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Provisional Quotes By Janet Malcolm

There are places in New York where the city's anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets
these express with particular force the city's penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure. — Janet Malcolm

Provisional Quotes By Samantha Ellis

...all readings are provisional, and that maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the time. — Samantha Ellis

Provisional Quotes By Trinh T. Minh-ha

Home for the exile in a secular and contingent world is always provisionalTrinh T. Minh-ha

Provisional Quotes By Alastair Reynolds

When two or more of their lighthuggers met, they would compare and update their respective nomenclature tables. If the first ship had assigned names to a group of worlds and their associated geographical features, and the second ship had no current entries for those bodies, it was usual for the second ship to amend its database with the new names. They might be flagged as provisional, unless a third ship confirmed that they were still unallocated. — Alastair Reynolds

Provisional Quotes By William James

Where [God] is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things. — William James

Provisional Quotes By Saul Bellow

There's this sense, you know: the impossibility of life, the provisional character and everything, the impossibility of finding anchorage, the insecurity, the hand to mouth existence, the terrible things that life does to you, and well, of course, growing is monotonous, so I try not to grow too much. — Saul Bellow

Provisional Quotes By Meles Zenawi

The ... provisional government unwaveringly believes that it can solve all the present problems together with the broad masses of Ethiopia. However, we can do this only if all the people come out in unison to implement our planned undertakings. — Meles Zenawi

Provisional Quotes By Fernand Braudel

When the [colonial] contact was violent, in fact, failure was more frequent than success. 'Colonialism' may have triumphed in the past: but today it is an obvious fiasco. And colonialism, typically, is the submergence of one civilisation by another. The conqured always submit to the stronger; but their submission is merely provisional when civilisations clash.
Long periods of enforced coexistence may include concessions or agreements and important, often fruitful, cultural exchange. But the process always has its limits. — Fernand Braudel

Provisional Quotes By Marcel Proust

Custom! that skillful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable. — Marcel Proust

Provisional Quotes By Tim Parks

a novelist's work is often a strategy (I don't mean the author need be aware of this) for dealing with some personal dilemma. Not just that the dilemma is "worked out" in the narrative, as critics often tell us, but that the acts of writing and publishing and positioning oneself in the world of literature are all part of an attempt to find a solution, however provisional, to some deep personal unease. — Tim Parks

Provisional Quotes By Viktor E. Frankl

A man who could not see the end of his"provisional existence" was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. — Viktor E. Frankl

Provisional Quotes By David Weinberger

Knowledge in the Internet Age - networked knowledge - is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it's provisional; it's a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved. — David Weinberger

Provisional Quotes By Marcel Proust

Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable. Certainly — Marcel Proust

Provisional Quotes By Peter Watson

...a useful coorective to the triumphalism of some scientists. For example, Maddox went out of his way to emphasise the provisional nature of much physics - he referred to black holes as 'putative' only, to the search for theories of everything as 'the embodiment of a belief, even a hope' and stated that the reason why the quantum gravity project is 'becalmed' right now is because 'the problem to be solved is not yet fully understood' and that the idea that the universe began with a Big Bang 'will be found to be false'. — Peter Watson

Provisional Quotes By Thomas Hardy

Her face had the usual fulness of expression which is developed by a life of solitude. Where the eyes of a multitude continuously beat like waves upon a countenance they seem to wear away its mobile power ; but in the still water of privacy every feeling and sentiment unfolds in visible luxuriance, to be interpreted as readily as a printed word by an intruder. In years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the necessity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced the provisional curves of her childhood's face to a premature finality. — Thomas Hardy

Provisional Quotes By Sam Lipsyte

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy. — Sam Lipsyte

Provisional Quotes By Louis De Broglie

The actual state of our knowledge is always provisional and ... there must be, beyond what is actually known, immense new regions to discover. — Louis De Broglie

