Quotes About Concepts

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.

Marxism-Leninism offered little guidance to rural Afghan society, with its ancient concepts and ways.

Concepts create idols; only wonder understands anything.

Concepts create idols; only wonder grasps anything.

As earl as the seventeenth century, John Locke recognized that in the realm of abstract notions each language is allowed to carve up its own concepts -- or "specific ideas" as he called them -- in its own way.

simple concepts – here, parts of the body from 'head' to 'heel' and from 'breast' to 'intestines' – are swept out of their original environment and carried into the domain of spatial relations.

Chaos and instability, concepts only beginning to acquire formal definitions, were not the same at all. A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances.

Names are not the things they name. Classes are not coextensive with subclasses.

the recognition that human language has limits, that people choose concepts that correspond only faintly to things in the real world, like the shadows of ghosts.

The mind generally does not compulsively continue to unearth additional options. It sacrifices concepts in order to reach a speedy decision.

Unfortunately, a lot of the concepts in the Bible are based on ancient mythology that doesn't fit the findings of science.

Chains do more than bargain down prices from suppliers or divide fixed costs across a lot of units. They rapidly spread economic discovery - the scarce and costly knowledge of what retail concepts and operational innovations actually work.

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space - abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms.

The general statement that the mental faculties are class concepts, belonging to descriptive psychology, relieves us of the necessity of discussing them and their significance at the present stage of our inquiry.

The English don't like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It's alright if they come from an 'intellectual,', but from a pop star you're getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn't rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you're in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn't it?

Good, we wanted good: to set the world right. We didn't lack integrity: we lacked humility. What we wanted was not innocently wanted. Precepts and concepts, the arrogance of theologians, to beat with a cross, to institute with blood, to build the house with bricks of crime, to declare obligatory communion. Some became secretaries to the secretary to the General Secretary of the Inferno.

No matter how compelling or beautiful they may be, words appeal in the main to the linear, thinking mind that thinks in words.

What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.

When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history's basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.

New ideas occur when a lot of random notions churn together until they coalesce.

Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.

The strongest feelings I have about printing always return to three simple concepts: the sculptural nature of type, the inevitableness of its arrangement on the page, and the authority of its impression.