Quotes About Structure

The artistic part of us all - I think that the easiest way to appreciate this - is through architecture. Architecture is very impressive; the beauty of buildings, temples.

We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.

The plan is the body

building, all tinted glass and natural lighting, was nothing like the cement tomb where

You can shift to another structure that will support you in creating the results you want, but never from the motivation of ridding yourself of structural conflict. Why? Because creating is different from solving or eliminating.

Once a structure exists, energy moves through that structure by the path of least resistance. In other words, energy moves where it is easiest for it to go.

A Foundational system serves not so much to prop up the house of mathematics as to clarify the principles and methods by which the house was built in the first place.

Chaos serves no social end.

the haiku. It has, of course, a three-part prosodic structure, five syllables–seven syllables–five syllables. But, as written in Japanese, it is usually represented in a single line and there is a long controversy about whether it should be translated as a one-line or a three-line poem.

Fussing over food was important. It gave a shape to the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner; beginning, middle, end.

Good composition is like a suspension bridge - each line adds strength and takes none away.

Good composition is like a suspension bridge, each line adds strength and takes none away. Thus a work of art is finished from the beginning, as Whistler has said. If there are only ten lines, then they are the ten lines which comprehend the most. Composition is the freedom of a thing to be its greatest best by being in its right place in the organization. It is a just sense of the relation of things.

Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.

No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?

The most feared situation is to end up inadvertently in the wrong place at the wrong time and get blamed. Yet this is exactly what happens in a structure that systematically diffuses responsibility. It is because managers fear blame-time that they diffuse responsibility; however such a diffusion inevitably means that someone, somewhere is going to become a scapegoat when things go wrong.

Works of architecture were, in that context, embodiments of the ideals on which the life of institutions depended.

Everywhere there is much complaining about too few leaders. We have too few because most institutions are structured so that only a few—only one at the time—can emerge.

In the context of religious leadership, tinkering with structure is not a first choice of means for building or sustaining quality in an institution. Leadership is the prime concern!

But now that 50 percent of the young people are involved in some post-secondary education, the structure of the institution and its impact on values have become a matter of concern.

But the conventional practice, particularly in a large foundation, is to delegate administration to a hierarchical staff structure, much as a business board would do it. And when bureaucratic inertia takes over, as it does—in time—in all institutions that are so structured, the usual remedy is to install a new top administrator who will build some new life into it.

Too much of the public concern for the quality of society is still devoted to caring directly for individuals and not enough attention goes to caring for institutions and the way they are structured. Structural flaws can cause harm to individuals; conversely, conceptually sound and ably administered institutions can build people and enrich society. All too often we seem to disregard this important influence that institutions can have on people.

innovation is discouraged in most bureaucracies

Kai Erikson has suggested that the idea that disasters bring communities together is very often far from true: 'for the most part . . . trauma damages the texture of community' for it often 'forces open whatever fault lines once ran silently through the structure of the larger community'.

Ours is a psychological age rather than an institutional one. What used to be done for us by institutional structures and through ritual process, we now have to do inside ourselves, for ourselves. Ours is a culture of the individual rather than the collective.