Quotes & Sayings About Specificity

All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Everything that David Chase does has a tremendous amount of specificity. He is very detail oriented. — John Magaro

While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? — Elif Batuman

What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses. — William J. Mitchell

The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty. — Gail Caldwell

In its most primitive form, life is, therefore, no longer bound to the cell, the cell which possesses structure and which can be compared to a complex wheel-work, such as a watch which ceases to exist if it is stamped down in a mortar. No, in its primitive form life is like fire, like a flame borne by the living substance;-like a flame which appears in endless diversity and yet has specificity within it;-which can adopt the form of the organic world, of the lank grass-leaf and of the stem of the tree. — Martinus Beijerinck

This definition was not just limited to establishing a method for exploring the specificity of one human group in relation to another. It also desired, from the outset, to renounce the prejudiced and racist ethnography about which the West has never tired of berating itself. The intention could not have been loftier, but the well-known saying tells us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Because — Mario Vargas-Llosa

This relative freedom of a hero does not violate the strict specificity of the construction, just as the specificity of a mathematical formula is not violated by the presence of irrational or transfinite quantities. — Mikhail Bakhtin

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand. — William Gibson

The changes that occur during the prodromal phase have been broadly characterised by Hafner and colleagues (Hafner et al., 1995), though other more intensive studies are reviewed and summarised in Yung et al. (1996). These and other studies (Jones et al., 1993) showed that although diagnostic specificity and ultimately potentially effective treatment comes with the later onset of positive psychotic symptoms, most of the disabling consequences of the underlying disorder emerge and manifest well prior to this phase. In particular, deficits in social functioning occur predominantly during the prodromal phase and prior to treatment. Hafner et al.
(1995) demonstrated clearly that the main factor determining social outcome two years after first admission for schizophrenia is acquired social status during the prodromal phase of the disorder. The importance of this phase was previously poorly appreciated because no conceptual — Max J. Birchwood

The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real. — Gaston Bachelard

The transaction cost approach maintains that some projects are easy to finance by debt and ought to be financed by debt. These are projects for which physical-asset specificity is low to moderate. — Oliver E. Williamson

The being level speaks the language of art, music, color shape and pattern directly
a language that requires no words
is not limited by words
nor does it have the specificity of words and thus cannot be broken onto parts that can be manipulated or analyzed by the intellect. It must be swallowed, whole not parsed, sorted and justified. — Thomas Campbell

Where some may see flat, static narratives, I see a spectrum of tonal gradations and realities. What I am creating is literally black portraiture with ballpoint pen ink. I'm looking for that in-between state in an individual where the overarching definition is lost. Skin as geography is the terrain I expand by emphasizing the specificity of blackness, where an individual's subjectivity, various realities and experiences can be drawn onto the diverse topography of the epidermis. From there, the possibilities of portraying a fully-fledged person are endless. — Toyin Odutola

At MTV, it's very nice sometimes to be able to be very specific. Specificity really makes a news story interesting because you can color it in that personality. — Tabitha Soren

I'm always looking for a reason to say no when I'm approached about a big studio tentpole because your fear is will you be consumed into the anonymous machine, and it will suck out any specificity and point of view that you might hope to express. — Matt Reeves

The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc. (174, — David Harvey

This attribute of equality within the market system is terribly important; Marx understands it as being fundamental to how capitalism theoretically works. Aristotle, too, understood the need for commensurability and equality in exchange relations, but he couldn't figure out what lay behind it. Why not? Marx's answer is that "Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers" (152). In a slave-holding society there can be no value theory of the sort that we are going to find under capitalism. Again, note the historical specificity of the value theory to capitalism. — David Harvey

I think it was Coleridge who said everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. People who can't stand Aristotle's endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato's soaring generalities. People who can't stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle. — Robert M. Pirsig

First, it is a commitment to particularism, to giving priority to the specificity of particulars, not to abstractions and generalities that divert our attention away from concrete realities. Idealizations tend to be partial and distorting, obscuring the heterogeneity and complexity of actual experiences and concrete practices, which is why they do not provide an adequate standpoint for the diagnosis of social problems and injustices. — Jose Medina

Most uses of bioassay involving smooth muscle demand high sensitivity and specificity. — John Vane

I love a sense of humor, I love intelligence, I love specificity, I love surprises. I'm inspired to get out of bed in the morning and fill my day with good things. — Michael Stuhlbarg

