Generative Quotes & Sayings

Parvati and Shiva are the divine embodiment of creativity (the feminine) and consciousness (the masculine). She is the generative energy of the universe; he is its formless wisdom. Whatever — Elizabeth Gilbert

essential differences between generative grammar and structural linguistics. — Noam Chomsky

We all write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing ("I was never the same again after my wife left me"), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise ("The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I'm so much happier with my new wife"). — Susan Cain

When I consider all the circumstances detailed above respecting the Pans, I cannot help believing that, under the mythos, a doctrine or history of a sect is concealed. Cunti, the wife of Pandu (du or God, Pan), wife of the generative power, mother of the Pandavas or devas, daughter of Sura or Syra the Sun Pandaea only daughter of Cristna or the Sun Pandion, who had by Medea a son called Medus, the king of the Medes, who had a cousin, the famous Perseus surely all this is very mythological an historical parable! — Godfrey Higgins

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Gaps don't/just happen./There is a/generative element/inside them,/a welling motion/
as when cold/waters shoulder/up through/warmer oceans./And where gaps/choose to widen,/coordinates warp,/even in places/constant since/the oldest maps. — Kay Ryan

At the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University, McAdams studies the stories that people tell about themselves. We all write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing ("I was never the same again after my wife left me"), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise ("The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I'm so much happier with my new wife"). Those who live the most fully realized lives - giving back to their families, societies, and ultimately themselves - tend to find meaning in their obstacles. In a sense, McAdams has breathed new life into one of the great insights of Western mythology: that where we stumble is where our treasure lies. — Susan Cain

A man knows, not only that he now is, but also that there was a time when he did not exist; consequently there must have been a cause. But we can only infer, from effects, causes exactly adequate to those effects. There certainly is a generative power which is effected by particular instruments; we cannot prove that it is inherent in these instruments, nor is the contrary hypothesis capable of demonstration. We admit that the generative power is incomprehensible, but to suppose that the same effects are produced by an eternal Omnipotent and Omniscient Being, leaves the cause in the same obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible. — Christopher Hitchens

A vote should be generative, not like business as usual, which is what voting feels like for most of us. — Eileen Myles

Out of the chaos and darkness of Nun rose Ammon-Ra, He-Who-Creates-Himself. I watched Ammon-Ra stroke his generative member, masturbating and spurting out his seminal seed in mighty waves that left the silver smear that we know as the Milky Way across the dark void. From this seed were generated Geb and Nut, the earth and the heaven. — Wilbur Smith

Most musicians I know don't just play music on Saturday night. They play music every day. They are always fiddling around, letting the notes lead them from one place to another. Taking still photographs is like that. It is a generative process. It pulls you along. — Henry Wessel Jr.

By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate. — Noam Chomsky

I believe that the artist's feelings are in some way generative. And I suspect that much of the artist's most productive emotion - not all of it but much of it - is felt in the course of playing around with form. — Carter Ratcliff

Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life — Peter M. Senge

I'm consciously shedding the assumption that a skeptical point of view is the most intellectually credible. Intellect does not function in opposition to mystery; tolerance is not more pragmatic than love; and cynicism is not more reasonable than hope. Unlike almost every worthwhile thing in life, cynicism is easy. It's never proven wrong by the corruption or the catastrophe. It's not generative. It judges things as they are, but does not lift a finger to try to shift them. I — Krista Tippett

Godfulness is simply recognizing the primacy of a presence of love, spaciousness, grace, generativity, caring, and creativity in the world and in myself. How can a mere financial crisis compare to that? The Generative Mystery cannot go bankrupt. It is not subject to scarcity. We never run out of God. — David Spangler

We therefore find that the triangles and rectangles herein described, enclose a large majority of the temples and cathedrals of the Greek and Gothic masters, for we have seen that the rectangle of the Egyptian triangle is a perfect generative medium, its ratio of five in width to eight in length 'encouraging impressions of contrast between horizontal and vertical lines' or spaces; and the same practically may be said of the Pythagorean triangle — Samuel Colman