Provisional Quotes By Gregory Benford

Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living. — Gregory Benford

Provisional Quotes By Michael Kenny

The self is constituted within a variety of arenas and in relation to multiple traditions. Self-hood, on this understanding, is both provisional and open-ended, and critically depends on the configuration of relationships between one's own groups and those cultures and values that are deemed 'other'. The regulation of alterity becomes a defining attribute of self-hood, as my sense of who I am is crucially mediated by an understanding of that which I am not (paraphrasing William Connolly). — Michael Kenny

Provisional Quotes By Richard Ford

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses
those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence. — Richard Ford

Provisional Quotes By David Ben-Gurion

In the midst of wanton aggression, we still call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to return to the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, with full and equal citizenship and due representation in its bodies and institutions - provisional or permanent. — David Ben-Gurion

Provisional Quotes By Emil Cioran

Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism. — Emil Cioran

Provisional Quotes By Maryse Holder

As soon as whatever provisional well of confidence dries up, I will feel like a frightened motherless child. And I will - what? Lessee, I'll beg friends to assure me I'm fascinating, that my soul is complex so I can once more conduce to irony. An abyss opens up. — Maryse Holder

Provisional Quotes By Jeff Denham

Whether we start with a provisional status and legal permanent residence ... or we set up some other way to assimilate legally, you can't ever put in something that says, 'You can never become a citizen.' That's un-American. — Jeff Denham

Provisional Quotes By Friedrich Nietzsche

How we, too, are still pious. - In science, convictions have no right of citizenship, so it is said and with good reason: only when they decide to descend to the modesty of a hypothesis, a provisional experimental standpoint, a regulative fiction, may they be granted admission and even a certain value in the realm of knowledge - though always with the restriction of remaining under police surveillance, under police suspicion. But, — Friedrich Nietzsche

Provisional Quotes By Henry Eyring

Apparent contradictions between religion and science often have been the basis of bitter controversy. Such differences are to be expected as long as human understanding remains provisional and fragmentary. — Henry Eyring

Provisional Quotes By Demian Bichir

I grew up in the theater. I began my career at 3. That was the first time I stepped onto a provisional stage. — Demian Bichir

Provisional Quotes By Sara Levine

My thoughts don't really bump along this way, but they do bump somehow, and it's more honest
more pedagogically useful, more truthful
to arrange them in a loose, disconnected, provisional way than to deliver only the conclusions. — Sara Levine

Provisional Quotes By Roland Barthes

Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -> Encyclopedias are impossible -> I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) -> "I don't know," "I refuse to judge": as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn't belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the "I don't know." The obligation to "be interested" in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional ... — Roland Barthes

Provisional Quotes By Harry S. Truman

The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel. — Harry S. Truman

Provisional Quotes By Anne Giardini

Life is perphas after all simply this thing and then the next. We are all of us improvising. We find a careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is perculiar and inexplicable. We are constanly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next. We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change-sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once- and we have to start over again, feeling our way back to a provisional state of contentment. — Anne Giardini

Provisional Quotes By Nick Lane

With these new techniques, a new breed of evolutionist is emerging, able to capture the workings of evolution in real time. The picture so painted is breathtaking in its wealth of detail and its compass, ranging from the subatomic to the planetary scale. And that is why I said that, for the first time in history, we know. Much of our growing body of knowledge is provisional, to be sure, but it is vibrant and meaningful. It is a joy to be alive at this time, when we know so much, and yet can still look forward to so much more. — Nick Lane

Provisional Quotes By Enoch Powell

Paisley has been and remains a greater threat to the Union than the Foreign Office and the Provisional IRA rolled into one. — Enoch Powell

Provisional Quotes By Jorge Luis Borges

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody. — Jorge Luis Borges

Provisional Quotes By Emily Witt

The body, I started to learn, was not a secondary entity. The mind contained very few truths that the body withheld. There was little of import in an encounter between two bodies that would fail to be revealed rather quickly. The epistolary run up to the date only rarely revealed the truth of a man's good humor or introversion, his anxiety or social grace. Until the bodies were introduced, seduction was only provisional. — Emily Witt

Provisional Quotes By Walead Beshty

It's extremely difficult to say what one actually means by 'sculpture' other than, in a provisional sense, it's something that goes on the floor or a pedestal, and loosely applies to a certain history of the use of that term. — Walead Beshty

