Concepts The Quotes & Sayings

The world is awakening and it's not waiting for anyone. You either awaken with it or be left consumed by old concepts and ideas. Do you thrust yourself into the unknown or stay covered in dust that has been hanging around for ages? — Bephyer Parey

Children must be free to think in all directions irrespective of the peculiar ideas of parents who often seal their children's minds with preconceived prejudices and false concepts of past generations. Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are. — Brock Chisholm

While one could hardly say that philosophers have given much attention to the place that the concept of evil has among our moral concepts, they have done so more in the last ten or so years than they had before. I have, therefore, often wondered why there has been so little discussion of goodness. In Search of Goodness is not only an exception: it is an admirable one. It is original and provocative, impressive both in its breadth and depth. — Raimond Gaita

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind,and are not however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world — Albert Einstein

Vaclav Havel was the most amazing man in terms of being the combination of somebody with massive moral authority, great courage for having espoused the concepts of democracy, freedom throughout a very difficult communist period, a very modest man, and somebody with a fabulous sense of humor and the idea of being able to see the absurd in situations. — Judy Woodruff

He wasn't a man, but a tape recorder, repeating catch phrases and old slogans without any thought to the concepts behind them, a dog stuck in the training of his youth and faithfully executing his tasks long after his master had moved on. — Harvey Pekar

Although separating mitochondria and microsomes might appear worlds apart from the determination of the molecular weight of macromolecules, certain concepts were common to the two operations and could be usefully transposed from the latter to the former. — Christian De Duve

People in the metros are busy making ends meet, but through my films, I like to give the reality of life a skip, and choose concepts which will give audiences a stress-free two-and-a-half hours. — Rohit Shetty

The world knows about our Jesus. They know about His poverty and love of the underdog. They know He told His followers to care for the poor and to share. They've heard about His radical economic theories and revolutionary redistribution concepts. They might not understand the nuances of His divinity or the various shades of His theology, but they know He was a friend of the oppressed. — Jen Hatmaker

Moment by moment the Holy Spirit will work with your beliefs, taking you step by step as you unwind your mind from the many false concepts that you believe keep you safe and make you happy. Only the release from these false beliefs can bring you true happiness and lasting peace. — David Hoffmeister

What I'm trying to do is deliver results, not promises; results, not vision; results, not concepts. The world is cynical about IBM's promises. — Louis V. Gerstner Jr.

Buddhists Believe In Reincarnation Buddhists don't believe reincarnation but they believe in rebirth. Reincarnation is about endless and set identity that moves from life to another, having the same emotions and memories with it. While rebirth on the other hand doesn't carry any memories or emotions you had in your past life, it is simply a small inscription of them in what's we called karma. Reincarnation and rebirth are rationally different concepts. Reincarnation is a belief that every person has a soul, and the soul travels to another body once their previous body dies. Rebirth explains that there's no permanent thing in the world. Every living creature is a nonstop accumulation of changing conditions that establish the body and mind. — Kiera Goodwin

The English don't like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It's alright if they come from an 'intellectual,', but from a pop star you're getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn't rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you're in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn't it? — Brian Eno

He loved the idea behind the Chinese concept of guanxi. It fit in the same general category as the concepts of friends, family, acquaintances, but it was more based in business and politics. Guanxi was about being able to call up a person one hadn't seen in years and ask for a favor. To have enough people in one's debt that there was more implied leverage to use when seeking favors from others. — Wildbow

I am closer to a European viewpoint of the world than an American one. My ethics and ideals are based on European concepts. — Bianca Jagger

The very existence of concepts such as justice, democracy and hospitality enables the promise of something beyond all conceived present possibilities: the only impossibility is the determination in advance that certain events would be impossible. — Claire Colebrook

More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world
a place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward ...
Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.
And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good. — Barack Obama

The concept of this so-called "TerraPower reactor" is that you, in the same reactor, you both burn and breed. So, instead of making plutonium and then extracting it, we take uranium - the 99.3 percent that you normally don't do anything with - we convert that, and we burn it. — Bill Gates

the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like 'force,' 'mass,' 'space,' and 'time,' he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. That — Thomas S. Kuhn

I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts. Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty. But the mind can't handle these so it has to imprison religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when the experience quiets down, the mind draws a bead on it and extracts concepts, notions, dogmas, so that religious experience can make sense to the mind. — Howard Thurman

