Discontinuous Quotes & Sayings

Technological change is discontinuous. The monks in their scriptoria did not invent the printing press, horse breeders did not invent the motorcar, and the music industry did not invent the iPod or launch iTunes. — Jason Epstein

And the way
Though discontinuous, and intermittent, sometimes
Not heard of for years at a time, did,
Nonetheless, move up, although, to his surprise
It was inside the house,
And always getting narrower. — John Ashbery

If the 'Principle of Relativity' in an extreme sense establishes itself, it seems as if even Time would become discontinuous and be supplied in atoms, as money is doled out in pence or centimes instead of continuously;-in which case our customary existence will turn out to be no more really continuous than the events on a kinematograph screen;-while that great agent of continuity, the Ether of Space, will be relegated to the museum of historical curiosities. — Oliver Lodge

The Clinton's secret is that they live in a morally discontinuous universe-events do not have consequences, and what happened 15 minutes ago has no connection to what happens now. Beware of power when it masters the secret of popular amnesia. — Lance Morrow

In this era of global capital triumphant, to keep responsibility alive in the reading and teaching of the textual is at first sight impractical. It is, however, the right of the textual to be so responsible, responsive, answerable. The "planet" is, here, as perhaps always, a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right. Its alterity, determining experience, is mysterious and discontinuous - an experience of the impossible. It is such collectivities that must be opened up with the question "How many are we?" when cultural origin is detranscendentalized into fiction - the toughest task in the diaspora. — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

What I am suggesting is that faith in Jesus risen from the dead transcends but includes what we call history and what we call science. Faith of this sort is not blind belief that rejects all history and science. Nor is it simply - which would be much safer! - a belief that inhabits a totally different sphere, discontinuous from either, in a separate watertight compartment. Rather, this kind of faith, which is like all modes of knowledge defined by the nature of its object, is faith in the creator God, the God who has promised to put all things to rights at the end, the God who (as the sharp point where those two come together) has raised Jesus from the dead within history, leaving as I said evidence that demands an explanation from the scientist as well as anybody else. — N. T. Wright

Yet in another way, calculus is fundamentally naive, almost childish in its optimism. Experience teaches us that change can be sudden, discontinuous, and wrenching. Calculus draws its power by refusing to see that. It insists on a world without accidents, where one thing leads logically to another. Give me the initial conditions and the law of motion, and with calculus I can predict the future -- or better yet, reconstruct the past. I wish I could do that now.
— Steven H. Strogatz

The world is continuously discontinuous. It is continuous for intuition and thinking; discontinuous for reason and observation. The human senses break it down but the unconvinced mind unites it. — Thiruman Archunan

Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous ... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky. — Michael Frayn

Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities. — Brian Eno

In the age of revolution it is not knowledge that produces new wealth, but insight - insight into opportunities for discontinuous innovation. Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination. You must become your own seer. — Gary Hamel

Life for the unwell is discontinuous and unpredictable. Things just come out of nowhere. People try but mostly do a lousy job of taking care of you. — Mark Vonnegut

Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely. — Neil Gaiman

Laws of motion of any kind only become comprehensible to man when he can examine arbitrarily selected units of that motion. But at the same time it is this arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous units which give rise to a large proportion of human error. — Leo Tolstoy

Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his 'self' as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion. — A.S. Byatt

Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am. — Anne Carson

That there is a continuous link from humans to gorillas, with the intermediate species merely long dead, is beyond the understanding of speciesists. Tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly leaps to infinite, incomputable value ... Self-styled pro-lifers, and others that indulge in footling debates about exactly when in its development a foetus becomes human, exhibit the same discontinuous mentality. Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil. — Richard Dawkins

Because the enormous narcissism of their parents deprived Will and Tom of suitable role models, both brothers learned to identify with absence. Consequently, even if something beneficial fortuitously entered their lives they immediately treated it as temporary. By the time they were teenagers they were already accustomed to a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and the lack of any emotional stability. Unfortunately, "accustomed to" here is really synonymous with "damaged by. — Mark Z. Danielewski

[A]ll the categories of creatures act individually as special-case and may be linearly analyzed; retrospectively, it is discoverable that inadvertently they are all interaffecting one another synergetically as a spherical, interprecessionally regenerative, tensegrity spherical integrity. Geodesic spheres demonstrate the compressionally discontinuous
tensionally continuous integrity. Ecology is tensegrity geodesic spherical programming. — R. Buckminster Fuller

