Undifferentiated Quotes & Sayings

Amazon is now the definitive source for data about whole sets of products - fungible consumer products. EBay is the authoritative source for the secondary market of those products. Google is the authority for information about facts, but they're relatively undifferentiated. — Tim O'Reilly

That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. — George Orwell

Power to the people' can only
be put into practice when the power exercised by social elites is
dissolved into the people. Each individual can then take control of
his daily life. If 'Power to the people' means nothing more than
power to the 'leaders' of the people, then the people remain an
undifferentiated, manipulatable mass, as powerless after the revolution as they were before. In the last analysis, the people can never
have power until they disappear as a 'people. — Murray Bookchin

Intense fatigue or illness may also weaken the control of the cortex. Hence we find tired or sick persons responding to threats with a greater degree of undifferentiated anxiety. In psychoanalytic terms, we would speak of this as regression. — Rollo May

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . . — Sebastian Faulks

Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality. — E.L. Doctorow

Our larger body is eternity. Eventually, we return to the source in its undifferentiated form, in its absolute form, which is both form and formlessness, but we exist in that sea all the time. — Frederick Lenz

White is fearful to gaze upon for too long: it is the color of shrouds; it is all-color, the prism fused, undifferentiated, linked wave to wave and particle to particle. — Chaim Potok

The forces of the sea give rise to imagination, which reflects them according to the nature and disposition of the perceiver. The sea itself is undifferentiated and without bias. — F.T. McKinstry

Understanding is the level immediately below Wisdom. It is on the level of Understanding that ideas exist separately, where they can be scrutinized and comprehended. While Wisdom is pure undifferentiated Mind, Understanding is the level where division exists, and where things are delineated and defined as separated objects. — Aryeh Kaplan

This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production, would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths. Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country's expansive destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the exceedingness of the possible over the real. — William James

To the extent that we retain the critical attitudes and destructive elements we have incorporated into our own personalities, we remain undifferentiated from our parents throughout our lifetime. — Lisa Firestone

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness. — Jerry Garcia

In our century even our dreams are alike, even dreams are things we sell. Undifferentiated, which is just another way of saying indifferent. — Karl Ove Knausgard

The rest were nondescript, as yet undifferentiated - yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyze. You scarcely knew they were there, until - bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marveling, to collect strange floating debris. — Dorothy L. Sayers

if you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business. — Peter Thiel

A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today's most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth. — Pope John Paul II

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. — Kurt Vonnegut

The question which haunts the dialectical culture is this: how to have unity without totally undifferentiated and meaningless oneness? If all things are basically one, the differences are meaningless, divisions false, and definitions are sophistications, in that the tyranny, or destiny, of oneness is the truth of all being. But, if all things are basically many, and if plurality is ultimate, then the world dissolves into unrelated particulars and becomes, as some thinkers insist, not a universe but a multiverse, and every atom is in a sense its own law and being. The first leads to the breakdown of differences and the liberty of atomistic individualism and particularity; the second is the breakdown of fundamental law into nihilism and the retreat of men and their arts into isolated and private universes — Rousas John Rushdoony

Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one's own life. — D.H. Lawrence

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time. — Bill McKibben

In that undifferentiated reality of the Self there is eternal bliss. All the phantoms of existence fade away. — Frederick Lenz

Give up identification with this mass of flesh as well as with what thinks it a mass. Both are intellectual imaginations. Recognise your true self as undifferentiated awareness, unaffected by time, past, present or future, and enter Peace. — Adi Shankara

In general, one's memories of any period must necessarily weaken as one moves away from it. One is constantly learning new facts, and old ones have to drop out to make way for them. At twenty I could have written the history of my schooldays with an accuracy which would be quite impossible now. But it can also happen that one's memories grow sharper after a long lapse of time, because one is looking at the past with fresh eyes and can isolate and, as it were, notice facts which previously existed undifferentiated among a mass of others. — George Orwell

However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises. — Warren E. Burger

