Preconception Quotes & Sayings

Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth. — Byrd Gibbens

Nothing you become will disappoint me; I have no preconception that I'd like to see you be or do. I have no desire to forsee you, only to discover you. You can't disappoint me — Mary Haskell

France was always a little scary to me. I had the preconception that France was a bit hoity-toity. — April Bloomfield

I was a very bad journalist. Awful. I would just invent everything. If I did an interview, I had a preconception of what that person should say and I would put my words in his mouth. — Isabel Allende

Hardly any one is able to see what is before him, just as it is in itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through the veil of his preconception, he criticizes before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself. — Arthur Symons

The world has its way with us long before we're born. — Annie Murphy Paul

Say it, no ideas but in things - nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident - split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained - secret - into the body of the light! — William Carlos Williams

Science starts with preconception, with the common culture, and with common sense. It moves on to observation, is marked by the discovery of paradox, and is then concerned with the correction of preconception. It moves then to use these corrections for the designing of further observation and for more refined experiment. And as it moves along this course the nature of the evidence and experience that nourish it becomes more and more unfamiliar; it is not just the language that is strange [to common culture]. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Your understanding of another person is limited by what you think you already know. So when you just listen, the person you meet won't match your preconception. The exciting thing is that you usually meet someone much wiser and kinder than you expected. You might also lose track of your ideas about who you are. — Byron Katie

Only human beings guide their behaviour by a knowledge of what happened before they were born and a preconception of what may happen after they are dead; thus only humans find their way by a light that illuminates more than the patch of ground they stand on. P. B. and J. S. MEDAWAR, The Life Science (1977) — Richard Dawkins

IN DISCUSSING SHUNYATA, we found that we impose our preconceptions, our ideas, our version of things onto phenomena instead of seeing things as they are. Once we are able to see through our veil of preconception, we realize that it is an unnecessary and confused way of attaching handles to experiences without considering whether the handles fit or not. In other words, preconceptions are a form of security. When we see something, immediately we name it and place it in a category. But form is empty; it does not need our categorizations to express its full nature, to be what it is. Form is in itself empty of preconception. — Chogyam Trungpa

The purpose of science is to develop, without prejudice or preconception of any kind, a knowledge of the facts, the laws, and the processes of nature. The even more important task of religion, on the other hand, is to develop the consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind. — Robert Andrews Millikan

You can vent your anger and think that others are to blame when in truth the anger you carry belongs to you.
Learn to accept responsibility for every action.
Learn to let go of preconception.
Learn to let go of what you have learnt in your life.
Travel lightly and you will find the journey has far more enlightenment than you could ever have imagined. — Tami Egonu

Judgments based on preconceptions make life simple for us to deal with since that means we safely shield ourselves behind barriers of preconception that helped us feel safe in whatever views or assumptions we are having. — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

His point is that when the two seem incompatible we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us, and so plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness. Gonzalez adds, "Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it's easy to see what we want to see." It's the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, — Rebecca Solnit

An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality. — John Cage

There is nothing so expensive, really, as a big, well-developed, full-bodied preconception. — E.B. White

In some measure, stimuli from the outside, especially when they are printed or spoken words, evoke some part of a system of stereotypes, so that the actual sensation and the preconception occupy consciousness at the same time. The two are blended, much as if we looked at red through blue glasses and saw green. — Walter Lippmann

It always matters who the storyteller is. It's a lens. — James Still

We hide behind our assumptions and preconceptions as if they were fortresses - shutting people out. I love to witness the fall of a preconception; the way it renders you naked — Karen Hitchcock

So strong was the preconception of absolute space and time in the scientific mentality of those days, that Lorentz did not realize the grand transcendence of what he had discovered, and contented himself with remodeling the edifice of Physics
instead of rebuilding it with a new foundation. — Felix Alba-Juez

When the sovereign spirit within us is true to nature, it stands poised and ready to adjust to every change in circumstances and to seize each new opportunity. It doesn't approach an object with prejudice or preconception, but handles each thing dispassionately before embracing it and, if necessary, finds advantage in what opposes it. It is like fire in this regard. Whereas a feeble flame might suffocate under a pile of dry sticks, a robust fire consumes everything it touches. The more objects of any kind heaped on it, the higher it rises, the hotter it burns. — Marcus Aurelius