It is striking how many spiritual writers react to the specificity of real prayer. It runs deeper than Greek Neoplatonism and the influence of Buddhist spirituality. Frankly, God makes us nervous when he gets too close. We don't want a physical dependence on him. It feels hokey, like we are controlling God. Deep down we just don't like grace. We don't want to risk our prayer not being answered. We prefer the safety of isolation to engaging the living God. To embrace the Father and thus prayer is to accept what one pastor called "the sting of particularity."4 Our dislike of asking is rooted in our desire for independence. — Paul E. Miller

What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get - the more specificity you harvest - the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. — Gregory Maguire

Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity. — Nicholson Baker

The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted in 2002, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes.3 Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that the United States would conduct a lethal strike outside an "area of active hostilities" only if a target represents a "continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons," without providing any sense of the internal process used to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or tried.4 The implicit message on drone strikes from the Obama administration has been Trust, but don't verify.5 — Jeremy Scahill

I cite too the ordinary fears of mortality the inspection of a fast-growing mole on the side of the nose blood in the stool a painful injury or the mournful witness of the slow death of a parent all this is given to all men as well as the starting awake in the nether hours of the night from such glutinous nightmare that on'e self name relationships nationality place in life all data of specificity wipe out amnesiatically asiatically you don't even know the idea human it is such a low hour of the night and he shares it with all of us. — E.L. Doctorow

This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance. — Douglas R. Hofstadter

But where was he going to go, exactly? It was not considered the thing to look panicked or even especially concerned about graduation, but everything about the world after Brakebills felt dangerously vague and under-thought to Quentin. What was he going to do? What exactly? Every ambition he'd ever had in his life had been realized the day he was admitted to Brakebills, and he was struggling to formulate a new one with any kind of practical specificity. This wasn't Fillory, where there was some magical war to be fought. There was no Watcherwoman to be rooted out, no great evil to be vanquished, and without that everything else seemed so mundane and penny-ante. No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters. — Lev Grossman

I think people can be trusted to know what makes them unhappy. Maybe we don't always know what we want exactly, but we can usually say what we don't with a fair amount of specificity. — Ann Aguirre

The more money you spend, the more you need to make back, and the more pressure there is to appeal to everyone - which to the studio means that the specificity and uniqueness must be watered down. But I think mass audiences like things that are more specific and tend to have a voice, like 'Napoleon Dynamite' or 'Superbad.' — Casey Wilson

Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political anymore, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears. — Jean Baudrillard

EAMES: Try this... "MY FATHER ACCEPTS THAT I WANT TO CREATE FOR MYSELF, NOT FOLLOW IN HIS FOOTSTEPS."
COBB: That might work.
ARTHUR: Might? We'll have to do better than that.
EAMES: Thanks for the contribution, Arthur.
ARTHUR: Forgive me for wanting a little specificity, Eames. — Christopher J. Nolan

Yet Gotama's Dhamma is more than just a series of axioms. It is to be lived rather than simply adopted and believed in. It entails that one embrace this world in all its contingency and specificity, with all its ambiguity and flaws. — Stephen Batchelor

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity. — Walter Mosley

Record labels, which used to have complete control, are essentially irrelevant. The process of a band exposing itself to the world is extremely democratic and there are no barriers. Music is no longer a commodity, it's an environment, or atmospheric element. Consumers have much more choice and you see people indulging in the specificity of their tastes dramatically more. They only bother with music they like. — Steve Albini

To his ear, of course, she suffered some from that malady of her generation- an almost laconic indifference toward speaking concisely- a circling and avoidance of linguistic specificity that bordered on a verbal form of shoulder-shrugging. — Steve Amick

Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature. — Jonathan Culler

Specificity refers to the ability of any medicine to discriminate between its intended target and its host. Killing a cancer cell in a test tube is not a particularly difficult task: the chemical world is packed with malevolent poisons that, even in infinitesimal quantities, can dispatch a cancer cell within minutes. The trouble lies in finding a selective poison - a drug that will kill cancer without annihilating the patient. Systemic therapy without specificity is an indiscriminate bomb. For an anticancer poison to become a useful drug, Meyer knew, it needed to be a fantastically nimble knife: sharp enough to kill cancer yet selective enough to spare the patient. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. — Terry Tempest Williams

Brains operate ... not by logic but by pattern recognition. This process is not precise, as is logic and mathematics. Instead, it trades off specificity and precision, if necessary, to increase its range. It is likely, for example, that early human thought proceeded by metaphor, which, even with the late acquisition of precise means such as logic and mathematical thought, continues to be a major source of imagination and creativity in adult life. — Gerald Edelman