Creative power is that receptive attitude of expectancy which makes a mold into which the plastic yet undifferentiated substance can flow and take the desired form. — Thomas Troward

She hated those boys and knew that they were stupid and hence their opinions were baseless and the impact of their lives on the planet would be measured only in undifferentiated emissions of methane and nitrates . . . but still. — J. Ryan Stradal

As for the public, the PR man, like the advertising expert and others who deal with people in the lump, including a number of would-be-statesmen and redeemers-at-large, conceive of that body as composed of non-ideographic units which are to be regarded not as ourselves but as, ultimately, gadgets of electrochemical circuitry operated by a push-button system of remote control. In fact, in dealing with the public in a purely technological society, the very notion of self is bypassed by various appeals to an undifferentiated unconscious, such appeals often having little or no relation to the vendible object or idea; in this connection history gives us to contemplate the fact that the psychologist J.B. Watson, the founder of American behaviorism, wound up in the advertising business. So history may become parable. — Robert Penn Warren

Progress is only possible by passing from a state of undifferentiated wholeness to differentiation of parts. — Ludwig Von Bertalanffy

A man is likewise form and expression, a written sign thrown unto boundless matter, an undifferentiated word of what is. I've therefore been created in the image of the inscriptions that, as a child, I used to project unto my bits of bone, stone, wood, and iron, probably even in the image of a single one of their words, a single one of their letters. — Mohammed Dib

To me, God is an intelligent, loving, conscious energy and why do I say that? Well you need energy to create. You have to have a source. It's undifferentiated energy which has intelligence or it couldn't create. — Bernie Siegel

During the last ten years of his life my father gradually lost the power of speech. At first he simply had trouble calling up certain words or would say similar words instead and then immediately laugh at himself. In the end he had only a handful of words left, and all his attempts at saying anything more substantial resulted in one of the last sentences he could articulate: 'That's strange.'
Whenever he said 'That's strange,' his eyes would express an infinite astonishment at knowing everything and being able to say nothing. Things lost their names and merged into a single, undifferentiated reality. I was the only one who by talking to him could temporarily transform that nameless infinity into the world of clearly named entities. — Milan Kundera

We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn't as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness — Gregory Maguire

The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated
faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the
features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is
this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found
myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or
the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel;
our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth
naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these
pavements are shells, bones and silence. — Virginia Woolf

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao. — Lao-Tzu

Fantasy is seductive and much more wonderful than reality, but you can't take it to the bank. It's always an escape. And if used as an escape, as in attending a movie or a show for a circumscribed period of time, it's fine. When it starts to become undifferentiated from reality, it leads to big trouble. — Woody Allen

Before the birth of all things, there existed an undifferentiated whole. A solitary void: unchanging, yet operating everywhere, without exhaustion. It is therefore considered the source of everything. I do not know its true name, although some call it Tao. If compelled to characterize it, I would simply call it great. For to be great implies that it is far-reaching, to be far-reaching implies distance, and to be distant implies returning to the source. Thus the Tao is great, Heaven is great, Earth is great, the wise person is also great. In the universe there are four great ones, and the wise person is one of them. The wise person follows the laws of Earth, Earth follows the laws of Heaven, and Heaven follows the law of Tao. The Tao, with nothing to follow, is natural unto itself. — Lao-Tzu

Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.
[ ... ]
We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. — Gene Wolfe

The Chinese used the symbol of tai chi, the undifferentiated reality - no separation, no left and right. — Frederick Lenz

Love the fading flowers as much as you love the undifferentiated which lasts forever. — Frederick Lenz

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities, rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of ourselves and of the places where we live, because your pale ale or sourdough bread or kimchi is going to taste nothing like mine or anyone else's. — Michael Pollan

'I am that I am,' said the Eternal. The Eternal - it is the race. One in substance - undifferentiated. One in time - stable and eternal. — Kadmi Cohen

Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath. — Michael Pollan

If I do not seem to be mentioning anything I've read lately, it is because I am in one of those periods of undifferentiated flux or something in which I am reading about fifty, at a minimum, books at once, so of course I seldom finish one. Eventually this phase will pass, and I'll discover I have about ten pages to go in all of them, and will sit down and systematically finish them, one after another. — Edward Gorey

Everything is part of one web, one matrix of existence, beyond discussion. This is our true self in its undifferentiated form. — Frederick Lenz

I attempted to see famines as broad "economic" problems (concentrating on how people can buy food, or otherwise get entitled to it), rather than in terms of the grossly undifferentiated picture of aggregate food supply for the economy as a whole. — Amartya Sen

Nay," he said. "Awareness is unbounded, undifferentiated, and is present in all things. It doth not distinguish between 'I' and all else, because it dwelleth in everything. Consciousness is a manifestation of awareness that is bounded and particular. It is concentrated in a single place and time, and is limited to a single point of view. Consciousness continually reacheth out toward awareness, to join it, but it cannot without giving up what it is. The grain of salt cannot experience the brine without dissolving. — Carolyn Ives Gilman

Another, more fluid metaphor for the world of thought gradually suggested itself to him, derived from his former voyages at sea. A philosopher who was trying to consider human understanding in all its aspects would behold beneath him a mass molded in calculable curves, streaked by currents which could be charted, and deeply furrowed by the pressure of winds and the heavy, inert weight of water. It seemed to him that the shapes which the mind assumes are like those great forms, born of undifferentiated water, which assail or replace each other on the surface of the deep; each concept collapses, eventually, to merge with its very opposite, like two waves breaking against each other only to subside into the same single line of white foam. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Do not be fooled by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth. — Pope Benedict XVI

In marketing terms, a commodity is an undifferentiated product that is just like its competitors. It isn't usually very innovative, and offers a similar set of features and price point compared to competitive products. In other words, its defining characteristic is its "sameness" compared to other similar products. When a product becomes a commodity, the price that it commands in the marketplace tends to erode. People aren't willing to pay extra for your product. They consider it and those of your competitors to be interchangeable, so no one company has an edge in sales. — Chuck Frey

Show respect to all. If you accept that all is undifferentiated oneness, and that all things are merely different aspects of that one thing (but vibrating at different frequencies), then you must respect yourself and everything and everyone around you. — Stephen Richards

the Singularity who hides behind the mask of the deity's personality. Worship of deities really means appreciating them for the skill with which they play their roles in the cosmic drama. You can also worship the One directly, but the One is undifferentiated, unqualified and absolute, while the world a jyotishi lives in is relative, qualified and differentiated. — Hart Defouw

Our personal shadow is the "hidden unconscious aspects of [ourselves], both good and bad, which the ego has either repressed or never recognized." It is all of the incompatible thoughts, feelings, desires, fantasies, and actions that we have suppressed and repressed into the personal unconscious, along with our more primitive, undifferentiated impulses and instincts. In the Freudian view of the psyche, it is what Freud identifies as the whole of the "unconscious." It is what I like to describe as the personal psychological garbage can of our psyches. — David Schoen

We see the man who blindly succumbs to a certain type of woman--how frequently a highly cultivated intellectual, for example, will become hopelessly entangled with the worst sort of strumpet because his feminine, emotional side is utterly undifferentiated; and equally familiar is the woman who for no apparent reason ties herself to a swindler or adventurer. — Jolande Jacobi

Can we simply address what it means to be human? What is available to us in this brief moment when the universe lifts up in the form of a human sentient body and being and we live out our seventy, eighty, or ninety years (if that) and then dissolve back into the undifferentiated ocean of potential? — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Academics have spent too much time trying to explain objectification, considering that there's an easy way to make white, Western men understand: You just have to go out in public somewhere poor. You become a thing. Your conscious and unique self becomes irrelevant, as a thousand eyes try to figure out how to best tap your wealth. And objectification begets objectification. The harassers become an undifferentiated mass themselves, made up of identical things that torment. — Elisabeth Eaves