Quotes About Concepts

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.

All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.

Religion is the organized attempt to understand spiritual experience, to interpret it with words and concepts, and to use this interpretation as the source of moral guidelines for the religious community.

The drive toward Life is protective, thoughtful, vulnerable, and invested in immaculate love. It is this last that marks the difference between a wise heart muddy with real life experiences in the trenches and a dry heart that functions on rote concepts alone.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

I also think we need to maintain distinctions - the doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology, and we should resist the temptation, which sometimes scientists give in to, to try to assimilate the concepts of theology to the concepts of science.

Goals and objectives are based on theories and foundations.

When you build your network, keep yourself open to new ideas, concepts, and theories. Some of them may even contradict and challenge long-held points of view. This isn't beneficial only to someone in my profession, but to every line of work.

Since I stayed in a colony where either one was an engineer or a scientist, everybody thought I would be a scientist. This was the expectation everybody had apart from my parents. Honestly, I, too, wanted to be a scientist. I think it was the way Dad would explain us scientific theories and concepts that made the subject more intriguing.

Ideas are not thoughts; the thought respects the boundaries that the idea ignores thereby failing to realize itself.

In class I was out of place because I could so easily be distracted from concepts by metaphors and facts. Clearly, I was less intelligent than I had hoped, and I felt frustrated by an inarticulate notion that something was wrong if old material was processed as if the immediate past and the uncertain future had no bearing on it.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland.

The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.

Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don't think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex.

For instance, I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don't think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex.

Good and evil, those are concepts man has made. And man is better, really, than the Savage Garden.

My novels are high concept. I guess big ideas interest me more than, say, the minutiae of domestic life.

Beasts abstract not.

Ancient fears of merging with, surrendering to, or being invaded by unfamiliar concepts, alien cultures, or different religions result in a kind of fundamentalism that causes spiritual evolution to become petrified.

How People Learn. If you want people to be able to pay attention, don't start with details. Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions. Meaning before details.

Why is your species so full of horrible ideas?