A Blank Slate Quotes & Sayings

I've never been about trying to promote a brand of Squarepusher. I've never been keen on that idea that these are the character traits that I've got to stick with and amplify and keep pushing forward and pushing on the public. I'm really happy to throw it all away and start each record with a blank slate but I concede you've got a point, there are things I can't get rid of, no matter how hard I try. — Squarepusher

Just as television didn't put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don't think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. ~ Steven Pinker, author of The Lauguage Instinct, How the Mind Works The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. — Leah Price

Music is the chalk to the blackboard of life. Without it everything is a blank slate — Ray Charles

If [t]he mind is a system with many parts, then an innate desire is just one component among others. Some faculties may endow us with greed or lust or malice, but others may endow us with sympathy, foresight, selfrespect, a desire for respect from others, and an ability to learn from our own experiences and those of our neighbors. These are physical circuits residing in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain, not occult powers of a poltergeist, and they have a genetic basis and an evolutionary history no less than the primal urges. It is only the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine that make people think that drives are "biological" but that thinking and decision making are something else. — Steven Pinker

The best thing the universe ever gave us is that we'll all be forgotten. [...] I kinda like the idea. That when we die, despite any pain or fear or embarrassment we experienced during our lives, despite any heartbreak or grief, we get to be dispersed back into nothingness. It makes me feel brave, knowing I'll get a blank slate at the end. You get a brief glimmer of consciousness to do with what you will and then it's given back to the universe again. I'm not religious, but even I can appreciate that that's redemption, on the grandest scale. Oblivion isn't scary; it's the closest thing to genuine absolution of sin that I can imagine. — Krystal Sutherland

Most people have a blank slate and can start from nothing. But for me, I had to break a bad habit that I've been doing all of my life, which is freestyle hip-hop. — Roshon Fegan

Note for a Textbook

The question is never answered, never resolved,
The circle of love and anger never squared,
The stubborn instinct not translated yet
In decimals, accurate and predictable
In union dues or payroll cuts or blood...

Always a symbol lost in the lovely theorem,
A fraction that will not fit in the sum of the system,
A jutting thrust in the graph of the commissar's forecast,
A troublesome blank in gauleiter's careful accounting,
An awkward hitch in the plans of the second vice-president.

The answers worked on the slate are never the same,
And the answers proved in the back of the book are wrong. — Charles Bruce

Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory. — Nicole Krauss

It is so hard for musicians when they step into acting is they're not coming in as a blank slate, they're coming in with a real set idea of who they are, where they're coming from, what their politics are, what their tastes are. — Shirley Manson

A baby is such a blank slate, like training the understudy fo a role you're planning to leave.You truly hope your replacement will do the play justice, but in secret, you want future critics to say you played the character better. — Chuck Palahniuk

War is a difficult time for everybody - for soldiers on the front and for the people on the road. War takes away from us everything that we know, as we know it. It gives us a blank slate to re-write our lives and for ink it gives us blood. — Preeti Bhonsle

The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either. — Alison Gopnik

I got to college and saw all of my friends going to these other schools and thought, 'You know, college is just a blank slate.' And I had an opportunity to go to different schools, but I chose Brown because it was unique and allowed you to be yourself as an individual and like I said, it's a blank slate. — Masi Oka

My future was a blank slate and only I could write on it. — Carter Quinn

I know absolutely nothing about where I'm going. I'm fine with that. I'm happy about it. Before, I had nothing. I had no life, no friends, and no family really, and I didn't really care. I had nothing, and nothing to lose, and then I knew loss. What I cared about was gone; it was all lost. Now I have everything to gain; everything is a clean slate. It's all blank pages waiting to be written on. It's all about going forward. It's all about uncertainty and possibilities. — Gregory Galloway

You can sit in front of a computer and have a blank slate and be completely overwhelmed by the possibilities and not get anywhere. — Rob Brown

I am a blank slate - therefore I can create anything I want. — Tobey Maguire

There is a brief moment when you first wake where you have no memories. An idyllic blank slate. A blissful emptiness. But it doesn't last long. You remember exactly who you are and all the terrible things you've gone through. — J.L. Weil

My loneliness ... still comes over me sometimes ... It's a liminal, lost sensation of having wandered wide, endless boulevards, among rows of orange trees, winter butterflies, seasons reversed and out of order, dogs barking from behind fences meant to keep out intruders. It's not the place that impoverishes me but I who bring my own sense of poverty, of loss, to the place. It's a sense of near nothingness, as though I were not so much a blank slate as an erased chalkboard, still bearing illegible smudges of smoothed-over writing. — Marco Roth

