Discursive Quotes & Sayings

Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or televisual values rule the culture. Television is successfully using a lot of those same techniques but using them for a very different agenda, which is to sort of create an ethos and please people and to sell products to consumers. — David Foster Wallace

Moreover, since (as chapters 3 and 5 will argue) tolerance requires that the tolerated refrain from demands or incursions on public or political life that issue from their "difference," the subject of tolerance is tolerated only so long as it does not make a political claim, that is, so long as it lives and practices its "difference" in a depoliticized or private fashion. In addition to being at odds with the epistemological and political stance to which many politicized identities aspire, this requirement also results in the discursive suppression of the social powers that constitute "difference" as well as in the strengthening of the hegemony of unmarked cultures, ethnicities, races, or sexualities; — Wendy Brown

You're a mountain
searching for it's echo! Whenever you hurt, you say, Lord God! The answer lives in that
which bends you low and makes you cry out. Pain and the threat of death, for instance, do this.
They make you clear. When they're gone, you lose purpose. You wonder what to do, where
to go. This is because you're uneven in your opening: sometimes closed and unreachable,
sometimes, with your shirt torn with longing. Your discursive intellect dominates for a
time; then the universal, beyond-time intelligence comes. Sell your questioning talents, my
son; buy bewildering surrender. Live simply and helpfully in that. Don't worry about
the University of Bukhara with its prestigious curriculum. — Rumi

Under these circumstances, if they meet with no one who understands the matter, these persons fall away, and abandon the right road; or become weak, or at least put hindrances in the way of their further advancement, because of the great efforts they make to proceed in their former way of meditation, fatiguing their natural powers beyond measure. They think that their state is the result of negligence or of sin. All their own efforts are now in vain, because God is leading them by another and a very different road, that of contemplation. Their first road was that of discursive reflection, but the second knows no imagination or reasoning. 4. It behooves those — San Juan De La Cruz

Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed. — John Fiske

Lao-tzu advised, "As soon as you have a thought, laugh at it," because reality is not what we think. We perceive the world through a window colored by beliefs, interpretations, and associations. We see things not as they are but as we are. The same brain that enables us to contemplate philosophy, solve math equations, and create poetry also generates a stream of static known as discursive thoughts, which seem to arise at random, bubbling up into our awareness. Such mental noise is a natural phenomenon, no more of a problem than the dreams that appear in the sleep state. Therefore, our schooling aims not to struggle with random thoughts but to transcend them in the present moment, where no thoughts exist, only awareness. Our mind's liberation awaits not in some imagined future but here and now. — Dan Millman

Without discursive thought it is just dharma practice. Hope together with aim obscures. One does not cut through pride by meditatively cultivating the desire for happiness. If there is hope, even the hope for buddhas, it is a negative force. If there is apprehension, even apprehension about hells, it is a negative force. — Machik Labdron

Buddhist philosophy is an interpretation of ordinary human experience, but an interpretation which is not revealed by God nor discovered in the access of inspiration nor seen in a mystical light. Basically, Buddhist metaphysics is a very simple and natural elaboration of the implications of Buddha's own experience of enlightenment. Buddhism does not seek primarily to understand or to "believe in" the enlightenment of Buddha as the solution to all human problems, but seeks an existential and empirical participation in that enlightenment experience. It is conceivable that one might have the "enlightenment" without being aware of any discursive philosophical implications at all. — Thomas Merton

[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice. — Michel Foucault

Loosen the bonds of discursive thought. Extend the circle of caring. Cease armoring against suffering. Wish for others the same happiness you wish for yourself. Be a tender-minded steward of creation. — Marc Ian Barasch

A discursive student is almost certain to fall into bad company. Ten minutes with a French novel or a German rationalist have sent a reader away with a fever for life. — Robert Aris Willmott

In the first part, the master-faculties are Observation and Memory, so in the second, the master-faculty is the Discursive Reason. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. — Alan Bennett

If there is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification. — Judith Butler

[I]n every theology or system, every tradition or discursive practice, a story is being told whose peculiar force should be allowed priority over the abstract categories by which the critic might seek to reduce all narrative to the same bare framework of elementary functions. — David Bentley Hart

The Mysterious Pass, which opens beyond space and time, is inconceivable by means of discursive thought and has, by definition, no fixed position. — Monica Esposito

The Biblical worldview is not given to us in the discursive and analytical language of philosophy and science, but in rich and compact language of symbolism and art. — James Jordan