Thinking in terms of two realms understands the paired concepts worldy-Christia n, natural-superna tural, profane-sacred, rational-revela tions, as ultimate static opposites ... and fails to recognize the original unity of these opposites in the Christ-reality. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Apart from an innate grasp of tactical concepts, a great coach must possess the essentials attributes of leadership which mold men into a cohesive, fighting team with an invincible will to victory. — Douglas MacArthur

The primordial purity of the ground completely transcends words, concepts, and formulations. — Jamgon Kongtrul

The religious urge in man is not a mere passing phase in the history of his spiritual development, but the ultimate source of all his ethical thought and all his concepts of morality; not the outcome of primitive credulity which a more "enlightened" age could outgrow, but the only answer to a real, basic need of man at all times and in all environments. In another word, it is an instinct. — Muhammad Asad

The 'phenomenal concept' issue is rather different, I think. Here the question is whether there are concepts of experiences that are made available to subjects solely in virtue of their having had those experiences themselves. Is there a way of thinking about seeing something red, say, that you get from having had those experiences, and so isn't available to a blind person? — David Papineau

You are so used to the support of concepts that when your concepts leave you, although it is your true state, you get frightened and try to cling to them again. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Law is not as disinterested as our concepts of law pretend; law serves power; law in large measure is a recapitulation of the status quo; it confirms a rigid order designed to insulate the beneficiaries of the status quo from the disturbances of change. The painful truth
one with a long history
is that police are around in large part to guarantee a peaceful disgestion for the rich. — William Sloane Coffin Jr.

Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts. — Neil Postman

What I want to do is try to raise the level of SCI-Arc's original mission, which was to be forward-thinking. And let's face it, if you're forward-thinking and you're dealing in concepts of new ideas, history has told us that new ideas are not always wanted by everyone. — Neil Denari

The problems we are experiencing are different aspects of one single crisis, which is a crisis in perception. It derives from the fact that most of us, and especially our large social institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview. — Joseph P. Kauffman

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious-that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment. — Dan Brown

Forcing companies to recruit away from the golf course might lead to the appointment of more women from NGOs and academia and medicine, all of whom are likely to understand such concepts as stewardship and sustainability much better than men picked from the usual hunting grounds. — Noreena Hertz

Being on the frontier, as I've said, required doing rather than imagining: clearing land, building shelter, obtaining food supplies. Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America, and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money - an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative. — Robert D. Kaplan

Think of success as a game of chance in which you have control over the odds. As you begin to master concepts in personal achievement, you are increasing your odds of achieving success. — Bo Bennett

The brain processes meaning before detail. Providing the gist, the core concept, first was like giving a thirsty person a tall glass of water. And the brain likes hierarchy. Starting with general concepts naturally leads to explaining information in a hierarchical fashion. You have to do the general idea first. And then you will see that 40 percent improvement in understanding. — John Medina

We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions - like the banking institutions, and other institutions; if we redesign our policies, if we look back on our concepts, so that we have a different idea of poor people. — Muhammad Yunus

It's not only the myths surrounding chess. Chess itself is a myth, you know? A game of hierarchy, of war. It's a story that people have been using to explain complex concepts for eons. Mathematics, yes. Geometry. Business. Philosophy. Even love. — Skye Warren

It is an old saying, abundantly justified, that where sciences meet there growth occurs. It is true moreover to say that in scientific borderlands not only are facts gathered that [are] often new in kind, but it is in these regions that wholly new concepts arise. It is my own faith that just as the older biology from its faithful studies of external forms provided a new concept in the doctrine of evolution, so the new biology is yet fated to furnish entirely new fundamental concepts of science, at which physics and chemistry when concerned with the non-living alone could never arrive. — Frederick Gowland Hopkins

One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term 'duty. — Ayn Rand

When you take action, particularly bold action, the boundaries of what you believe to be possible (your belief system) expand. Which, in turn, gives you the capacity to consider new ideas, new possibilities, and new concepts that you previously thought to be impossible. — Robert Ringer

I think the downloadable scene in general is really, really interesting for developers because it's low-risk. It doesn't require as much money as a triple-A title. And it's a great proving ground for new IPs, new concepts, new ideas - things that I think I, as a developer, find really attractive. — Kim Swift

Without the concepts, methods and results found and developed by previous generations right down to Greek antiquity one cannot understand either the aims or achievements of mathematics in the last 50 years. [Said in 1950] — Hermann Weyl

NEEMO missions are a challenging and exciting aspect of astronaut training. The research we conduct during those missions allows us to test new technologies and exploration concepts in conditions similar to the ones we'll experience in space. They are a great opportunity to help me expand my knowledge and develop new tools for future space exploration. — Jeremy Hansen