Provisional Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

Since religion has proved itself uniquely delinquent on the one subject where moral and ethical authority might be counted as universal and absolute, I think we are entitled to at least three provisional conclusions. The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is - because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs - not just amoral but immoral. — Christopher Hitchens

Provisional Quotes By Henning Mankell

There's always an end. But the end is always the beginning of something else. The periods we write into our lives are always provisional, in one way or another. — Henning Mankell

Provisional Quotes By Haruki Murakami

She was the only thing that held together the fragile, provisional me. — Haruki Murakami

Provisional Quotes By Recep Tayyip Erdogan

In this context, social consensus, and institutions that embody this consensus, must be made effective in order for democratization not to be abused as a provisional instrument to establish an anti-democratic regime. — Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Provisional Quotes By Mason Cooley

The idealist regards facts as provisional. — Mason Cooley

Provisional Quotes By Cormac McCarthy

They pulled the wet saddles off the horses and hobbled them and walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddle legged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the grey twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. — Cormac McCarthy

Provisional Quotes By Cees Nooteboom

As far as he could see, the world was moving, in an orderly capitalist fashion, toward a logical, perhaps provisional, perhaps permanent, end. — Cees Nooteboom

Provisional Quotes By Stephen Hawking

Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. — Stephen Hawking

Provisional Quotes By Albert Camus

How rapid will be the development toward this higher phase of Communism when each shall receive according to
his needs? "That, we do not and cannot know ... We have no data that allow us to solve these questions." "For the
sake of greater clarity," Lenin affirms with his customary arbitrariness, "it has never been vouchsafed to any
socialist to guarantee the advent of the higher phase of Communism." It can be said that at this point freedom
definitely dies. From the rule of the masses and the concept of the proletarian revolution we first pass on to the idea
of a revolution made and directed by professional agents. The relentless criticism of the State is then reconciled with
the necessary, but provisional, dictatorship of the proletariat, embodied in its leaders. Finally, it is announced that
the end of this provisional condition cannot be foreseen and that, what is more, no one has ever presumed to promise
that there will be an end. — Albert Camus

Provisional Quotes By Bertrand Meyer

Worse yet is the rejection of upfront requirements. The basic observation is correct: requirements will change, and are hard anyway to capture at the beginning. In no way, however, does it imply the dramatic conclusion that upfront requirements are useless! What it does imply is that requirements should be subject to change, like all other artifacts on the software process.

[...]

The agile advice here is irresponsible and serious software projects should ignore it.The sound practice is to start collecting requirements at the beginning, produce a provisional version prior to engaging in design, and treat the requirements as a living product that undergoes constant adaptation throughout the project. — Bertrand Meyer

Provisional Quotes By Kathryn Schulz

The idea behind the meta-induction is that all of our theories are fundamentally provisional and quite possibly wrong, if we can add that idea to our cognitive toolkit, we will be better able to listen with curiosity and empathy to those whose theories contradict our own. We will be better able to pay attention to counterevidence - those anomalous bits of data that make our picture of the world a little weirder, more mysterious, less clean, less done. And we will be able to hold our own beliefs a bit more humbly, in the knowledge that better ideas are almost certainly on the way. — Kathryn Schulz

Provisional Quotes By Stephen Nachmanovitch

There is not ultimate breakthrough; what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul. — Stephen Nachmanovitch

Provisional Quotes By Jack Higgins

My Irish passport makes me look like a chief of staff for the Provisional IRA. — Jack Higgins

Provisional Quotes By Amy Poehler

The federal government began investigating allegations of fraud against the Coalition Provisional Authority, a U.S. contractor accused in a bid-rigging operation involving millions of dollars. Asked to comment, a spokesperson for Halliburton said, 'Millions? With an M? That is adorable.' — Amy Poehler

Provisional Quotes By David Pye

Everything we design and make is an improvisation, a lash-up, something inept and provisional. — David Pye

