of about three different people. I like doing it that way. I start with the characters, as opposed to plot, location, or some visual element. I write more by ear than by eye. I always work on the different sound of each character, trying to make sure each has a specific voice and speech pattern, which some writers could care less about.

  Warren Leight

  Growing Up, Eye, Writing

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• The psychiatric interviewer is supposed to be doing three things: considering what the patient could mean by what he says; considering how he himself can best phrase what he wishes to communicate to the patient; and, at the same time, observing the general pattern of the events being communicated. In addition to that, to make notes which will be of more than evocative value, or come anywhere near being a verbatim record of what is said, in my opinion is beyond the capacity of most human beings.

  Harry Stack Sullivan

  Mean, Science, Wish

  Harry Stack Sullivan (1953). “The collected works”

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• Mathematics is about problems, and problems must be made the focus of a student's mathematical life. Painful and creatively frustrating as it may be, students and their teachers should at all times be engaged in the process - having ideas, not having ideas, discovering patterns, making conjectures, constructing examples and counterexamples, devising arguments, and critiquing each other's work.

  Paul Lockhart

  Teacher, Math, Ideas

  "A Mathematician's Lament". Book by Paul Lockhart, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2009.

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• History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch or two for a pattern.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Two, History, Giving

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• History is not a pattern-book of fossilized ideologies.

  F. M. Powicke

  Book, History, Ideology

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