[Wild animals], and the beautiful landscapes that sustain them ... possess a value and a virtue regardless of our dwindling connection with them. It seems that there is a virtue and a wisdom in keeping some things beyond our reach: that the protection of wilderness itself is imperative ... We have touched, and are consuming, everything. The world is very old, and we are so new. I like the feeling of awe
what the late writer Wallace Stegner called 'the birth of awe'
in beholding wild country not reduced by man. I like to remember that it is wild country that gives rise to wild animals; and that the marvelous specificity of wild animals reminds us to wake up, to let our senses be inflamed by every scent and sound and sight and taste and touch of the world. I like to remember that we are not here forever, and not here alone, and that the respect with which we behold the wild world matters, if anything does. — Rick Bass

The Middleman: "So what's it going to be? Keep the secret or death?"
Wendy Watson: "What do you think?"
The Middleman: "Ma'am specificity is the soul of all good communication. — Javier Grillo-Marxuach

What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told. — Paolo Bacigalupi

France has a specificity - the market players who provide Internet access are the telecom operators, and all of the players are French. They had a habit of, let's say, getting along with each other, and the prices traditionally were very high. — Xavier Niel

This is who you are, I thought, and my eyes were wet with love for myself and my lovers and for the world. How wonderful and strange it is to be alive! How uneven we are, and how lucky, in our delirious specificity and holy broken forms. — Justin Taylor

I mean, on virtually every major issue before this country that is the natural purview of the federal government, it's important to have some specificity about what you're going to do if you want to be the president. And so I agree that, up until this point, it hasn't been a huge factor. — Marco Rubio

In truth, "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" isn't about Sept. 11. It's about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies - or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers - and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage. — Manohla Dargis

Thought is power, as is desire, but neither is enough unless it is backed by faith, specificity, and the desire to see to it that it becomes. — Stephen Richards

I think something that I can't name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that kind of curiosity. — George Saunders

The advantage of writing from experience is that it often provides you with details that you would never think of yourself, no matter how rich your imagination. And specificity in description is something every writer should strive for. — Christopher Paolini

The lesson Arendt drew was that a beautiful soul is not enough, for "it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration." To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls "specificity," the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community. — Adam Kirsch

Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity. — Anatole Broyard

The Universe responds to specificity. — Romany Malco

As has repeatedly been stated, the underlying hypothesis, which in a number of cases has been supported by direct experimental evidence, is that each gene controls the production, function, and specificity of a particular enzyme. — Edward Lawrie Tatum

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal. — Bonnie Jo Campbell

Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense. — James Sallis

Specificity of time and place drop away and one starts to think about the picture, as much as what it is of. — Uta Barth

The kind of sleep that I had during my own film [Certified Copy] screening in Cannes is different. It's not because of the specificity of the film. It was because of my relationship as an author to this film. Usually when I take my films to festivals, I feel incredibly anxious about them. I wonder how it will be received, how the audience will react. I feel deeply responsible for them. Whereas this time, I didn't have that responsibility on my shoulders. — Abbas Kiarostami

I've never had a "hankering" to direct. I can perform, but I can't write on that level. I tend to go off on tangents. Directing also requires a kind of specificity and I don't have it. — Robin Williams

Specificity is what makes good storytelling, and good storytelling is what makes money, and making money is then what encourages new producers to invest in different stories about Asians. — Constance Wu

Desire I think has less to do with possession than with participation, the will to involve oneself in the body of the world, in the principle of things expressing itself in splendid specificity, a handful of images: a lover's irreplaceable body, the roil and shimmer of the sea overshot with sunlight, a handful of cherries, the texture and weight of a word. The word that seems most apt is partake ... We can say we partake of something but we may just as accurately say we take part in something' we are implicated in another being, which is always the beginning of wisdom, isn't it- that involvement which enlarges us, which engages the heart, which takes out of the routine limitations of self? — Mark Doty

Becaise I love God, I want to handle his truth with accuracy, clarity, and specificity. I want to build bridges of understanding from the wisdom of the Word to the details of people's lives. And because I love people, I will not be satisfied with lobbing grenades of general truth at them. Rather, through good questions, committed listening, and careful interpretation, I will enter their world with the understanding necessary to bring Christ's help to where it is really needed. — Paul David Tripp

There is no agreement on the extent to which metabolism could develop independently of a genetic material. In my opinion, there is no basis in known chemistry for the belief that long sequences of reactions can organize spontaneously
and every reason to believe that they cannot. The problem of achieving sufficient specificity, whether in aqueous solution or on the surface of a mineral, is so severe that the chance of closing a cycle of reactions as complex as the reverse citric acid cycle, for example, is negligible. — Leslie Orgel