There's a generative material relationship between the material and the image that comes up. — Walead Beshty

Good metaphors are "generative."13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." Many — Chip Heath

Every writer needs two selves - the generative self and the editor self. — Mary Karr

True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of all existing institutions she raises her glorious head, as the new foundress of the world. — Novalis

Under the microscope you clearly perceive that these insects have organs, orifices, excrement; they do, most emphatically, copulate. Escorted on the one side by the Bot or Warble, on the other by the Hessian Fly, Miss Ormond advanced statelily, if slowly, into the open. Never did her features show more sublime than when lit up by the candour of her avowal. This is excrement; these, though Ritzema Bos is positive to the contrary, are the generative organs of the male. I've proved it. — Virginia Woolf

Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components ... the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. The first of these is interpreted by the semantic component; the second, by the phonological component. — Noam Chomsky

Indeed, it is evident that the mere passage of time itself is destructive rather than generative [ ... ] because change is primarily a 'passing away.' So it is only incidentally that time is the cause of things coming into being and existing. — Aristotle.

We human beings constitute and reconstitute ourselves through cultural traditions, which we experience as our own development in a historical time that spans the generations. To investigate the life-world as horizon and ground of all experience therefore requires investigating none other than generativity - the processes of becoming, of making and remaking, that occur over the generations and within which any individual genesis is always already situated. ... Individual subjectivity is intersubjectively and culturally embodied, embedded, and emergent. — Evan Thompson

Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt. — Betty Friedan

Generative ideas emerge from joint thinking, from significant conversations, and from sustained, shared struggles to achieve new insights from partners in thought. — Vera John-Steiner

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning ... elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed. — Roland Barthes

Your compassion travels beyond your own inner circle. And then you breathe out an alternative version where you mentally and emotionally and psychologically purify the poisons. So indeed, the generative idea is in the crux of this practice and of my propensity toward poetry, which is a practice of the imagination. — Anne Waldman

In death, Alexander of Macedon's end differed no whit from his stable-boy's. Either both were received into the same generative principle of the universe, or both alike were dispersed into atoms. — Marcus Aurelius

Thought is valuable in proportion as it is generative. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death ... to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that. — Alan Watts

Stories are like wine; they need time. So take the time. This isn't a hot dog eating contest. You're not being judged on how much you write but rather, how well you do it. Sure, there's a balance - you have to be generative, have to be swimming forward lest you sink like a stone and find remora fish mating inside your rectum. But generation and creativity should not come at the cost of quality. Give your stories and your career the time and patience it needs. — Chuck Wendig

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish. — Brian Eno

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank. — Steven Johnson

If I waited to be in the mood to write, I'd barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don't know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it's the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it. — Dani Shapiro

When you ask people what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It becomes quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. — Peter Senge

Generative metaphors and proverbs both derive their power from a clever substitution: They substitute something easy to think about for something difficult. — Chip Heath

True love is generative. It is the only kind that makes more of itself as it goes along. — Timothy Keller

We are going to need organizations that are culturally equipped to adapt. They must have internal processes that are creative, generative, and productive rather than controlled, confining, and normative. In short, we must UNSHACKLE THE HUMAN BRAIN and exploit its productive potential. — Karl Albrecht

It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn't about progress, and wants to - as Walt Whitman put it - 'contain multitudes.' — Jerry Saltz

Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the first anatomists settled on generative primacy. What shows up first in the embryo must be most important and therefore most likely to hold the soul. The trouble with this particular avenue of learning, known as ensoulment, was that early first trimester human embryos were difficult to come by. Classical scholars of ensoulment, Aristotle among them, attempted to get around the problem by examining the larger, more easily obtained poultry embryo. To quote Vivian Nutton, author of The Anatomy of the Soul in Early Renaissance Medicine and the Human Embryo, analogies drawn from the inspection of hen's eggs foundered on the subject that man was not a chicken. — Mary Roach