When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was. — Alan Watts

The great historian of religion Martin Marty once said every religion serves two functions: First, it is a message of personal salvation telling is how to get right with God; and second, it is a lens for interpreting the world.
Historically, evangelicals have been good at the first functions- at "saving souls". But they have not been nearly so good at helping people to interpret the world around them- at providing a set of interrelated concepts that function as a lens to give a biblical view of areas like science, politics, economics, or bioethics.
As Marty puts it, evangelicals have typically "accentuated personal piety and individual salvation, leaving men to their own devices to interpret the world around them. — Nancy Pearcey

One problem with relying on existing concepts is that it could stifle innovation, weakening the film sector over time. — Anita Elberse

THE ART OF THE BRICK exhibition is accessible because it engages the child in all of us while simultaneously illuminating sophisticated and complex concepts. Everyone can relate to the medium since it is a toy that many children have at home. But my goal with this exhibition when it first debuted in 2007 was to elevate this simple plaything to a place it has never been before. — Nathan Sawaya

At that time two opposing concepts of the Game called forth commentary and discussion. The foremost players distinguished two principal types of Game, the formal and the psychological. — Hermann Hesse

Mental illness, of course, is not literally a 'thing' - or physical object - and hence it can 'exist' only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist. — Thomas Szasz

I have always thought that art is not a category, not a realm covering innumerable concepts and derivative phenomena, but that, on the contrary, it is something concentrated, strictly limited. It is a principle that is present in every work of art, a force applied to it and a truth worked out in it. And I have never seen art as form but rather as a hidden, secret part of content ... A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways - by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art ... You can call it an idea, a statement about life, so all-embracing that it can't be split up into separate words; and if there is so much as a particle of it in any work that includes other things as well, it outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence, the heart and soul of the work. — Boris Pasternak

The world outside of me has no meaning independent of my thinking it. (pauses to look) I look out of the window. A garden. Trees. Grass. A young woman in a chair reading a book. I think: chair. So she is sitting. I think: book. So she is reading. Now the young woman touches her hair where it's come undone. But how can we be sure there is a world of phenomena, a woman reading in a garden? Perhaps the only thing that's real is my sensory experience, which has the form of a woman reading- in a universe which is in fact empty! But Immanuel Kant says- no! Because what I perceive as reality includes concepts which I cannot experience through the senses. Time and space. Cause and effect. Relations between things. Without me there is something wrong with this picture. The trees, the grass, the woman are merely- oh, she's coming! (nervously)- she's coming in here-! I say, don't leave!-where are you going? — Tom Stoppard

Becoming limitless involves mental agility; the ability to quickly grasp and incorporate new ideas and concepts with confidence. — Lorii Myers

Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin - which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next. And yet, ironically, one of the fears attending our progress in science is that a more complete understanding of ourselves will dehumanize us. Viewing — Sam Harris

The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time. — James J. Gibson

This whole issue of limits to growth, which provides a psychological, as well as a physical, cap on potential expansion of activity and awareness, has had a very depressing effect on many people ... I don't for a moment think that there's any concept which anyone's working with now which will be followed as a straightforward scenario. But the idea embodied in concepts such as space colonization or space industrialization, or availability of nonterrestrial resources, is fundamental, and it will change the way in which people look at the future. — Rusty Schweickart

The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like "nation," "society," and "culture" name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding. — Eric R. Wolf

So a deeper look at which verbs participate in the locative alternation has forced us to take a deeper look at what compels the mind to construe physical events in certain ways. And at that depth we have discovered a new layer of concepts that the mind uses to organize mundane experience: concepts about substance, space, time, and force. These concepts encourage the mind to unite events that have nothing in common in terms of what they look like, smell like, or feel like, yet they obviously matter to the mind a great deal. They are so pervasive that some philosophers consider them to be the very scaffolding that organizes mental life, and in chapter 4 I will show how they saturate our science, our storytelling, our morals, our law, even our humor. — Steven Pinker

Philosophical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from concepts; mathematical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from the construction of concepts. — Immanuel Kant

No one can stop or control your thought process or your thinking. You can think anything you want. But that doesn't seem to be the point. The thinking process has to be directed into a certain approach ... not in accord with certain dogma, philosophy, or concepts. Instead, one has to know the thinker itself. — Chogyam Trungpa

Within the next few years-a decade perhaps-we should be in a position to unlock new knowledge about life and matter so great that wholly new concepts of human life will follow in the wake of this new knowledge. — David Lilienthal

