Non Canonical Quotes & Sayings

Most people imagine the canonical dripping faucet as relentlessly periodic, but it is not necessarily so, as a moment of experimentation reveals. "It's a simple example of a system that goes from predictable behavior to unpredictable behavior, "Shaw said. "If you turn it up a little bit, you can see a regime where the pitter-patter is irregular. As it turns out, it's not a predictable pattern beyond a short time. So even something as simple as a faucet can generate a pattern that is eternally creative. — James Gleick

For the Greeks, there was no single canonical version of creation, but a number of overlapping stories. — Neil MacGregor

Proponents of canonical hermeneutics are either unintentionally or willfully naive here-in most cases the naivete is willful. Canonical readings simply act as if the evolution of the text is irrelevant to its meaning; usually this is because it is deemed to be more expedient for the purpose of exhorting a faith community if such considerations are put aside. — Thom Stark

The Google Voice service is a lifesaver for me. My actual phone number changes a lot, so having a canonical Google Voice number that doesn't change - it's actually my same number from high school - is indispensable. — Matt Mullenweg

You will stay up all night reading this brilliant and devastating novel the way you might have with a new best friend in junior high-one whose revelations thrilled and terrified you, and whose raw, hard-earned wisdom remade the way you saw the world. It evokes the genius of Angela Pneumans canonical progenitors: Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy. Lay It on My Heart is a gorgeous, riveting, and unforgettable book. — Julie Orringer

Dashes and disappointments are not canonical Scripture. — Samuel Rutherford

Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet. — Harold Bloom

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. — Giorgio Agamben

Paradoxically, our imperial global Anglo-American language is dull with the glitter of its own decay. In response, the new meta- physical poet might consider the following cleansing strategies: keep faith with the canonical writers of the past, study Homeric Greek, excavate etymologies, embrace threatened languages, practice the fine art of translation, listen regularly to the musical flow of the breath and the beat of the heart, switch off the television, become a votary of silence.
Here lies the beginning of freedom. — Peter Abbs

There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees a complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost canonical status in Protestant theology. But now we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical. — Karl Barth

Thus Jung's interest, in contrast with Dasgupta's, were with yoga not as "philosophy and religion" but as psychology. Hence his definition of yoga was a psychological one: "Yoga was originally a natural process of introversion. . . . Such introversions lead to characteristic inner processes of personality changes. In the course of several thousand years these introversions became gradually organized as methods, and along widely differing ways."44 Jung's concern was not primarily with the canonical and organized methods and teachings of yoga but with the putative natural processes of introversion that originally underlay them. — C. G. Jung

It was exactly the sort of person, like Joan of Arc, who did know why women wore skirts, who was most justified in not wearing one; it was exactly the sort of person, like St. Francis, who did sympathise with the feast and the fireside, who was most entitled to become a beggar on the open road. And when, in the general emancipation of modern society, the Duchess says she does not see why she shouldn't play leapfrog, or the Dean declares that he sees no valid canonical reason why he should not stand on his head, we may say to these persons with patient benevolence: "Defer, therefore, the operation you contemplate until you have realised by ripe reflection what principle or prejudice you are violating. Then play leapfrog and stand on your head and the Lord be with you." Among — G.K. Chesterton

Azazel is also listed as one of the Watchers, angelic creatures from the Book of Enoch, a text no longer canonical under any large Christian faith. These Watchers were not expelled from Paradise, but were punished by god for having children with humans, and teaching them science, technology, and other crafts. Azazel in particular taught humans how to make weapons, as well as ornaments and cosmetics. Other Watchers taught them how to write and make paper, how to read signs and predict the weather, and how to study the heavens with astrology. — Anonymous

