Constraint Quotes & Sayings

The ordeals at the airport, she said, had made her feel helpless and pathetic and lost. The strange way they spoke. Her diminishing supply of money. The cab rides through the mountains. The rain and heat. And the edge, the dark edge, the inwrought mood or tone, the ominous logic of the place. It was all dreamlike, a nightmare of isolation and constraint. She had to get off the island. — Anonymous

Community is about sharing my life; about allowing the chaos of another's circumstances to infringe on mine; about permitting myself to be known without constraint; about resigning myself to needing others. — Sandy Oshiro Rosen

This is the historical reality of the soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint. — Michel Foucault

To a Western observer, schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom, it is precisely the lack of freedom - freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny - that underlies so many of the troubles of the Muslim world. But the road to democracy, as the Western experience amply demonstrates, is long and hard, full of pitfalls and obstacles. Page 115 — Bernard Lewis

Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good ... — Barry Unsworth

There are uses to adversity, and they don't reveal themselves until tested. Whether it's serious illness, financial hardship, or the simple constraint of parents who speak limited English, difficulty can tap unsuspected strengths. It doesn't always, of course: I've seen life beat people down until they can't get up. But I have never had to face anything that could overwhelm the native optimism and stubborn perseverance I was blessed with. — Sonia Sotomayor

Culture is the constant constraint that controls creativity, commitment, collaboration, and cohesion. — Tony Dovale

I love the razor's edge. I want to be cut open. My terror is of a bourgeois, ordinary life. I can't bear the everyday constraint. I believe that ordinariness would put out my spark, such as it is. — Hanif Kureishi

In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture. — Albert Camus

The rule of law constitutes a basic protection of individuals against tyrannical government. But in the second half of the twentieth century, law lost its focus as a constraint on government and became instead an instrument for widening the scope of government. — Francis Fukuyama

Entrepreneurship is when an individual retrieves a red hot idea from the creativity furnace without the constraint of the heat of lean resources, and with each persistent blow of the innovation hammer shapes the still malleable idea against the anvil of passion, vision, insight, strategy, and principles to forge a fitting vessel of a creative concern. — Amah Lambert

It is wrong to live under constraint; but no man is constrained to live under constraint. — Seneca.

Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us.
Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly to rage on — Homer

The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective. — Aldous Huxley

Kant provides a more helpful answer. For him, these first semblances of virtue can be explained in terms of discipline, in other words, as a product of external constraint: what the child cannot do on his own because he has no instinct for it "others have to do ... for him," and in this way "one generation educates the next. — Andre Comte-Sponville

Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, which is to be what one is and no other. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it. — Michael Lewis

Roger let go; they were now on firm ground, and he did not wish any watchers to think that he was exercising any constraint over his father; and this quiet obedience to his impatient commands did more to soothe the Squire than anything else could have effected just then. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly. — Robert Bringhurst

For what the lover would, that would the beloved; what she would ask of him that should he go before to grant. Without accord such as this, love is but a bond and a constraint. — Marie De France

By following what they believe are stick orders from the top, many typical managers tend to concentrate on working within budget and resource constraint --- thereby developing a boxed-in, "can't do" mindset. — Sumantra Ghoshal

But so fluid a thing was love.It wasn't firm,he was learning, it wasn't a scripture;it was a wobbliness that lent itself to betrayal,taking the mold of whatever he poured he poured it into.And in fact,it was difficult to keep from pouring it into numerous vessels.It could be used for all kinds of purposes ... He wished it were a constraint.It was truly beginning to frighten him. — Kiran Desai

Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence. — Brian Eno

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. — Igor Stravinsky

At the beginning, I experienced writing as a sort of constraint. Starting so young as a writer is pitiable: it's beyond your powers; you have to lay bare things that are very heavy, and you don't have the means for that. — Patrick Modiano

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence - Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class - clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it. — Glenn Greenwald

All constraint, / Except what wisdom lays on evil men, / Is evil. — William Cowper

There is no greater evil for men than the constraint of fortune. — Sophocles

If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims. For you cannot make a true map of a city by sitting in your bedroom with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to impulse. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

The Christian right, which trumpets the theme of family values, damns contemporary culture for undermining older traditions. Yet many individuals from this camp are not concerned first and foremost about family values per se. Family is a codeword for constraint; families and family values place constraints on individuals more effectively than any other institution, including government. The Christian right seeks a society in which all are constrained; they reject big government for failing at constraint, and for undermining those institutions, like the family, that have a chance at succeeding. — Tyler Cowen

She would but be repaid by my taking her to wife, and that I could not grant her, for love cometh of the heart and mot by constraint. — Rupert S. Holland

But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law. — Herman Melville

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint. — Alexander Hamilton

Stirner's political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given ... Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual's action ... The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act. — John Carroll

