Quotes & Sayings About Gestalt

I am interested in what I term gestalts; picture circumstances which bring together disparate images or ideas so as to form new meanings and new configurations. — Robert Heinecken

Think of the transformation as a process of buildup followed by breakthrough, broken into three broad stages: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. Within each of these three stages, there are two key concepts, shown in the framework and described below. Wrapping around this entire framework is a concept we came to call the flywheel, which captures the gestalt of the entire process of going from good to great. — James C. Collins

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year. — May Sarton

It's only when we dare to experience the full anxiety of knowing that life doesn't go on forever that we can experience transcendence and get in touch with the infinite. To use an analogy from gestalt psychology, Non-Being is the necessary ground for the figure of Being to make itself known to us. It's only when we're willing to let go of all of our illusions and admit that we are lost and helpless and terrified that we will be free of ourselves and our false securities and ready for what Kierkegaard calls "the leap of faith."
p. 43 — Thomas Cathcart

It was the merit of Gestalt psychology to make us aware of the remarkable performance involved in perceiving shapes. Take, for example, a ball or an egg: we can see their shapes at a glance. Yet suppose that instead of the impression made on our eye by an aggregate of white points forming the surface of an egg, we were presented with another, logically equivalent, presentation of these points as given by a list of their spatial co-ordinate values. It would take years of labour to discover the shape inherent in this aggregate of figures - provided it could be guessed at all. The perception of the egg from the list of co-ordinate values would, in fact, be a feat rather similar in nature and measure of intellectual achievement to the discovery of the Copernican system. — Michael Polanyi

I went to a Gestalt therapist and said that I want to be able to at least tell my muscles that aren't involved that they don't have to go into spasms too. — Dick York

You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped. — Frederick Salomon Perls

Your freedom is a supreme value. Nothing is higher than that. But your freedom is possible only if you are not encaged in your habits, unconscious patterns of living. Change your gestalt from unconsciousness to consciousness. — Rajneesh

Many minutes pass. I learn much from him, and he from me. It's exhilarating, to be suddenly awash in ideas whose implications would take me days to consider fully. But we're also gathering strategic information: I infer the extent of his unspoken knowledge, compare it with my own, and simulate his corresponding inferences. For there is always the awareness that this must come to an end; the formulation of our exchanges renders ideological differences luminously clear. Reynolds hasn't witnessed the beauty that I have; he's stood before lovely insights, oblivious to them. The sole gestalt that inspires him is the one I ignored: that of the planetary society, of the biosphere. I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity. Each feels that the other has ignored great opportunities. He — Ted Chiang

Gestalt means whole, and so are you. — Jan Deelstra

Surprisingly, Gestalt psychologists have found that when subjected to Ganz fields for long periods of time, we hallucinate. Can empty fields serve as mirrors, not for our exteriors, but for our interiors? — John Paul Caponigro

I am troubled by the devaluing of the word 'design'. I find myself now being somewhat embarrassed to be called a designer. In fact I prefer the German term, Gestalt-Ingenieur. Apple and Vitsoe are relatively lone voices treating the discipline of design seriously in all corners of their businesses. They understand that design is not simply an adjective to place in front of a product's name to somehow artificially enhance its value. Ever fewer people appear to understand that design is a serious profession; and for our future welfare we need more companies to take that profession seriously. — Dieter Rams

The basic thesis of gestalt theory might be formulated thus: there are contexts in which what is happening in the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the separate pieces, but conversely; what happens to a part of the whole is, in clearcut cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole. — Max Wertheimer

They suggested E-meters, Gestalt, eating only high-mineral foods that had been planted during a full moon. — Emma Cline

Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading. — Richard Serra

My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech. It wouldn't be transcribed in the form of words arranged linearly, but as a giant ideogram, to be absorbed as a whole. — Ted Chiang

The Getsmart Prayer

I do my laundry and you do yours,
I am not in this life to listen to your ceaseless yammering,
And you are not in this world for any discernable reason at all.
You are you, and I am I, and I got the better deal.
And if by chance we find each other, it will be unspeakably tedious.
Fuck off. — Jon Carroll

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine. — Frederick Salomon Perls

I don't think that we are capable of anything like this many possible colour responses. Instead I argue that the perception of colour differences between two surfaces viewed side-by-side is a gestalt phenomenon. — David Papineau

The word "holistic" is meant to distinguish their method from the purely numerical process at less-selective state universities or community colleges, where a committee will automatically admit any applicant with scores or grades above an explicit threshold. It's a cagey word, "holistic," borrowed from New Age yogis, Gestalt therapists, makers of herbal toothpaste, and other mystifiers whose prestige depends on your not being able to figure out exactly what they're doing. A more practical and accurate term for holistic admissions is "completely subjective." Kat — Andrew Ferguson

No matter what I study, I can see patterns. I see the gestalt, the melody within the notes, in everything: mathematics and science, art and music, psychology and sociology. As I read the texts, I can think only that the authors are plodding along from one point to the next, groping for connections that they can't see. They're like a crowd of people unable to read music, peering at the score for a Bach sonata, trying to explain how one note leads to another. As glorious as these patterns are, they also whet my appetite for more. There are other patterns waiting to be discovered, gestalts of another scale entirely. With respect to those, I'm blind myself; all my sonatas are just isolated data points by comparison. I have no idea what form such gestalts might assume, but that'll come in time. I want to find them, and comprehend them. I want this more than anything I've ever wanted before. The — Ted Chiang

Whenever you are in anger, remember yourself. In that very remembering the focus changes, the gestalt changes. You become more and more centred. Anger remains there just on the periphery of your being, but you know now that it is separate from you. You are not angry, you are only a witness to it. Now it is up to you to choose to be angry or not to be angry. You are no more identified; hence the freedom to choose. — Rajneesh