Meditation here is not reflection or any other kind of discursive thinking. It is pure concentration: training the mind to dwell on an interior focus without wandering, until it becomes absorbed in the object of its contemplation. But absorption does not mean unconsciousness. The outside world may be forgotten, but meditation is a state of intense inner wakefulness. — Anonymous

If pressed to supplement Tweedledee's ostensive definition of logic with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic is the systematic study of the logical truths. Pressed further, I would say that a sentence is logically true if all sentences with its grammatical structure are true. Pressed further still, I would say to read this book. — Willard Van Orman Quine

As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency. — Slavoj Zizek

It might have been supposed that Freddy, whose intellect was not of the first order, would have found it impossible to grasp the gist of an extremely tangled and discursive story, but once more the possession of three volatile and excitable sisters stood him in good stead. — Georgette Heyer

discursive regimes of the late eighteenth century drew the figure of man into the sand, and even if he manages to survive the etching, typing, and storing of the late nineteenth-century analog media, he is certain to disappear with the compression of that sand into silicon. — Geoffrey Winthrop-Young

Death is a cessation of the impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the strings that move the appetites, and of the discursive movements of the thoughts, and of the service to the flesh. — Marcus Aurelius

A form of consciousness beyond the veils of discursive thought, a space forever present for those who seek it, not in some far-off wilderness, but in our inner most hearts. When that realization dawns in the depths of one's being, the world effortlessly transforms into that which was sought. — Ian Baker

Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner. — Seneca.

The cause of the six-sided shape of a snowflake is none other than that of the ordered shapes of plants and of numerical constants; and since in them nothing occurs without supreme reason-not, to be sure, such as discursive reasoning discovers, but such as existed from the first in the Creators's design and is preserved from that origin to this day in the wonderful nature of animal faculties, I do not believe that even in a snowflake this ordered pattern exists at random. — Johannes Kepler

The analysis of laughter had opened to me points of contact between the fundamentals of a communal and disciplined emotional knowledge and those of discursive knowledge. — Georges Bataille

For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms - as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music, as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in nature, of Wordsworth's 'something far more deeply interfused'; as systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an 'obscure knowledge'. But now I knew contemplation at its height. — Aldous Huxley

Long, discursive, dry, and inane are the prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart, they fall like a killing frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing prayers they are. Every vestige of devotion has perished under their breath. The deader they are the longer they grow. — E. M. Bounds

Beauty always represents an inward and inexhaustible equilibrium of forces; and this overwhelms our soul, since it can neither be calculated nor mechanically produced. A sense of beauty can therefore permit us the direct experience of relationships before we can perceive them, in a differentiated manner, with our discursive reason; in this, incidentally, there is a defence for our own physical and psychic well-being, something that we cannot neglect with impunity. — Titus Burckhardt

When I write now I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts. — Juan Goytisolo

As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is
also the discursive/cultural means by which "sexed nature" or "a natural
sex" is produced and established as "prediscursive," prior to culture,
a politically neutral surface on which culture acts — Judith Butler

Exploring microhistories, cultural history can "track the changing interplay among schools of thought and language patronage and power of financing and control, teaching traditions and elites," that is, make us aware of the discursive workings of power. — Martin Prochazka

Most philosophers do not want intellectual matters to reduce to a question of morality (obedience or rebellion to God's Word). They want to hold the intellect or reason to be above matters of moral volition. They hold that truth is obtainable and testable no matter what ethical condition the thinker is in.
Hence, they maintain that all disputes must be rationally resolvable, and a rational case for a philosophic position relies on a valid chain of discursive argumentation that takes us back to incontestable first principles or facts. — Greg L. Bahnsen

I do not deny certain kinds of biological differences. But I always ask under what conditions, under what discursive and institutional conditions, do certain biological differences - and they're not necessary ones, given the anomalous state of bodies in the world - become the salient characteristics of sex. — Judith Butler

I'm a discursive thinker, so quotation has played an active role in the structure and content of my books from the beginning. — Masha Tupitsyn

We have developed a more logical and discursive mode of thought. Instead of looking at a physical phenomena imaginatively, we strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thing itself. — Karen Armstrong

If, as Marshall McLuhan once taught us, the medium is the message, then Derfner's medium-this lovely, discursive amalgamation of wit and smarts-is indeed his message about how to stay happy, sane, and honest in whatever situation one finds oneself in. — Philip Gambone

We are caught in a traffic jam of discursive thought. — Chogyam Trungpa

The music of the supreme architect, Bach, is filled with pages of discursive argument and rumination, glorifying the nameless whole by a rich embroidery of passages which lead everywhere and nowhere. The ideas are presented, stood on their head, dissolved into fragments, until the ultimate message becomes the connections of all things great and small, a chain of being which cannot be secured until the last note is in place. — Russell Sherman