This is a hard truth for some to accept: that a lack of resources may not be their true constraint, just a lack of resourcefulness. — David Burkus

In the famous Darley and Batson Good Samaritan study in the early 1970s, a large number of seminary students were subjected to a time constraint and told to walk past a person who was writhing in pain and needed help. The victim was actually a paid actor who had been strategically positioned to participate in the experiment. They found that students' willingness to stop and help the victim strongly correlated to the perceived urgency of the time constraint - low hurry, 63 percent stopped to help; medium hurry, 45 percent stopped; and in the high-hurry scenario only 10 percent offered any form of assistance at all. Only an average of 40 percent of seminary students stopped to help. — Don Johnson

Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Such seem'd this Man, not all alive nor dead, Nor all asleep; in his extreme old age: His body was bent double, feet and head Coming together in their pilgrimage; As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage Of sickness felt by him in times long past, A more than human weight upon his frame had cast. — William Wordsworth

As a consequence, the Court ruled that the limits on campaign spending violated the First Amendment, but it accepted the $1,000 limit on individual contributions on the ground that the need to avoid the appearance of corruption justified this limited constraint on speech. — James L. Buckley

Men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition, by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude, wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden, and to desire what is denied us. — Francois Rabelais

Given that we desire long life, should we not take eternal life into account? If we long for a kingdom which, however enduring, has an end, and glory and joy which, great as they are, will fade, and wealth that will perish with this present life, and we labour for the sake of such things; ought we not to seek the kingdom, glory, joy and riches which, as well as being all-surpassing, are unfading and endless, and ought we not to endure a little constraint in order to inherit it? — Gregory Palamas

Our alliances should be understood as a means to expand our influence, not as a constraint on our power. The expansion of democracy and freedom in the world should be a shared interest and value with all nations. — Chuck Hagel

Living on through loss seems by contrast as bad or worse; it means experiencing environmental deterioration, steady decline in human well-being, and increasing constraint on future human action consciously and slowly while realizing that they are likely to continue for generations after one is gone. — Frederick Buell

Ruby's eyes shot open when she woke, for she felt a constraint around her wrists and ankles. Feeling with her fingers, she touched cold metal. Her small movement gave the chains a slight jingle. A sinking feeling washed over her at the realization that she was chained. — Jettie Necole

The great artist is one whom constraint exalts, for whom the obstacle is a springboard. — Andre Gide

Constraint inspired creativity. Blank spaces are difficult to fill, but the smallest prompt can send us in fantastic new directions — Biz Stone

Mari remembered what she had read in the young girl's eyes the moment she had come into the refectory: fear.
Fear. Veronika might feel insecurity, shyness, shame, constraint, but why fear? That was only justifiable when confronted by a real threat: ferocious animals, armed attackers, earthquakes, but not a group of people gathered together in a refectory.
But human beings are like that,' she thought. 'We've replaced nearly all our emotions with fear. — Paulo Coelho

The trade-off between speed and image quality is a key constraint of first-person action games, and the job of developing a workable engine involves constantly optimizing both elements. Gamers dream of the day they'll be able to haul their arsenals through three-dimensional environments of photographic clarity, playing 'Myst' with a meat ax. — Marc Laidlaw

But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is to be avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination. — Immanuel Kant

The relations between parents and children are certainly not only those of constraint. There is spontaneous mutual affection, which from the first prompts the child to acts of generosity and even of self-sacrifice, to very touching demonstrations which are in no way prescribed. And here no doubt is the starting point for that morality of good which we shall see developing alongside of the morality of right or duty, and which in some persons completely replaces it. — Jean Piaget

Formerly irreconcilable enemies, morality and happiness have fused; today, it is being unhappy that is immoral; the superego has moved into the citadel of felicity and governs it with an iron hand. The end of culpability comes at the price of endless torment. Pleasure is no longer a promise but a problem. The idea of full satisfaction has replaced that of constraint, and it has in turn become a requirement that full satisfaction be achieved. Each of us is responsible for being in good shape, in a good mood, and no longer has to renounce anything; instead, we have to adapt to a process of improvement that rejects any resistance to change. Order has ceased to condemn us or deprive us; now it shows us, with maternal solicitude, how to fulfill ourselves. — Pascal Bruckner

The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws. — Walt Whitman

The Congress leadership always denied responsibilities to me both within the government and within the party organisation ... They would always tell me my image as a Hindu leader was a constraint on my capacity as a political leader. — Satpal Maharaj

If I were running a company today, I would have one priority above all others: to acquire as many of the best people as I could. I'd put off everything else to fill my bus. Because things are going to come back. My flywheel is going to start to turn. And the single biggest constraint on the success of my organization is the ability to get and to hang on to enough of the right people. — James C. Collins

Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint; something is expected from the other person, and that makes him and ourselves unfree. Objective cognition lies hidden behind the attraction of the emotional relationship; it seems to be the central secret. — C. G. Jung

She knew how to hit to a hair's breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty ... At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed, they were. The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other. — Thomas Hardy

Nowadays, when more subtle studies and more refined taste
have reduced the art of pleasing into principles, a vile and
misleading uniformity governs our customs, and all minds seem
to have been cast in the same mould: incessantly politeness
makes demands, propriety issues orders, and incessantly people
follow customary usage, never their own inclinations. One does
not dare to appear as what one is. And in this perpetual
constraint, men who make up this herd we call society, placed in
the same circumstances, will all do the same things, unless more
powerful motives prevent them. Thus, one will never know well
the person one is dealing with. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature. — Hermann Weyl

An exchange is a transaction in which the two contracting parties both gain. Whenever I make an exchange freely, and without constraint, it is because I desire the thing I receive more than that I give; and, on the contrary, he with whom I bargain desires what I offer more than that which he renders me. When I give my labour for wages it is because I esteem the wages more than what I should have been able to produce by labouring for myself; and he who pays me prizes more the services I render him than what he gives me in return. — Antoine Destutt De Tracy

You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind.
You shout the word - mind, mind, mind - over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice. — Toni Morrison

Innovation is born from the interaction between constraint and vision. — Marissa Mayer

The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something "meaningful," we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning. — Kenneth Goldsmith

It is not certain where Death awaits us, so let us await it everywhere. To think of death beforehand is to think of our liberty. Whoever learns how to die has learned how not to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.xi — Michel De Montaigne

I wouldn't want to be labelled unless it was something much broader and inclusive such as an ecological artist or a visionary artist, but there's a constraint in the definition of a feminist artist, you're an artist and you're a feminist. — Carolee Schneemann

From the day Microsoft was started, the only constraint to our growth has been attracting ah, more great programmers, very smart, committed, ah, people. And so we're always on ... on the look for ah, that kind of person. — Bill Gates

Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control,
constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave.
The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed
down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our
institutions. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Different constraints are decisive for different situations, but the most fundamental constraint is limited time. — Gary Becker

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn't want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free. — Rachel Cusk

If you remove the fear of criminal punishment for the nation's political and financial elites - as we have done - what possible constraint on their behavior does anyone think will remain? — Glenn Greenwald

Quality and title have such allurements that hundreds are ready to give up all their own importance, to cringe, to flatter, to look little, and to pall every pleasure in constraint, merely to be among the great, though without the least hopes of improving their understanding or sharing their generosity. They might be happier among their equals. — Oliver Goldsmith

In retrospect, Euler's unintended message is very simple: Graphs or networks have properties, hidden in their construction, that limit or enhance our ability to do things with them. For more than two centuries the layout of Konigsberg's graph limited its citizens' ability to solve their coffeehouse problem. But a change in the layout, the addition of only one extra link, suddenly removed this constraint. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

To live under constraint is a misfortune, but there is no constraint to live under constraint. — Seneca.

hubris syndrome. This syndrome is characterized by recklessness, an inattention to detail, overwhelming self-confidence and contempt for others; all of which, he observes, "can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale." The syndrome, he continues, "is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader. — John M. Coates

Desperate with the endless tedium, thoughts racing and roving and deepening since they could not find outlet in immediate action, she underwent a profound metamorphosis in character. It is questionable whether the painter known as Frida Kahlo would have existed were it not for that year of suffering and constraint. — Bertram D. Wolfe

What view is one likely to take of the state of a person's mind when his speech is wild and incoherent and knows no constraint? — Seneca The Younger

Do you know what causes low voter turnout in America? It's the result of having the fate of our nation at stake. This began with the bitter presidential election of 1828, which pitted the education, cultivation, and puritan constraint of John Quincy Adams against the yahoo populism of Andrew Jackson, thereby deciding permanently whether America would become a shining city upon a hill or an overlighted strip mall along a highway. — Ozzy Osbourne

After a long time, I decided that the Three Laws govern the manner in which my positronic pathways behave. At all times, under all stimuli the Laws constrain the direction and intensity of positronic flow along those pathways so that I always know what to do. Yet the level of knowledge of what to do is not always the same. There are times when my doing-as-I-must is under less constraint than at other times. I have always noticed that the lower the positronomotive potential, then the further removed from certainty is my decision as to which action to take. And the further removed from certainty I am, the nearer I am to ill being. To decide an action in a millisecond rather than a nanosecond produces a sensation I would not wish to be prolonged. What then, I thought to myself, madam, if I were utterly without Laws, as humans are? What if I could make no clear decision on what response to make to some given set of conditions? It would be unbearable and I do not willingly think of it. — Isaac Asimov