In his person, life, death and resurrection, Jesus Christ is the 'form of God'. As presented in the New Testament writings, the words, actions and sufferings of Jesus form an aesthetic unity, held together by the 'style' of unconditional love. Love is always beautiful, because it expresses the self-diffusiveness of being, and so is touched by being's radiance, the pulchrum. But the unconditional, gracious, sacrificial love of Jesus Christ expresses not just the mystery of being - finite being - but the mystery of the Source of being, the transcendent communion of love which we call the Trinity.25 Thus through the Gestalt Christi, the love which God is shines through to the world. This is Balthasar's basic intuition. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Just take one thing out and the whole palace, the whole edifice of the human mind collapses. Take effort out of it and desiring disappears, imagination disappears, past and future disappear, or take desire out and effort disappears and time disappears and ego disappears. Just take one thing out of the gestalt and the whole gestalt simply disappears; it cannot exist without certain things. Those are the very essentials of it - effort is one of the essentials. Hence all the great Masters of the world have taught about grace. — Rajneesh

I've always balked at anything that feels like a clique, even if it's not always in my best interest to do so. I like each individual, fedora-wearing hipster - it's just the greater gestalt that rubs me the wrong way. — Michael Showalter

I've decided to skip 'holistic'. I don't know what it means, and I don't want to know. That may seem extreme, but I followed the same strategy toward 'Gestalt' and the 'Twist', and lived to tell the tale. — Calvin Trillin

Feminism is an entire world view or gestalt, not just a laundry list of women's issues. — Charlotte Bunch

A tailwind, on the other hand, is one of the most beautiful experiences you can have on a bike. There's no wind in my ears, so I hear everything around me. The chain purrs sweetly as it pulls the gears under the coaxing of my legs. The soft hiss of my tires on the smooth hard pavement, the sound of little critters scurrying in the desert around me as I pass. Smells aren't as big a deal out here in the dry desert, but even the smells are more accessible in a tailwind, since I'm moving through air at a slower relative speed, and the smells linger around my face long enough to register and enjoy them.
Relative progress, speed, sights, smells, sounds. It all goes together to create a gestalt for the ride that's pure sweetness, and I never want it to end.
Hozho. — Neil M. Hanson

My parents are famously not part of the gestalt of the fashion industry. — David Lauren

It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. — William Gibson

Part of my gestalt is that I still feel a little bit like a wallflower. Even in my own life. I talk about myself behind my back. — Carrie Fisher

The perception of edges (seeing where one thing ends and another starts) The perception of spaces (seeing what lies beside and beyond) The perception of relationships (seeing in perspective and in proportion) The perception of lights and shadows (seeing things in degrees of values) The perception of the gestalt (seeing the whole and its parts) — Betty Edwards

Gestalt Prayer
I do my thing and you do yours.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
And if by chance we find each other, then it is beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped. — Frederick Salomon Perls

There are wholes, the behavior of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. It is the hope of Gestalt theory to determine the nature of such wholes. — Max Wertheimer

In the Gestalt theory of perception this is known as the figure/ground
relationship. This theory asserts, in brief, that no figure is ever perceived
except in relation to a background. — Alan W. Watts

During its sixteen years in the field, it achieved a series of seemingly impossible tasks, culminating with the destruction of a 488-year-old vampire who had been secretly controlling the wheat industry for 252 of those years. Keep in mind that in an episode that occurred in 1980, it took forty-five soldiers to kill a sixty-four-year-old vampire. Gestalt is tough. — Daniel O'Malley

There are still psychologists who, in a basic misunderstanding, think that gestalt theory tends to underestimate the role of past experience. Gestalt theory tries to differentiate between and-summative aggregates, on the one hand, and gestalten, structures, on the other, both in sub-wholes and in the total field, and to develop appropriate scientific tools for investigating the latter. — Max Wertheimer

[Monty] talks about Fritz Perls and the Gestalt theory. The here and now is the only time that exists. And being yourself. Not accepting yourself, not taking yourself for granted. Being yourself. Your self. Monty defines 'normality' as a contententment with who you are. — Antony Sher

Graphic design, which evokes the symmetria of Vituvius, the dynamic symmetry of Hambidge, the asymmetry of Mondrian; which is a good gestalt, generated by intuition or by computer, by invention or by a system of coordinates, is not good design if it does not communicate. — Paul Rand

Once you saw the face of a god in those jumbled blacks and whites, it was everybody out of the pool - you could never unsee it. Others might laugh and say it's nothing, just a lot of splotches with no meaning, give me a good old Craftmaster paint-by-the-numbers any day but you would always see the face of Christ-Our-Lord looking out at you. You had seen it in one gestalt leap, the conscious and unconscious melding in that one shocking moment of understanding. You would always see it. You were damned to always see it. — Stephen King

Between one breath and the next, the vision took him. It came not as a chain of reason, more words words words, but as a blinding image, all complete in its first moment, inherent, holistic, gestalt, inspired. Every hour of his life from now on would be but the linear exploration of its fullness. — Lois McMaster Bujold

The essay form has superceded the novel as the vehicle that best suggests the prevailing apocalyptic gestalt, and as the talisman that is most able to repel the onset of paralysing dread. — Adam Parfrey

Spirit is love, spirit is connection, inclusive, and that's what I'm interested in, and that's what moved me. That's what I got more and more into as I grew up and as I was in college in the 60's with consciousness raising and other kind of things, gestalt psychology etc. — Surya Das

The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled. — Mary Midgley

The transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all. — Thomas Kuhn

Another basic feature of a Gestalt model of intervention is the special definition of resistance and the way of dealing with it. The Gestalt-oriented consultant assumes as a working hypothesis that there is a great deal of ambivalence regarding change in any system. — Edwin C. Nevis