Provisional Quotes By Gautama Buddha

Rely on the teaching, not on the person;
Rely on the meaning, not on the words;
Rely on the definitive meaning, not on the provisional;
Rely on your wisdom mind, not on your ordinary mind. — Gautama Buddha

Provisional Quotes By Evan Dara

I would next like to work in anthropology; for here, if I may say so, I believe I have much to contribute-indeed, I believe I am on the verge of substantiating significant advances both theoretical and practical; yes, my inquisitors, I assure you this is true; for I have established, on my own, as an unaffiliated scholar, no less than a new definition of Man- yes, him- one that is easily more rigorous than any heretofore proposed; forget opposable thumbs, disregard use of tools,lay down language capacity or abstract reasoning-those are clearly insufficient; my definition easily surpasses these provisional flouncings in accuracy, comprehensiveness, and elegance; and it is this: man is the animal who pisses where he shouldn't; — Evan Dara

Provisional Quotes By Ian McEwan

In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I'd type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a professional to type a final draft, but I felt I was missing things I would have changed if I had done it myself. In the mid-eighties I was a grateful convert to computers. Word processing is more intimate, more like thinking itself. In retrospect, the typewriter seems a gross mechanical obstruction. I like the provisional nature of unprinted material held in the computer's memory - like an unspoken thought. I like the way sentences or passages can be endlessly reworked, and the way this faithful machine remembers all your little jottings and messages to yourself. Until, of course, it sulks and crashes. — Ian McEwan

Provisional Quotes By Andre Malraux

Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact. — Andre Malraux

Provisional Quotes By Talal Asad

Certainly in order to understand the natural world one needs clarity, logic, and the capacity for theory building. But that understanding tends to improve because and to the extent that it is provisional, hypothetical, when it looks for disconfirmation in the particular rather than final proof as a universal. — Talal Asad

Provisional Quotes By Cormac McCarthy

Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all. — Cormac McCarthy

Provisional Quotes By Gilles Deleuze

I have no admiration for culture. I have no reserve knowledge, no provisional knowledge. And everything that I learn, I learn for a particular task, and once it's done, I immediately forget it, so that if ten years later, I have to get involved with something close to or directly within the same subject, I would have to start again from zero, with some few exceptions. — Gilles Deleuze

Provisional Quotes By Karl Marx

Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that. — Karl Marx

Provisional Quotes By J. Christopher Herold

A provisional government was appointed on April 1 (it consisted mainly of Talleyrand's whist partners), and the following day the Senate, on Talleyrand's urging, declared Napoleon deposed. — J. Christopher Herold

Provisional Quotes By Elena Ferrante

It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute. — Elena Ferrante

Provisional Quotes By Stephen Jay Gould

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent. — Stephen Jay Gould

Provisional Quotes By Francois Jacob

For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future. — Francois Jacob

Provisional Quotes By Michael McCaul

In the Steven F. Austin Colony, which was the first colony, Texans first established a provisional government in 1835 with the intention of writing a declaration of independence soon after. — Michael McCaul

Provisional Quotes By James Cameron

I've sworn off agnosticism, which I now call cowardly atheism. I've come to the position that in the complete absence of any supporting data whatsover for the persistence of the individual in some spiritual form, it is necessary to operate under the provisional conclusion that there is no afterlife and then be ready to amend that if I find out otherwise. — James Cameron

Provisional Quotes By Laozi

The Tao can't be perceived. Smaller than an electron, it contains uncountable galaxies. If powerful men and women could remain centered in the Tao, all things would be in harmony. The world would become a paradise. All people would be at peace, and the law would be written in their hearts. When you have names and forms, know that they are provisional. When you have institutions, know where their functions should end. Knowing when to stop, you can avoid any danger. All things end in the Tao as rivers flow into the sea. — Laozi

Provisional Quotes By George Eliot

I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight - that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin. — George Eliot

Provisional Quotes By Katherine Boo

What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace. — Katherine Boo

Provisional Quotes By Pope Francis

128. We were created with a vocation to work. The goal should not be that technological progress increasingly replace human work, for this would be detrimental to humanity. Work is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfilment. Helping the poor financially must always be a provisional solution in the face of pressing needs. The broader objective should always be to allow them a dignified life through work. — Pope Francis

