Wholes Quotes & Sayings

My goal is that Julie and Brody do not become the other's half. They should be two wholes that become a greater one. That is the only way to overcome evil in the end. — Melissa D. Ellis

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures. — Jonathan Haidt

Where will you sleep?" he inquired, sitting down heavily on the bed. "No where," the Alien replied, its toneless voice dividing the word into two equally significant wholes. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Family was even a bigger word than I imagined, wide and without limitations, if you allowed it, defying easy definition. You had family that was supposed to be family and wasn't, family that wasn't family but was, halves becoming whole, wholes splitting into two; it was possible to lack whole, honest love and connection from family in lead roles, yet to be filled to abundance by the unexpected supporting players. — Deb Caletti

We are saved not as souls but as wholes. (All — N. T. Wright

Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away. — Robert James Waller

Nature (and that includes us) is not made up of parts within wholes. It is made up of wholes within wholes. All boundaries, national boundaries included, are fundamentally arbitrary. We invent them and then, ironically, we find ourselves trapped within them. But — Peter M. Senge

Don't get trapped into thinking people are halves instead of wholes. — David Levithan

At the conclusion of all our studies we must try once again to experience the human soul as soul, and not just as a buzz of bioelectricity; the human will as will, and not just a surge of hormones; the human heart not as a fibrous, sticky pump, but as the metaphoric organ of understanding. We need not believe in them as metaphysical entities
they are as real as the flesh and blood they are made of. But we must believe in them as entities; not as analyzed fragments, but as wholes made real by our contemplation of them, by the words we use to talk of them, by the way we have transmuted them to speech. We must stand in awe of them as unassailable, even though they are dissected before our eyes. — Melvin Konner

For a modern woman it is important to be supported and that there is equality in every aspect, and that it's not two halves that make a whole - it's two wholes that make a whole. — Katy Perry

There are still psychologists who, in a basic misunderstanding, think that gestalt theory tends to underestimate the role of past experience. Gestalt theory tries to differentiate between and-summative aggregates, on the one hand, and gestalten, structures, on the other, both in sub-wholes and in the total field, and to develop appropriate scientific tools for investigating the latter. — Max Wertheimer

As infants, we see the world in parts. There is the good - the things that feed and nourish us. There is the bad - the things that frustrate or deny us. As children mature, they come to see the world in more complex ways, realizing, for example, that beyond black and white, there are shades of gray. The same mother who feeds us may sometimes have no milk. Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes.4 With this integration, we learn to tolerate disappointment and ambiguity. And we learn that to sustain realistic relationships, one must accept others in their complexity. When we imagine a robot as a true companion, there is no need to do any of this work. — Sherry Turkle

Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes. — Sherry Turkle

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things. — Heraclitus

An intimate relationship does not banish loneliness. Only when we are comfortable with who we are can we truly function independently in a healthy way, can we truly function within a relationship. Two halves do not make a whole when it comes to a healthy relationship: it takes two wholes. — Patricia L. Fry

A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved. — George Eliot

It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence. — George Eliot

What started out as wishful thinking, angel given signs from above, was now just an imprisoned lot of dirty, broken pieces that used to belong to beautifully glistening wholes. — Elizabeth Lee

Evolution is the gradual development and stratification of progressive series of wholes, stretching from the inorganic beginnings to the highest level of spiritual creation. — Jan Smuts

LYNDA: Don't get trapped into thinking people are halves instead of wholes.
TINY: People are halves?
LYNDA: They're not trying to sell you on it yet, but believe me, they will. The idea that two is the ideal, and that one is only good as half of two. You are not a half, and you should never treat someone else like a half. Agreed?
TINY: Agreed! — David Levithan

The double role of living systems as parts and wholes requires the interplay of two opposite tendencies: an integrative tendency to function as part of a larger whole, and a self-assertive, or self-organizing tendency to preserve individual autonomy (see Chapter 7). — Fritjof Capra

Ultimately, it is impossible to separate word and deed ministry because human beings are integrated wholes - body and soul. It is both natural and necessary that ministers of mercy also minister the Word while they are in the process of meeting human needs, and that communicators of the gospel also show compassion with regard to the material needs of the people they are trying to reach. An integrative ministry means weaving together word and deed ministry as much as possible. — Timothy Keller

There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The abstracting of visual elements in order to recognize their particularity has become automatic, but seeing, combining, and creating them as integrated 'wholes' will remain a lifelong challenge. — Freeman Patterson

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way. — Charles Jencks

Free men and women ... can think across time, viewing their own lives, inclusive of past, present, and future, as architectural wholes, static in mental space. They can therefore see, as others cannot, the cracks and buttresses of repeated action, the points of stress, the established framework. They are not perfect; but they are less imperfect than we by a full dimension of being. — Robert Grudin

Environmental history ... refer[s] to the past contact of man with his total habitat ... The environmental historian like the ecologist [s]hould think in terms of wholes, of communities, of interrelationships, and of balances. — Roderick Nash

To qualify as a Seeker, it was necessary to show a high serendipity factor. In my experimental behaviour pool as a child, I had exhibited such a factor, and had been selected for special training forthwith. I had taken additional courses in Philosophical, Alpha-humerals, Incidental Tetrachotomy, Apunctual Synchronicity, Homoontogenesis, and other subjects, ultimately qualifying as a Prime Esemplastic Seeker. In other words, I put two and two together in situations where other people were not thinking about addition. I connected. I made wholes greater than parts. Mine was an invaluable profession in a cosmos increasingly full of parts. — Brian W. Aldiss

Two halves don't make a whole. Two wholes make a whole. In my relationship, I was giving myself away to make the relationship better, but in actuality, wasn't doing better by doing that. I became less of a man. — Jason Mraz

Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. — Simon Reynolds

The law of mosaics: how to deal with parts in the absence of wholes. — Ronald Sukenick

I must conquer my loneliness alone. I must be happy with myself or I have nothing to offer you. Two halves have little choice but to join; and yes, they do make a whole. But two wholes when they coincide ... that is beauty. That is love ... — Peter McWilliams

The ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes — T. S. Eliot

There are wholes, the behavior of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. It is the hope of Gestalt theory to determine the nature of such wholes. — Max Wertheimer

I do think that at least when we're thinking about ourselves as living, conscious, human beings we are dynamic wholes. — Alva Noe

This was one of those situations in which the whole is not enough. Perhaps because there were other "wholes," or because the "whole" made up by the speaker and his personal world rotates like a planet, and the combined effect of rotation and orbital movement is to keep certain sides of certain planets permanently hidden. — Cesar Aira

If the resources of different nations are treated as exclusive properties of these nations as wholes, if international economic relations, instead of being relations between individuals, become increasingly relations between whole nations organized as trading bodies, they inevitably become the source of friction and envy between whole nations. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia. — Simon Reynolds

Real scientists investigate parts, not wholes. But this diminishes the goals of true science. What most scientists are doing today really should be called technology, not science. — T. Colin Campbell

Poetry, like sanctity, is the orchestration of multiple attributes into vast, compelling wholes. — William Everson

Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical
that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental ... — Thomas Nagel

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. — Donna J. Haraway

His anguished mind writhed with contradictions. He was a man of parts and halfs, in a time of wholes and absolutes. — Alexander Rose

If you want a full man, you need to be the full version of yourself. Never expect anyone to complete you. Don't be two halves to make a whole, be two wholes and make something more. — Katy Evans

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments. — Susan Sontag

One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable - embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak? — Henry James