The mindset that is needed, the capabilities that are needed, the metrics that are needed, the whole culture that is needed for discontinuous innovation, are fundamentally different. — Vijay Govindarajan

In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day. — Salman Rushdie

Blood had long since ceased to beat from one end to the other, but one could sense, from passages marked with fresher traces of wheels and hooves, that once the meaning and even the very idea of a long journey was lost, sleep had not descended over it in one fell swoop: it had continued to steal a march here and there, in a discontinuous way, and over short distances, like a laborer who feels his cart jolt on a section of Roman road that crosses his field ... — Julien Gracq

Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action. — Michel Foucault

If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space. — Susan Sontag

There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing — William James

Our mind, by virtue of a certain finite, limited capability, is by no means capable of putting a question to Nature that permits a continuous series of answers. The observations, the individual results of measurements, are the answers of Nature to our discontinuous questioning. — Erwin Schrodinger

To talk about realizing the Self is discontinuous because there is nothing to realize but the Self. There is nothing but realization. — Frederick Lenz

Collaboration across teams tends to be discontinuous and discrete (e.g., via meetings). — Sriram Narayan

People with mental illness are very much like people without mental illness only more so. What we lose with a psychotic episode is the comforting assurance that we can't lose our mind. When most people look down they see solid ground. When I look down, I'm not so sure.
Crazy thoughts are not the problem. Everyone has crazy thoughts. Hallucinations and delusions tend to catch the attention but aren't the problem. The problem is that the world becomes discontinuous. We can't attend to the world and take care of ourselves. So others try to take care of us and they do an imperfect job of it. There is no substitute for being well. — Mark Vonnegut

Choicelessness is the alchemy of transformation, of inner mutation. A new being is born who has nothing to do with the past, who is absolutely discontinuous with the past. He has no desire. And when there is no desire, for the first time you live — Rajneesh

But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do you mean when you say ... ?" or "From what sources does your information come?" This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art. — Neil Postman

From a neuroscience perspective we are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self-- feelings, thoughts, memories-- are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story. — Paul Broks

Our lives with all their miracles and wonders are merely a discontinuous string of incidents - until we create the narrative that gives them meaning — Arlene Goldbard

We learn to understand ourselves in and through it because the artwork is not a timeless present for a pure aesthetic consciousness (i.e., it is not an encounter with an object for which one can only express feelings of pleasure or displeasure), but rather, a real encounter with a world that presents itself historically. The self-understanding that occurs in relation to the experience of art, Gadamer tells us, is only possible when our experiencing is not discontinuous with "the unity and integrity of the other."17 — James Risser

In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined. — David Bohm

We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that "just happen" every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them, since they are radically discontinuous with ordinary life. But wars and atrocities do not "just happen": societies and individuals slide into them, little by little, one tiny decision or omission at a time. (p214) — Rosa Brooks

The griding sword with discontinuous wound Pass'd through him, but th' Ethereal substance clos'd Not long divisible, and from the gash A stream of Nectarous humor issuing flow'd Sanguin, such as Celestial Spirits may bleed, And all his Armour staind ere while so bright. — John Milton

The discontinuous 'reduction of the wave packets' which cannot be derived from Schroedinger's equation is ... a consequence of the transition from the possible to the actual. — Werner Heisenberg

During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned - not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value. — Peter Drucker

Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

If we fail, the planet will grow sterile and your people will die in hunger, thirst and waves of plagues. Our people and the thrm's will die more slowly because the poisons here will render us unable to conceive. The skies will cease to be blue, the land will lose its verdure and the seas, well, the seas will be the first to go. Anything that does survive will be broken, mutant, discontinuous from us and mutually exclusive. It will be the new life of a shattered world, a world for chitinous, crawly things, not one for soft and tender emotion. I hope, child, I have answered your question.
Meg said nothing. None of it made sense, but she still felt an urge to deny it, deny it, even though Ekaterina's strange, rolling words carried a ring of truth. Suddenly, the autumn chill cut through all her layers of bundling wraps. She could not stop shivering. — Robert Stikmanz