Schemata Quotes & Sayings

The college bookstore was a splash of life, culture, and society. As a psychology student, I often found myself intrigued by the behavior, ways of thinking and feeling, and general schemata of others, and this was the perfect spot to engage my senses.
Other times, I was just annoyed. — Gina Marinello-Sweeney

I do not mean to say that we should, or could, return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean to say that there are systems of knowledge and grand poetical schemata derived from the mobile life that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate. And mad to destroy. — Robyn Davidson

That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard - of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy - happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love - are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify. — David Foster Wallace

The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching. — Jean Piaget

Schemata are our necessary instruments for making the surfaces of what we read connect significantly with the background knowledge that is wittheld from immediate conciousness by the limits of short-term memory. — E.D. Hirsch Jr.

Accommodation of mental structures to reality implies the existence of assimilatory schemata apart from which any structure would be impossible. — Jean Piaget

Dear friends & fellow characters, you all know the importance we attach to the power of collective prayer in this our desperate struggle for survival. Some of us have more existence than others, at various times according to fashion. But even this is becoming extremely shadowy & precarious, for we are not read, & when read , we are read badly, we are not lived as we used to be, we are not identified with & fantasized, we are rapidly forgotten. Those of us who have the good fortune to be read by teachers, scholars, & students are not read as we used to be read, but analyzed as schemata, structures, functions within structures, logical & mathematical formulae, aporia, psychic movements, social significances & so forth. — Christine Brooke-Rose

The fire seemed to live, go down, or die according to its own schemata. In the morning, however, it always saw fit to die. — Toni Morrison

Moreover, the question at hand concerns modes of operation or schemata of action, and not directly the subjects (or persons) who are their authors or vehicles. It concerns an operational logic whose models may go as far back as the age-old ruses of fishes and insects that disguise or transform themselves in order to survive, and which has in any case been concealed by the form of rationality currently dominant in Western culture. — Michel De Certeau

Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way. — Oliver Sacks

We could speak about the meaning of life vis-a-vis non-consequential/deontological theories, apodictic transformation schemata, the incoherence of exemplification, metaphysical realism, Cartesian interactive dualism, revised non reductive dualism, postmodernist grammatology and dicey dichotomies. But we would still be left with Nietzsche's preposterous mustache which instills great anguish and skepticism in the brain, which leads (as it did in his case) to utter madness. I suggest we go to Paris instead. — Maira Kalman