There are places in this world where fable, myth, preconception, love, longing or prejudice step in and so distort a cool, clear appraisal that a kind of high colored magical confusion takes permanent hold ... Surely Texas is such a place ... — John Steinbeck

What matters is the character of ... stereotypes, and the gullibility with which we employ them. And these in the end depend upon ... our philosophy of life. If in that philosophy we assume that the world is codified according to a code which we possess, we are likely to make our reports of what is going on describe a world run by our code. But if our philosophy tells us that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas, then, when we use our stereotypes, we tend to know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly. We tend, also, to realize more and more clearly when our ideas started, where they started, how they came to us, why we accepted them. All useful history is antiseptic in this fashion. It enables us to know what fairy tale, what school book, what tradition, what novel, play, picture, phrase, planted one preconception in this mind, another in that mind. — Walter Lippmann

If we're not careful, mindset, preconception, or subsequent turns can affect even what we think we observed in the first place. — Anonymous

When I over-prepare, I try to let it all go and forget all about it when the camera rolls, so I can just be present with the other actors and allow what's going to happen to happen without too much preconception. — John Hawkes

He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception. It is clear then that if we wish to make use of a method of experimental psychology, the first thing necessary is to renounce all former creeds and to proceed by means of the method in the search for truth. — Maria Montessori

Staying requires being curious about who you actually are when you don't take yourself to be a collection of memories.When you don't infer your existence form replaying what happened to you, when you don't take yourself to be the girl your mother/father/brother/teacher/lover didn't see or adore. When you sense yourself directly, immediately, right now, without preconception, who are you? — Geneen Roth

When we allow a preconception to rule our behavior, we are actually allowing our past to control our present and future. — Ilchi Lee

THE rule for travelling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind us. The object of travelling is to see and learn; but such is our impatience of ignorance, or the jealousy of our self-love, that we generally set up a certain preconception beforehand (in self-defence, or as a barrier against the lessons of experience,) and are surprised at or quarrel with all that does not conform to it. Let us think what we please of what we really find, but prejudge
nothing. [Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy] — William Hazlitt

Bare skin is the one and only right criterion for receiving water's gracious acceptance or any acceptance whatsoever from that element. But Pliny also seems to say something more: Stripping off not caution but the stale, crusty garments of preconception, peeling sensibly down to raw, new nakedness, is the only way to enter and be properly embraced by the world. — Janet Lembke

Once you free your mind about the concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want. So nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do. — Giorgio Moroder

I came to understand that belief is a preconception about the way reality should be; faith is the willingness to experience reality as it is, including the acceptance of the unknown. An interesting way to understand the difference is to use the words interchangeably in the same sentence: I believe in Santa Claus. I have faith in Santa Claus. Belief can impede spiritual unfoldment; faith is supremely necessary for it. — Judith Hanson Lasater

It is a Lancashire custom to be on the defensive. We anticipate jokes about rain, "bi gum," and Wigan; we expect people to peer at us through the thin layer of smoke they fancy they see around our heads. — Sylvia Lovat Corbridge

Beyond the Noise of Words Listening is an art not easily come by, but in it there is beauty and great understanding. We listen with the various depths of our being, but our listening is always with a preconception or from a particular point of view. We do not listen simply; there is always the intervening screen of our own thoughts, conclusions, and prejudices ... . To listen there must be an inward quietness, a freedom from the strain of acquiring, a relaxed attention. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Perception is of course intimately tied to preconception. I have, as is true for each of us, a pair of cultural eyeglasses that will determine to greater or lesser degree what will be in focus, what will be a blur, what gives me a headache, and what I cannot see. I was raised a Christian - the mythology resides deep in my bones - and I know the story of Jesus nearly as well as I know my own. Until my late teens I couldn't see some of the darker acts perpetrated in the name of Christ. I still feel a twinge each time I say, "I am not a Christian," a slight apprehension that I may have gone too far. Sometimes I look up, a small part of my upbringing still telling me that my blasphemy will call forth a bolt of lightning from the sky. — Derrick Jensen

When preconception is so clearly defined, so easily reproduced, so enthusiastically welcomed and so long accommodated as in the case of Piltdown Man, science reveals a disturbing predisposition towards belief before investigation. — John Reader