The characteristics of this kind of reading are perhaps summed up in the word "orthodox," which is almost always applicable. The word comes from two Greek roots, meaning "right opinion." These are books for which there is one and only one right reading; any other reading or interpretation is fraught with peril, from the loss of an "A" to the damnation of one's soul. This characteristic carries with it an obligation. The faithful reader of a canonical book is obliged to make sense out of it and to find it true in one or another sense of "true." If he cannot do this by himself, he is obliged to go to someone who can. This may be a priest or a rabbi, or it may be his superior in the party hierarchy, or it may be his professor. In any case, he is obliged to accept the resolution of his problem that is offered him. He reads essentially without freedom; but in return for this he gains a kind of satisfaction that is possibly never obtained when reading other books. — Mortimer J. Adler

Who was Jesus anyway? After twenty centuries, there is not much anyone can agree on. The four canonical gospels don't measure up to modern standards of biographical writing, and - outside of this material - there is precious little contemporary evidence, apart from a few glancing mentions of Jesus or the movement centered on him. — Jay Parini

I would almost consider myself a canonical child of Generation X ... because I think there is an ethic and aesthetic that goes along with that generation, it may have something to do with the fact that "Never Mind the Bollocks" was released when we were 16-years-old and that was really the album that crystalized a generation. — Mark Pesce

Zen is a special transmission outside the Canonical Scriptures; it does not depend upon texts. — Robert Linssen

When I re-read the Odyssey, it felt like I was reading PD James or Minette Walters - you feel that you are sharing in something that hundreds of millions of people have read with love, and I think that this is worth holding onto. It is not a matter of canonical texts or elitism, which the universities are trying to make us wary about. It is about shared language and metaphor and experience and imagery and that is all good. — Robert Dessaix

On the other hand, inspiration - a criterion for canonization we might expect to play a great role - is not a factor. The Shepherd of Hermas and many writings either claimed inspiration or had it claimed for them, yet were neither universally nor ultimately accepted as canonical. In contrast, no NT writing claims inspiration for itself. The statement in 2 Tim. 3:16 that all Scripture is inspired by God (theopneustos) refers to Torah. Second Peter 3:16 refers to Paul's letters as though they were Scripture but does not say they were 'inspired.' In Revelation, 'inspiration' is certainly implied but not explicitly claimed. No doubt there was an increasingly widespread conviction that the NT writings were divinely inspired, but that notion did not appear to factor in as a criterion for canonization. — Luke Timothy Johnson

This is a challenge when we consider the four earliest extant biographies of Jesus, known as the canonical Gospels. There is somewhat of a consensus among contemporary scholars that the Gospels belong to the genre of Greco-Roman biography (bios). Bioi offered the ancient biographer great flexibility for rearranging material and inventing speeches in order to communicate the teachings, philosophy, and political beliefs of the subject, and they often included legend. Because bios was a flexible genre, it is often difficult to determine where history ends and legend begins.24 — Michael R. Licona

All canonical writing possesses the quality of making you feel strangeness at home. — Harold Bloom

It's better to emphasize biblical theology, partly because there are fine Study Bibles already available that lean into systematic theology, and partly because biblical theology is particularly strong at helping readers see how the Bible hangs together in its own categories: that is, God in his infinite wisdom chose to give us his Word in the 66 canonical books, with all of their variations in theme, emphasis, vocabulary, literary form, and distinctive contributions across time. — D. A. Carson

Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan. — Christopher Hitchens

Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired. — Harold Bloom

Fanfiction is the madwoman in mainstream culture's attic, but the attic won't contain it forever. Writing and reading fanfiction isn't just something you do; it's a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions might not be the only way things have to be. — Anne Jamison

Canonical exegesis may be defined as the interpretation of individual components of the canon in the context of the canon as a whole. Even in the pre-canonical period evidence of intra-biblical interpretation is not lacking. In the Old Testament it can be seen how later law-codes took over the provisions of earlier codes and applied them to fresh situations, or how later prophets took up and reinterpreted the oracles of their predecessors. — F.F. Bruce

What is the historical context in which the Psalter was compiled? What difference do the psalm titles make to canonical interpretation? How does the total canonical context affect our understanding and appropriation of the Psalms? — Anonymous

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force. — Friedrich Nietzsche

These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives. — Hari Kunzru

Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories. — Stephen Jay Gould