In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery ... Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines "buggery" as "heresy, sodomy. — Thomas Szasz

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects? — Sergei Eisenstein

Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory. — Leo Tolstoy

It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data. If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities. — Werner Heisenberg

Identifying the flaw in the US philosophical roots requires that we move beyond the intellectual and emotional climate in which the Constitution was conceived and adopted. The meanings of concepts and words change with use, and even the Supreme Court has admitted that the original perspective of the American social contract has been altered by the passage of time. — David E. Wilkins

Mathematics is entirely free in its development, and its concepts are only linked by the necessity of being consistent, and are co-ordinated with concepts introduced previously by means of precise definitions. — Georg Cantor

I've always loved fairytales, and I've loved the concept of, um, some of the best parts of a lot of stories are the beginning. — Darren Criss

The period is one of the most complicated and concepts of classical rhetoric. Nobody in the ancient world could quite decide what it meant, but they were united in the belief that it was terribly, terribly important. — Mark Forsyth

It is therefore an analogical knowledge: a knowledge of a being who is unknowable in himself, yet able to make something of himself known in the being he created. Here, indeed, lies something of an antinomy. Rather, agnosticism, suffering from a confusion of concepts, sees here an irresolvable contradiction in what Christian theology regards as an adorable mystery. It is completely incomprehensible to us how God can reveal himself and to some extent make himself known in created beings: eternity in time, immensity in space, infinity in the finite, immutability in change, being in becoming, the all, as it were, in that which is nothing. This mystery cannot be comprehended; it can only be gratefully acknowledged. — Anonymous

It will change everything. We won't need governments and corporations. The very concepts our economic and social systems are based on: money, wealth, privilege, will be meaningless. What use is money when everyone can build everything they need?'...
'These are people who've spent their whole lives fighting their way to the top and you're just going to tell them that there is no top anymore?... it's you that doesn't understand: they only care about material things as status symbols, to show that they're better than everyone else, that they've beaten everyone else, that's what drives them. They'll never give that up. — K. Valisumbra

In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a "dead concept," but equally unhealthy
were all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-abrac
and mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time. — Michael Pollan

Poor human reason, when it trusts in itself, substitutes the strangest absurdities for the highest divine concepts. — John Chrysostom

The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time. — Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

There were no whys in a person's life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite self patience. — Chad Harbach

Buddhism is the study of the way the mind works. One has to be able to hold a large number of relational concepts simultaneously in the mind. It is necessary to grid, to literally unlock realities and dimensions with the power of your mind. — Frederick Lenz

Chemists in earlier centuries were quite interested in the nature of acids. They had no interest in analysing their concept of acid. After all, they knew that their understanding of acids was at a fairly primitive level, and what they wanted to do was understand something about the world better - the nature of acidity - not something about their own concepts. — Hilary Kornblith

For Dewey, the Great Community was the basic fact of history. The individual and the soul were invalid concepts, man was truly man, not as an individual, but as after Aristotle, in society and supremely in the State. Thus, for Dewey, true education mean not the development of the individual in terms of learning, but his socialization.
Progressive education ... educates the individual in terms of particular facts of the universe without reference to God, truth, or morality. — Rousas John Rushdoony

If our previous analyses are correct, they all point to the same conclusion, that metaphysical adventures are doomed to fail when their authors substitute the fundamental concepts of any particular science for those of metaphysics. — Etienne Gilson

This irrelevance of molecular arrangements for macroscopic results has given rise to the tendency to confine physics and chemistry to the study of homogeneous systems as well as homogeneous classes. In statistical mechanics a great deal of labor is in fact spent on showing that homogeneous systems and homogeneous classes are closely related and to a considerable extent interchangeable concepts of theoretical analysis (Gibbs theory). Naturally, this is not an accident. The methods of physics and chemistry are ideally suited for dealing with homogeneous classes with their interchangeable components. But experience shows that the objects of biology are radically inhomogeneous both as systems (structurally) and as classes (generically). Therefore, the method of biology and, consequently, its results will differ widely from the method and results of physical science. — Walter M. Elsasser

English, unlike Hebrew, is read from left to right - as are clocks. The concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise are universal, irrespective of alphabet. — Joshua Cohen

We need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place. Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention. — Iris Murdoch

Macroscopic objects, as we see them all around us, are governed by a variety of forces, derived from a variety of approximations to a variety of physical theories. In contrast, the only elements in the construction of black holes are our basic concepts of space and time. They are, thus, almost by definition, the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe. — Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