To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the 'music,' but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind's hearing to your ears' natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning. — Peter Senge

The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority. — Felix Frankfurter

It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology. — Niels Kaj Jerne

I've never stood on a piece of ground as throbbingly, even pornographically, generative. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Introverts like being introverts. We are drawn to ideas, we are passionate observers, and for us, solitude is rich and generative. — Laurie Helgoe

Thrivability emerges from each of us holding the persistent intention to be generative: that is to say, to create more value than we consume. — Jean M. Russell

Morris Halle was already working on a generative phonology of Russian in the 1950s, and we also worked together on the generative phonology of English, at first jointly with Fred Lukoff. — Noam Chomsky

When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea. — Matthew Zapruder

In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation. — Rowan Williams

of all things, the greatest, and most important, and most all-embracing, is this society in which human beings and God are associated together. From this are derived the generative forces to which not only my father and grandfather owe their origin, but also all beings that are born and grow on the earth, and especially rational beings, [5] since they alone are fitted by nature to enter into communion with the divine, being bound to God through reason. — Epictetus

But true giving is not an economic exchange; it is a generative act. It does not subtract from what we have; it multiplies the effect we can have in the world. Many — Kent Nerburn

[T]he hidden linguistic universe of companianate couples ... rests entirely on one generative phrase: 'Would you please stop doing that. — Laura Kipnis

Whenever we can, we tend to use debt to fund deals, as Aspen is very cash generative, so it doesn't make sense to issue equity. Over time, we can eliminate debt. — Stephen Saad

The person with a fixed goal, a clear picture of his desire, or an ideal always before him, causes it, through repetition, to be buried deeply in his subconscious mind and is thus enabled, thanks to its generative and sustaining power, to realize his goal in a minimum of time and with a minimum of physical effort. Just pursue the thought unceasingly. Step by step you will achieve realization, for all your faculties and powers become directed to that end — Claude M. Bristol

The hardest thing in life may be to learn to truly trust that there is something noble and generative in ourselves. This is a greater sense of the notion of believing in our self; to truly believe in oneself means to uncover the inner core of imagination and authenticity that can also be called the genius within us. When we connect to the inner resident of the soul, we also learn how we are woven to the Soul of the World. — Michael Meade

Giving is a miracle that can transform the heaviest of hearts. Two people, who moments before lived in separate worlds of private concerns, suddenly meet each other over a simple act of sharing. The world expands, a moment of goodness is created, and something new comes into being where before there was nothing ... But true giving is not an economic exchange; it is a generative act. It does not subtract from what we have; it multiples the effect we can have in the world. — Kent Nerburn

The generative function is strictly nothing but an animal one, and can never be anything else. True spirituality demands its utter extirpation; and while its proper exercise for the continuation of the human race, in the semi-animal stage of its evolution, may not be considered sinful, its misuse, in any way, is fraught with the most terrible consequences physically, psychically and spiritually; and the forces connected with it are used for abnormal purposes only in the foulest practices of sorcery, the inevitable result of which is moral death - the annihilation of the individuality. — James Morgan Pryse

When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It becomes quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit. — Peter M. Senge

Whereas militant Christianity triumphs over all, generative Christianity transforms the world through humble service to all. It is not about victory; it is about following Christ in order to seed human community with grace. — Diana Butler Bass

Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration. — Thom Mayne

Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon provided we observe nature as a child does, without prejudices and preconceptions, but with that clear and candid vision which adults lose and scientists must strive to regain. — Peter Medawar

Generative testing is an approach to testing software that was made popular by the QuickCheck library. Originally written in Haskell and since ported to several other programming languages (Ruby, Python, C, C++, Objective-C, Smalltalk, Java, JavaScript, Erlang, Scala, Clojure...), the QuickCheck library allows the developer to separate test logic from the generation of test cases. This means that, as developers, we can spend less time instructing the compiler how to test our code, and focus instead on what properties we expect our code to have. — Anonymous