Provisional Quotes By Ben Bernanke

Of course, economic forecasts must be revised when new information arrives and are thus necessarily provisional. — Ben Bernanke

Provisional Quotes By Orlando Figes

The Provisional Government had lost effective military control of the capital a full two days before the armed uprising began. This was the essential fact of the whole insurrection: without it one cannot explain the ease of the Bolshevik victory. — Orlando Figes

Provisional Quotes By Franco Santoro

Emotions and thoughts are not who we are, they are merely emotions and thoughts, collective waves of energy moving through the web of life. They never stay as they are or hold the same intensity. They are provisional. Hence no matter how beautiful or horrible they are, they will change, with or without any effort. Just acknowledge and let them go, regardless of what they are, and you will know who you are. — Franco Santoro

Provisional Quotes By Graeme Simsion

Naturally, the books and research papers described the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome, and I formed a provisional conclusion that most of these were simply variations in human brain function that had been inappropriately medicalized because they did not fit social norms - constructed social norms - that reflected the most common human configurations rather than the full range. — Graeme Simsion

Provisional Quotes By Aldous Huxley

The man who has successfully solved the problem of his relations with the two worlds of data and symbols is a man who has no beliefs. With regard to the problems of practical life he entertains a series of working hypotheses, which serve his purposes, but are taken no more seriously than any other kind of tool or instrument. In other words, symbols should never be raised to the rank of dogmas, nor should any system be regarded as more than a provisional convenience. — Aldous Huxley

Provisional Quotes By Louis Antoine De Saint-Just

In the circumstances in which the Republic finds itself, the constitution cannot be inaugurated; it would destroy itself ... The provisional government of France is revolutionary until there is peace. — Louis Antoine De Saint-Just

Provisional Quotes By Jane Addams

An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom as these conditions imply
low rental. — Jane Addams

Provisional Quotes By Henry Kissinger

This body of thought represents an almost total inversion of Westphalian world order. In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be the point of departure for an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate; at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale. Noninterference in other countries' domestic affairs cannot serve as a governing principle, because national loyalties represent deviations from the true faith and because jihadists have a duty to transform dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers. Purity, not stability, is the guiding principle of this conception of world order. — Henry Kissinger

Provisional Quotes By Emil M. Cioran

Akhmatova, like Gogol, wanted to possess nothing. She gave away the presents given to her, and a few days later they would be found in other people's houses. This characteristic recalls the behavior of nomads, compelled to the provisional by necessity and by choice...When eastern Europe furnishes such models of detachment, why seek them out in India or elsewhere? (from Anathemas and Admirations) — Emil M. Cioran

Provisional Quotes By John Polkinghorne

scientific discovery requires the boldness of provisional commitment to a point of view, while remaining aware that this may require subsequent modification in the light of further experience. — John Polkinghorne

Provisional Quotes By Kim Stanley Robinson

Perhaps there is a provisional solution to this epistemological mess, which is to be located in the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition - the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human language: it is as if it made sense. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Provisional Quotes By Howard Norman

Friendship is provisional, you have to keep earning it, back and forth, give the gift that's only each other's to give — Howard Norman

Provisional Quotes By C.S. Lewis

Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness. — C.S. Lewis

Provisional Quotes By Katherine Boo

The age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. — Katherine Boo

Provisional Quotes By Duong Van Minh

We wait here to meet the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam to discuss together a ceremony of orderly transfer of power so as to avoid any unnecessary bloodshed in the population. — Duong Van Minh

Provisional Quotes By Paulo Coelho

Firstly, by learning the great lesson of wise men: patience, the certainty that everything - both good and bad - is provisional in this life. Secondly, using this sudden change of course to risk new things in daily life, to do things you always dreamed of. — Paulo Coelho

Provisional Quotes By Philippe Aries

The first typical adolescent of modern times was Wagner's Siegfried. : the music of Siegfried expressed for the first time that combination of (provisional) purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre which was to make the adolescent the hero of our twentieth century, the century of adolescence. — Philippe Aries