When a philosopher, scientist, or psychologist discusses the discrepancy between the actual and the ideal, he or she attempts to convince us with the tools of discursive thought ... An artist does it differently ... their primary approach is different, even though both groups, if you will, are investigating the actual, the ideal, and the discrepancy in between. — Stephen Dobyns

I don't want people to think about one common thing. Coda is non-discursive, just like choreography for the stage. So each audience member's thoughts about it, or better yet, their feelings, will be different. Moreover, images contain so much information that one can see things that the next person won't notice. As a result, people will surely think about Coda in dissimilar ways. — Martine Epoque

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up. — Alan Bennett

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive. — Donna Tartt

The formation of a diaspora could be articulated as the quintessential journey into becoming; a process marked by incessant regoupings, recreations, and reiteration. Together these stressed actions strive to open up new spaces of discursive and performative postcolonial consciousness. — Okwui Enwezor

Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds, come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil. — Natalie Goldberg

It isn't so terrible to think logically and to be analytical; if we are designing a bridge or balancing a checkbook, that's the best way to think and the best way to be. But when we look carefully, we see that discursive, linear thinking is only useful for certain kinds of tasks; for others it is quite useless. Like the hammer or the toothbrush, discursive thought is a tool intended for certain kinds of jobs: If you use a hammer to brush your teeth, or a toothbrush to drive nails, you are not likely to meet with great success. — John Daishin Buksbazen

Fantasy is a product of thought, Imagination of sensibility. If the thinking, discursive mind turns to speculation, the result isFantasy; if, however, the sensitive, intuitive mind turns to speculation, the result is Imagination. Fantasy may be visionary, but it is cold and logical. Imagination is sensuous and instinctive. Both have form, but the form of Fantasy is analogous to Exposition, that of Imagination to Narrative. — Herbert Read

The agentive mind is not only active in nature, but it seeks out dialogue and discourse with other active minds. And it is through this dialogic, discursive process that we come to know the Other and his points of view, his stories. We learn an enormous amount not only about the world but about ourselves by discourse with Others. — Jerome Bruner

The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being. This Absolute is the God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mystical phraseology. The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground - the knowledge that can come only to those who are prepared to "Die to self" and so make room, as it were, for God. — Aldous Huxley

Ambiguity is really important to me. Part of the difficulty facing photographers is that almost any subject matter has accumulated a representational history, so to find a new discursive space, a space to wander around those subject matters, is a real challenge. — Larry Sultan

Poetry is language that speaks to our hearts. And I'm using the biblical word heart. I think the closest equivalent to that in 21st-century language is our imaginations. The heart, in biblical physiology, is the center of our emotions, but also of our intellect. Those two things cannot be separated. And poetic language is precise. It is detailed, it's realistic, but it is not the discursive language of mere fact. — Krista Tippett

Our understanding is a faculty of concepts, i.e., a discursive understanding, for which it must of course be contingent what and how different might be the particular that can be given to it in nature and brought under its concepts. — Immanuel Kant

Actually, when I look at my old notebooks, I think I have been a bit self-indulgent and have given myself too much time to meander in my discursive thoughts. I could have cut through sooner. Yet it is good to know about our terrible selves, not laud or criticize them, just acknowledge them. Then, out of this knowledge, we are better equipped to make a choice for beauty, kind consideration and clear truth. We make this choice with our feet firmly on the ground. We are not running wildly after beauty with fear at our backs. — Natalie Goldberg

The assignment of meanings [in music] is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling. — Susanne K. Langer

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience. — A.R. Ammons

All the things you need in the death transition, you need now in the life transition, because life is a transition, it is a between state. Therefore, every night when you fall asleep, it's like you die. And every time you do, you should be using the process of falling asleep as giving up your attention to sense objects, your discursive ruminating thoughts and so on. You should use that as a process of giving up and giving yourself completely to the universe and becoming completely obliterated. — Robert Thurman

The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra. — Annie Dillard

The epitome of the human realm is to be stuck in a huge traffic jam of discursive thought. — Chogyam Trungpa

Inner experience ... is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral ... It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate. — Georges Bataille

In re-reading 'Presumed Innocent,' the one thing that struck me - and I re-read the book four different times in writing 'Innocent,' interested in different things each time - but I did think there were a couple of extra loops in the plot that I probably didn't need. The other thing that sort of amazed me was how discursive the book was. — Scott Turow