Given its diverse meanings and lack of specificity, the word "scientism" should be dropped. But if it's to be kept, I suggest we level the playing field by introducing the term religionism, which I'll define as "the tendency of religion to overstep its boundaries by making unwarranted statements about the universe, or by demanding unearned authority." Religionism would include clerics claiming to be moral authorities, arguments that scientific phenomena give evidence for God, and unsupported statements about the nature of a god and how he interacts with the world. And here we find no lack of examples, including believers who blame natural disasters on homosexuality, tell us that God doesn't want us to use condoms, argue that the acceptance of evolution by scientists is a conspiracy, and insist that human morality and the universe's "fine-tuning" are evidence for God. — Jerry A. Coyne

I think references, where they fit organically, are great. It's great to do a show that's real and relatable, and so much of what is real, is using real things and instances that are specific. Specificity is the best tool you can have, as a writer. — Mindy Kaling

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people. — Mike Mills

We live in capitalism, and capitalism is defined by the production line, and the production line is defined by specificity. If you see yourself as an artist, which I do, then you can't be limited by that. You can't let somebody tell you, 'Well, you can only draw this kind of picture or write that kind of book.' — Walter Mosley

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity, it will be universal. — David Schwimmer

If there is a lack of specificity in Grossman's description of the town and the walkers, and if the story perhaps sometimes becomes lost and confusing, then it is because the landscape and its inhabitants are really shadows, creatures of an interior world, whose journey and whose quest are within. Falling Out of Time is short, and clearly a deeply personal book, but its importance and impact ought not to be underestimated. — Ian Sansom

A newly born genre never supplants or replaces any already existing genres. Each new genre merely supplements the old ones, merely widens the circle of already existing genres. For every genre has its own predominant sphere of existence, in which it is irreplaceable. Thus the appearance of the polyphonic novel does not nullify or in any way restrict the further productive development of monologic forms of the novel (biographical, historical, the novel of everyday life, the novel-epic, etc.), for there will always continue to exist and expand those spheres of existence, of man and nature, which require precisely objectified and finalizing, that is monological, forms of artistic cognition. But again we repeat: the thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere in which this consciousness exists, in all its depth and specificity, cannot be reached through a monologic artistic approach. — Mikhail Bakhtin

The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific. — Peter Levi

Specificity is the soul of narrative. — John Hodgman

I don't want to think that anything is off limits for me to write about, but I also don't want to intrude on anybody's life, which is why there's very little specificity or names in the songs I write. — J. D. Souther

It is unlikely that you'll have anything emerge from MEF (Major Economies Forum) by way of detailed programmatic specificity. — Kevin Rudd

The iPod has taken away the whole platinum record sales prospect. Sincerity and specificity are going to be the hot commodities in music. Everybody can have anything that they want, so now it gets into what specifically you have to give. — Eric Lewis

Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made. — David Mitchell

Honesty was a thing that could never be a thing. In a blaze of hubris and misplaced enthusiasm, we kowtowed to it, thinking it would make us better people, but conveniently forgetting that an abstraction was incompatible with the specificity of a human's needs and wants. — Erin Bomboy

There's a specificity of language that's required in Shakespeare that most drama students in England deal with - a specificity of language that is somehow not as clear in a lot of American schools. — James Avery

That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence. — Kehinde Wiley

Everything we do on 'Luck' is absolutely no different than if we'd had been doing it in a feature film. There's no short cuts. The specificity of what every single line might mean. Everything Dustin Hoffman does. Kevin Dunn is as authentic in the last scene of the last episode as he is in the first scene of the first episode. — Michael Mann

One bit in or out of focus makes the difference between our bodies being ourselves and our being part of a group. I want to melt the idea of specificity and blend individuality into the crowd. — Ross Bleckner

Jewish, black, Filipino, whatever the specificity is, it's specificity that makes a good story. And I think people are tired of seeing the same old shtick on network television. It's just a group of white people hanging out talking about their jobs. Who cares? We've seen that. — Rachel Bloom

I truly believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among ... then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home ... If we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put ... then I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation. — Terry Tempest Williams

If the results of the present study on the chemical nature of the transforming principle are confirmed, then nucleic acids must be regarded as possessing biological specificity the chemical basis of which is as yet undetermined. — Oswald Theodore Avery

Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application. — George Saunders