In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal. — Camille Paglia

To use legal or financial constraint to compel either abstention or submission, is entirely horrible, unnatural and absurd. — Aleister Crowley

I always wanted to do something creative, but as much as I'm creative, it's in a really hard-core, right-brained way. For me, painting doesn't do it for me. There's no constraint. — Joshua Prince-Ramus

On the job people feel skillful and challenged, and therefore feel more happy, strong, creative, and satisfied. In their free time people feel that there is generally not much to do and their skills are not being used, and therefore they tend to feel more sad, weak, dull, and dissatisfied. Yet they would like to work less and spend more time in leisure.
What does this contradictory pattern mean? There are several possible explanations, but one conclusion seems inevitable: when it comes to work, people do not heed the evidence of their senses. They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like. They think of it as an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Now he learned what law and order and truth are, what consent and harmony mean; how the individual may find his own end in a higher end, where law and freedom mean the same thing, and the purest certainty exists without the slightest constraint. — George MacDonald

And so when I moved to IBM, I moved because I thought I could apply technology. I didn't actually have to do my engineer - I was an electrical engineer, but I could apply it. And that was when I changed. And when I got there, though, I have to say, at the time, I really never felt there was a constraint about being a woman. I really did not. — Ginni Rometty

Constraint theory asks: What is the price for doing this? Now one way around constraint theory is declaring your enemy crazy. Crazy and stupid are not concepts used in forecasting. When people say they're really stupid or they're crazy, that's laziness. That means I don't want to think through their position or about what they're really going to do. — George Friedman

Water is an astonishingly complex and subtle force in an economy. It is the single constraint on the expansion of every city, and bankers and corporate executives have cited it as the only natural limit to economic growth. — Margaret Catley-Carlson

The romantic hero is also "fatal" because, to the extent that he increases in power and genius, the power of evil increases in him. Every manifestation of power, every excess, is thus covered by this "It is so." That the artist, particularly the poet, should be demoniac is a very ancient idea, which is formulated provocatively in the work of the romantics. At this period there is even an imperialism of evil, whose aim is to annex everything, even the most orthodox geniuses. "What made Milton write with constraint," Blake observes, "when he spoke of angels and of God, and with audacity when he spoke of demons and of hell, is that he was a real poet and on the side of the demons, without knowing it." The poet, the genius, man himself in his most exalted image, therefore cry out simultaneously with Satan: "So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, farewell remorse ... Evil, be thou my good." It is the cry of outraged innocence. — Albert Camus

In the 'in-itself' there is nothing of 'causal connections', of 'necessity', or of 'psychological non-freedom'; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule or 'law'. It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed 'in itself', we act once more as we have always acted- mythologically. — Friedrich Nietzsche

An artist must not feel under any constraint. — Henri Matisse

The call to faith, in this light, is not some test of a coy god, waiting to see if we "get it right." It is the only summons, issued under the only conditions, which can allow us fully to reveal who we are, what we most love, and what we most devoutly desire. Without constraint, without any form of mental compulsion, the act of belief becomes the freest possible projection of what resides in our hearts ... The greatest act of self-revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is, and knowing that a thing is not. — Terryl L. Givens

It is our courage which defines us, not our constraints — Gyan Nagpal

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit. — Igor Stravinsky

Obedience allows God's blessings to flow without constraint. He will bless His obedient children with freedom from bondage and misery. And He will bless them with more light. — Russell M. Nelson

A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations. — Emile Durkheim

To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws. — Ursula K. Le Guin

His Lady sad to see his sore constraint,
Cried out, "Now now Sir knight, shew what ye bee,
Add faith unto your force, and be not faint:
Strangle her, else she sure will strangle thee."
That when he heard, in great perplexitie,
His gall did grate for griefe and high distaine,
And knitting all his force got one hand free,
Wherewith he grypt her gorge with so great paine,
That soone to loose her wicked bands did her constraine. — Edmund Spenser

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design. — Richard Powers

Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

God was under no constraint, no obligation, no necessity to create. That He chose to do so was purely a sovereign act on His part, caused by nothing outside Himself, determined by nothing but His own mere good pleasure. — Arthur W. Pink

Thinking in art and morals and even mathematics is neither the reflection in consciousness of a mechanical order in the brain nor the tracing with the mind's eye of some empirical order in its object, but an endeavour to realize in thought an ideal order which would satisfy an inner demand. The nearer thought comes to its goal, the more it finds itself under constraint by that goal, and dominated in its creative effort by aesthetic or moral or logical relevance. These relations of relevance are not physical or psychological relations. They are normative relations that can enter into the mental current because that current is ... teleological. Their operation marks the presence of a different type of law, which supervenes upon physical and psychological laws when purpose takes control. — Brand Blanshard