There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history. — Amy Reed

TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIAL SCIENCE embraced not just the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage but the third member of the trinity, the Ghost in the Machine. The declaration that we can change what we don't like about ourselves became a watchword of social science. But that only raises the question "Who or what is the 'we'?" If the "we" doing the remaking are just other hunks of matter in the biological world, then any malleability of behavior we discover would be cold comfort, because we, the molders, would be biologically constrained and therefore might not mold people, or allow ourselves to be molded, in the most socially salutary way. A ghost in the machine is the ultimate liberator of human will - including the will to change society - from mechanical causation. — Steven Pinker

I can't look at a stranger's face and think, She's smiling just like Amy. When Amy smiles like that she's happy, so this person is probably happy, too. Instead, I watch and evaluate, with a slightly anxious feeling. It's as if I have to build a behavior database for every single person I meet in life. When I encounter someone for the first time, the slate is blank and I don't know what to expect. — John Elder Robison

What we need,' Henry says, 'is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let's call her Tabula Rasa. — Audrey Niffenegger

An artist adopts a radically different view regarding the importance of time than a businessperson does. Instead of perceiving time as a merchantable facet doled out incrementally according to marketplace demands, an artist portrays time as an agent of destruction. The irrevocability of time frames the human condition. Time might the medium of all human experience, but its passage obscures and eventually obliterates all human endeavors. Time unchecked leads to a blank slate of nothingness. Time's destructive march towards meaningless is arrested through memory and art depicting humankind's struggles and accomplishments. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Hey, non dispera! There is a way out. Come to beautiful Oasis. No crime, no madness, no bad stuff of any kind, a brand new home, home on the range, no or antelope but hey, accentuate the positive, there never is a discouraging word, nobody rapes you or tries to reminisce about Paris in the springtime, no sense sniffing that old vomit, right? Cut the strings, blank the slate, let go of Auschwitz and the Alamo and the ... the fucking Egyptians for God's sake, who needs it, who cares, focus on tomorrow. Onward and upward. Come to beautiful Oasis. — Michel Faber

I've always felt a little lost in life, like I never received complete instructions on who I'm supposed to be. Everyone else around me seemed to know exactly who they were. Their lives would fly right by me; their GPS's locked on to destinations while I just sat idling in the street. In high school I never did any extracurricular activities because I couldn't figure out if I was a sports person or a music person. And it was no different in college. I wandered through four different majors, unable to decide who I wanted to be. I just felt like a blank slate.

And if I was a blank slate, Micah York was The Starry Night - authentic, beautiful, perfect. He was my exact antithesis which is what attracted me to him in the first place. He was born knowing exactly who he was and what he was about. His confidence and certainty in himself was an all but tangible element of him. — C.K. Walker

Having a blank slate is sometimes as daunting as it is exciting. — Joe Madureira

My room is cleared. My head is cleared. Earlier, around dawn, I took out the last load of trash. I look around and see what's left. Nothing. There is no more Daelyn Rice. As I was. As I am. Or will become. I'm a blank slate — Julie Anne Peters

Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised. — Gregory B. Sadler

The religion that has transformed Western civilization for two millennia is a blank slate for liberals. Their closest reference point is conservative Christians, meaning people you're not supposed to hire. And these are the people who carp about George Bush's alleged lack of intellectual curiosity. — Ann Coulter

Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Children may be innately motivated to make friends, acquire status, hone motor skills, and explore the physical world, but they are not necessarily motivated to adapt their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics. A family, peer group, and culture that ascribe high status to school achievement may be needed to give a child the motive to persevere toward effortful feats of learning whose rewards are apparent only over the long term. — Steven Pinker

When a dancer comes onstage, he is not just a blank slate that the choreographer has written on. Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in life Each time, he has chosen, and in what he is onstage, you see the result of those choices. You are looking at the person he is, and the person who, at this point, he cannot help but be Exceptional dancers, in my experience, are also exceptional people, people with an attitude toward life, a kind of quest, and an internal quality. They know who they are, and they show this to you, willingly. — Mikhail Baryshnikov

The mind of a baby is a tabula rasa; society writes information on his mind. — Debasish Mridha

The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. "Virgin" is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best. — Jessica Valenti

Don't get seduced by your own stuff. Don't get high on your own supply. The hardest thing as a filmmaker is when you're watching a film that you've worked on for several years. You know every frame so intimately that holding lots of the objectivity of a new viewer who has just seen it for the first time is the hardest thing. Every aesthetic decision you make - and you make thousands of them every day, have to - in theory, must be done from you being a blank slate. You almost have to run a program, like a mind wipe, every time you watch the movie. — James Cameron

Twitter is an astounding platform for information, but it's a total blank slate - which means it's an astounding platform for disinformation, too. — Rachel Sklar

Contrary to what some parents might believe or hope for, children are not born a blank slate. Rather, they come into the world with predetermined abilities, proclivities and temperaments that nurturing parents may be able to foster or modify, but can rarely reverse. — Jane Brody

I argued that the Bush administration, and the Coalition officials more recently, didn't understand Iraqi society. They thought it was a blank slate, that they could use Iraqis as guinea pigs. — Juan Cole

