Invariant Quotes & Sayings

I crave you
Like hunger
Like thirst
Like madness
And, nothing
Will sate or slake
Or, make me sane
But you. — Kirk Diedrich

[The] first postulate of the Principle of Uniformity, namely, that the laws of nature are invariant with time, is not peculiar to that principle or to geology, but is a common denominator of all science. In fact, instead of being an assumption or an ad hoc hypothesis, it is simply a succinct summation of the totality of all experimental and observational evidence. — M. King Hubbert

In some central and important cases, ... the existence of specific power relations in the society will produce an appearance of a particular kind. Certain features of the society that are merely local and contingent, and maintained in existence only by the continual exercise of power, will come to seem as if they were universal, necessary, invariant, or natural features of all forms of human social life, or as if they arose spontaneously and uncoercedly by free human action. — Raymond Geuss

the problem is then to develop a theory of invariance with respect to arbitrary linear transformations, in which, however, in contra-distinction to the case of affine geometry, we have a definite invariant quadratic form, viz. the metrical groundform once and for all as an absolute datum. — Hermann Weyl

Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding, — Bernard Lonergan

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry,
Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love! — Arthur Rimbaud

When we see something, we do not think of what we see as a separable aspect of it, a ghostly skin shed for our vision. We feel that we see the thing itself, rather than any occasion or extrusion of the thing. But when we hear something, we do not have the same sensation of hearing the thing itself. This is because objects do not have a single, invariant sound, or voice. How something sounds is literally contingent, depending upon what touches or comes into contact with it to generate the sound. We hear, as it were, the event of the thing, not the thing itself — Steven Connor

We have a word, censorship, which describes the suppression or alteration of the artist's work by governmental edict intended to prohibit the expression of certain ideas. We have no word for what happened to the writer who refused to splice gratuitous sex scenes into her work. We have no word for the mandatory inclusion of the predictable, invariant Sweaty Sex Scene in nearly every contemporary film intended for adults, nor for the daily, unavoidable overload of sexual images used to sell other kinds of products. It is a sort of reverse censorship, imposed by market analysts who don't believe anything will sell unless coated by sex. Liberation it is not. — D.A. Clarke

[H]istorical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws of nature do not represent its usual working methods. The sciences of history use a different mode of explanation, rooted in the comparative and observational richness in our data. We cannot see a past event directly, but science is usually based on inference, not unvarnished observation (you don't see electrons, gravity, or black holes either). — Stephen Jay Gould

We are astonished at thought, but sensation is equally wonderful. — Voltaire

I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world.
There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt. — Oliver Sacks

[Critical social science attempts] to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed. — Jurgen Habermas

Authenticity seems like sort of a joke. Actually I believe it was the late comedian George Burns who said, "if you can fake sincerity, you've got it made." People cannot be invariant across situations and roles and, moreover, leaders need to be true not to themselves, but to what others want, need, and expect from them. — Jeffrey Pfeffer

The physics of earthquake behavior is mostly independent of scale. A large earthquake is just a scaled-up version of a small earthquake. That distinguishes earthquakes from animals, for example-a ten inch animal must be structured quite differently from a one-inch animal, and a hundred-inch animal needs a different architecture still, if its bones are not to snap under the increased mass. Clouds, on the other hand, are scaling phenomena like earthquakes. Their characteristic irregularity-describable in terms of fractal dimension-changes not at all as they are observed on different scales. That is why air travelers lose all perspective on how far away a cloud is. Without help from cues such as haziness, a cloud twenty feet away can be indistinguishable from two thousand feet away. Indeed, analysis of satellite pictures has shown an invariant fractal dimension in clouds observed from hundreds of miles away. — James Gleick

Hope is the most important four-letter word in the language. — Ed Markey

Spinoza had argued that God, synonymous with nature, was immutable and eternal, leaving no room for chance. Agreeing with Spinoza, Einstein sought the invariant rules governing nature's mechanisms. He was absolutely determined to prove that the world was absolutely determined. — Paul Halpern

The problems of financing the universities and their intellectual freedom, threatened by political and bureaucratic interference, are problems which are invariant under the ism transformations: socialism, communism, capitalism, or any other ism or ology. — Serge Lang

Any man short of a stormy night will suck the life right out of you. Don't let anyone take your passion away. Lock it up tight and find your stormy night. True love comes only once, and only a love of that magnitude can survive the combined power of a winter storm and a stormy night. She'd — Melissa Foster

Time lost to pointless delay can never be regained. It is the most reprehensible kind of theft. Why was it that men did not grasp this simple fact? Money comes and goes and comes again, and knowledge can be acquired and forgotten and rediscovered, but time once lost is lost for good, each passing second irretrievable. — John Pipkin

Poetic language features an iconic rather than a predominantly conventional relationship of form and content in which all language (and cultural) elements, variant as well as invariant, may be involved in the expression of the content.", "Analysis of the Poetic Text. — Yuri Lotman

In reality, time doesn't pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren't separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn't a location, you can't travel to it. — Michael Crichton

This is not mathematics, it is theology.
(On being exposed to Hilbert's work in invariant theory.) — Paul Gordan