The most frequently cited artists and curators travel extensively and there is a real difference in saying whether concepts and other contributions to the current contemporary arts agenda bear a recognizable cultural, or even national, identity. — Charlotte Bydler

From the point of view of pure logic or philosophy, there will often be a dialectical tension between two concepts.
For example ...
If I reflect on the concept of 'being,' I will be obliged to introduce the opposite concept, that of 'nothing.' You can't reflect on your existence without immediately realizing that you won't always exist. The tension between 'being' and 'nothing' becomes resolved in the concept of 'becoming.' Because if something is in the process of becoming, it both is and is not. — Jostein Gaarder

The concept of 'measurement' becomes so fuzzy on reflection that it is quite surprising to have it appearing in physical theory at the most fundamental level ... does not any analysis of measurement require concepts more fundamental than measurement? And should not the fundamental theory be about these more fundamental concepts? — John Stewart Bell

Richard Felder is co-developer of the Index of Learning Styles. He suggests that there are eight different learning styles. Active learners absorb material best by applying it in some fashion or explaining it to others. Reflective learners prefer to consider the material before doing anything with it. Sensing learners like learning facts and tend to be good with details. Intuitive learners like to identify the relationships between things and are comfortable with abstract concepts. Visual learners remember best what they see, while verbal learners do better with written and spoken explanations. Sequential learners like to learn by following a process from one logical step to the next, while global learners tend to make cognitive leaps, continuously taking in information until they get it. — Ken Robinson

IMAGINATION: one of the most powerful tools that humans have to help us visualize our dreams and goals. Imagination is our ability to form mental images and concepts in our brains to foster ideas and turn our goals into reality. — Anonymous

When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader. — Alastair Reynolds

A work of art contains its verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The acid test of any legal system is not the greatness or the grandeur of its ideal concepts, but whether, in fact, it is able to produce order and justice. — Lee Kuan Yew

What I like most about the process of literary creation is gathering mundane facts and concepts, then clothing them with the ornate jewels and fine garments of imagination and fantasy, weaving a tale on the glittering edge of possibility. — Gregory Hamilton

We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology. — Jean Baudrillard

I don't understand why people insist on pitting concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can't they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid package that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being. What's wrong with that idea? — Garth Stein

Master Oracle Advanced PL/SQL concepts with the book — Saurabh Gupta

All thinking of the religious man is etymological, a reduction of all concepts to the original intuition, to the characteristic. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine. People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together. — Gloria Steinem

["Manning Up"'s] essays definitely nuance the idea of transitioning into a "shared manhood" (much like feminists of color have complicated the idea of "shared womanhood"). Trans men don't all transition to just become "men," which was one of the projects' cornerstone concepts. They become black men, white men, queer men, straight men, working class men, affluent men, fatherly men, single men, spiritual men, etc. etc. All of these mean different things when filtered through social and intimate, familial lenses.

One major boon of the growth in transgender literature ... is that we get to tease out these complexities in lives that will be popularly portrayed as monolithic unless we provide counter-scripts."

- from a National Book Critics Circle interview with writer Rigoberto Gonzalez — Mitch Kellaway

Normal humanity has only the courage to react to the usual gradations that range from the beautiful to the ugly, which in the long run are nothing but nuances of the same thing. The monster, on the other hand, Don Jeronimo contended with feeling, in order to exalt them with his mystique, belongs to a different, privileged species, with its own rights and particular canons that exclude the concepts of beauty and ugliness as tenuous categories, because, in essence, monstrosity is the culmination of both qualities synthesized and exacerbated to the sublime. — Jose Donoso

I do not want to presuppose anything as known. I see in my explanation in section 1 the definition of the concepts point, straight line and plane, if one adds to these all the axioms of groups i-v as characteristics. If one is looking for other definitions of point, perhaps by means of paraphrase in terms of extensionless, etc., then, of course, I would most decidedly have to oppose such an enterprise. One is then looking for something that can never be found, for there is nothing there, and everything gets lost, becomes confused and vague, and degenerates into a game of hide and seek. — David Hilbert

Another huge advantage of learning as much as you can in different fields is that the more concepts you understand, the easier it is to learn new ones. Imagine explaining to an extraterrestrial visitor the concept of a horse. It would take some time. If the next thing you tried to explain were the concept of a zebra, the conversation would be shorter. You would simply point out that a zebra is a lot like a horse but with black and white strips. Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else. — Scott Adams