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. — Steven Pinker

Don't get seduced by your own stuff; work hard to keep a blank slate state of mind each time you watch your film. — James Cameron

Every day is a blank canvas to use our free will to create something beautiful for our Creator. — Alisa Hope Wagner

Some actors wear their roles like clothing," he said. "No matter what part they're playing, you can always easily see who it is beneath the costume."
"It's how drag queens do women, darling," volunteered the elegant Miss X.
[ ... ]
"The really amazing actors strip themselves down to nothing-they make themselves a blank slate, and you can never guess what they're going to look like or act like in their next film because they completely transform themselves."
"It's how transsexuals do women, darling," opined Doris Fish with an arched eyebrow in my direction. — Kate Bornstein

The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate ... is a totalitarian's dream. — Steven Pinker

In The Blank Slate I argued that the modern denial of the dark side of human nature - the doctrine of the Noble Savage - was a reaction against the romantic militarism, hydraulic theories of aggression, and glorification of struggle and strife that had been popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. — Steven Pinker

Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up. — Erik Larson

Fantasy is sort of a blank slate that everybody can project their own culture onto. Everybody can read it in their own way. — D. B. Weiss

It's only at first sight,when the mind's a blank slate,that you get the purest look.
So I fold the flap back,and write:
Tumbleweeds. — Alyson Noel

Byron; and, realistically, quite a number of those infants will die without my care, and Josephine is hardly a creature with potential, hardly anybody's idea of a tabula rasa, a blank slate - hell, she's a slate that's had bad math scrawled on it and then been waxed so that nothing can ever be written on it again. I've treated sheep that had more of a right to live. — Tim Powers

One of the strangest things is the act of creation.
You are faced with a blank slate - a page, a canvas, a block of stone or wood, a silent musical instrument.
You then look inside yourself. You pull and tug and squeeze and fish around for slippery raw shapeless things that swim like fish made of cloud vapor and fill you with living clamor. You latch onto something. And you bring it forth out of your head like Zeus giving birth to Athena.
And as it comes out, it takes shape and tangible form.
It drips on the canvas, and slides through your pen, it springs forth and resonates into the musical strings, and slips along the edge of the sculptor's tool onto the surface of the wood or marble.
You have given it cohesion. You have brought forth something ordered and beautiful out of nothing.
You have glimpsed the divine. — Vera Nazarian

People today will have you believing life is a blank slate upon which you can write anything at all
this is poetic, even romantic. Unfortunately, it's also a lie, because life exists in, is bound by, shaped by, controlled by, and functions within a construct. Attempt to function outside that construct, or bend it to our will, or remove it completely, and you throw all of society into chaos. We're seeing that now.
Like it or not, birds don't fly upside down ... and neither can we. — Northern Adams

When absolutes are abandoned for principles, the U.S. Constitution becomes a blank slate for anyone's graffiti. — Wayne LaPierre

It's a blank slate here, filled with possibility. — Suzanne Young

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. — Steven Pinker

There's a brief moment when you first wake up, where you have no memories. A blissful blank slate, a happy emptiness. — Candace Bushnell

At the end of the day, when the sun falls a willing prisoner of the night ... and humans, males and females alike, become submitted to the mistress of the dark, my mind begins to wander and wonder. Looking upwards at a blank slate of concrete, the psyque expresses freely what my subconscious is afraid to give free rein. And there and then, between the play of reality and dreamland, I find my place. I find myself. — Eiry Nieves

There's nothing so attractive as a blank slate. Take one attractive man, slap on a thick coat of daydream, and voila, the perfect man. With absolutely no resemblance to reality. — Lauren Willig

This is what happens when you treat your 168 hours as a blank slate. This is what happens when you fill them up only with things that deserve to be there. You build a life where you really can have it all. — Laura Vanderkam

I probably shouldn't say this about all animals, but at least the farm animals that I've hung out with, and even when I go to the zoo usually, they're like a blank slate. I guess that's why I like them. They're puppets, and you can imagine them being anything you want. — Kristen Schaal

It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that
well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been
or, more precisely, being about to be
hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say that these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap
the crater
that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers. — Tom McCarthy

The message from too many Democrats and Republicans alike remains that we should not let facts get in the way of our day-dreams. It's so much easier to fantasize about an alternative and ideal world, rather than making the hard and unpopular decisions that are necessary to deal with the complicated and frustrating one in which we live. It is so much easier to imagine that world as a blank slate on which America can draw as it wishes, rather than to recognize that limits on American power, and recalibrate strategy accordingly. If Americans fail to reexamine their fundamental attitudes toward that world, then the risk for the future is that failure in Iraq will make the United States more cautious, but not wiser. — John Hulsman

As a matter of principle, I always come to a film like a blank slate, I don't learn my lines in advance. With this approach, I feel clean. — Jeanne Moreau