Provisional Quotes By G.K. Chesterton

In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. — G.K. Chesterton

Provisional Quotes By A.R. Ammons

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change. — A.R. Ammons

Provisional Quotes By Peter Enns

The findings of the past 150 years have made extrabiblical evidence an unavoidable conversation partner. The result is that, as perhaps never before in the history of the church, we can see how truly provisional and incomplete certain dimensions of our understanding of Scripture can be. On the other hand, we are encouraged to encounter the depth and riches of God's revelation and to rely more and more on God's Spirit, who speaks to the church in Scripture. — Peter Enns

Provisional Quotes By Chuck Klosterman

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true--both objectively and subjectively--is habitually provisional. — Chuck Klosterman

Provisional Quotes By Louis J. Cameli

fidelity and lifelong communion, it is circumscribed, limited, and provisional. The — Louis J. Cameli

Provisional Quotes By William Batchelder Greene

Faith is from within; it is the outbreaking of human spontaneity; it is force of soul, grandeur of sentiment, magnanimity, generosity, courage. Its formulas are naturally unintelligible in their literal tenor; for, otherwise, they would represent that which is scientifically known, and would not be the mere provisional clothing of that which is not objectively given, but subjectively projected from the inmost depth of the soul. — William Batchelder Greene

Provisional Quotes By Rachel Naomi Remen

Most of us encounter a great deal more Mystery than we are willing to experience. Sometimes knowing life requires us to suspend disbelief, to recognize that all our hard-won knowledge may only be provisional and the world may be quite different than we believe it to be. This can be very stressful, even frightening. But if we are not willing to wonder, we may have to hang up the phone on life. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Provisional Quotes By Katherine Boo

In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. — Katherine Boo

Provisional Quotes By Christopher Hitchens

I think we are entitled to at least three provisional conclusions. The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is - because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs - not just amoral but immoral. The ignorant psychopath and or brute who mistreats his children must be punished but can be understood. Those who claim a heavenly warrant for the cruelty have been tainted by evil, and also constitute far more danger. — Christopher Hitchens

Provisional Quotes By Leon Wieseltier

It's exemplification of our moment in American culture and American cultural journalism. It is an accurate document of the discourse of "takes." This movie, that book, this poem, that painting, this record, that show: Make a smart remark and move on. A take is an opinion that has no aspiration to a belief, an impression taht never hardens into a position. Its lightness is its appeal. It is provisional, evanescent, a move in a game, an accredited shallowness, a bulwark against a pause in the conversation. A take is expected not to be true but to be interesting, and even when it is interesting it makes no troublesome claim upon anybody's attention. Another take will quickly follow, and the silence that is a mark of perplexity, of research and reflection, will be mercifully kept at bay. A take asks for no affiliation. It requires no commitment. — Leon Wieseltier

Provisional Quotes By Nevill Francis Mott

All scientific theories are provisional and may be changed, but ... on the whole, they are accepted from Washington to Moscow because of their practical success. Where religion has opposed the findings of science, it has almost always had to retreat. — Nevill Francis Mott

Provisional Quotes By Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

With the growth of knowledge our ideas must from time to time be organized afresh. The change takes place usually in accordance with new maxims as they arise, but it always remains provisional. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Provisional Quotes By Svetlana Alexievich

There are many of us here. A whole street. That's what it's called--Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that's how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they're invalids, but they don't leave their jobs, they're scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In an instant. They just drop--someone will be walking, he falls down, goes to sleep, never wakes up. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. They die, but no one's really asked us. No one's asked what we've been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them.

But I was telling you about love. About my love...

-- Lyudmila, Ignatenko,
wife of deceased fireman, Vasily Ignatenko — Svetlana Alexievich

Provisional Quotes By Giorgio Agamben

One of the essential characteristics of the state of exception-the provisional abolition of the distinction among legislative, executive, and judicial powers-here shows its tendency to become a lasting practice of government. — Giorgio Agamben