Quotes About Concepts

According to Müller, during this time language still was not capable of expressing anything that required conceptual thought. It contained no abstract nouns, such as beauty, or any adjectives, such as beautiful, because such words generalized concepts from direct observations. Thus, he claimed that the earliest languages consisted entirely of nouns that referred to substantial objects and verbs describing actions.17

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. —Albert Einstein

Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.

All beliefs. All concepts. All thoughts. Yes, they're all false; all bullshit. Of course they are. Not just religions and spiritual teachings, but all philosophies, all ideas, all opinions. If you're going for the truth, you're not taking any of them with you. Nothing that says two, not one, survives.

Infinity is beautiful; it destroys everything it touches. It annihilates all concepts, all beliefs, all sense of self. No teacher, teaching, book or practice could ever be as effective as simply allowing the thought of infinity to slowly devour you.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language.

functioned—I realized that first impressions about hotel rooms are like first loves: neither is based on the concept of how, over time, one can come to appreciate the pleasures of durability over infatuation.

Contrary to rationalism, there are no a priori concepts; but contrary to empiricism, there are axiomatic concepts about which we can be certain; contrary to both schools, perception is not awareness of images, impressions, or sense data, but of objects that exist independent of our awareness of them.

One who states and proposes this scheme makes several claims about the Dinge: that they are not in space and time, for example, and more poignantly, that our concepts don't apply to them (applying only to the phenomena), so that we cannot refer to or think about them. But if we really can't think the Dinge, then we can't think about them (and can't whistle them either); if we can't think about them, we can't so much as entertain the thought that there are such things. The incoherence is patent.

When I write Superboy and other DC characters, it's about boiling them down to core concepts.

The advantage of the internet is that it has taken away the charade of politics. China has heard of democracy and people know about certain concepts they wouldn't have previously.

A great amount has been talked and written about what constitutes a sufficient balance and what really is meant by the concepts of 'balance' and 'deterrence'.

I think the good thing about Macklemore is that he is very precise about what he gets involved in. As you can tell, he's very passionate about what he puts his name on, because he talks about things people don't usually talk about, and his concepts are very, very passionate.

Jerry Fodor, a fierce critic of pragmatist approaches to mind and language, puts this sort of criticism in a nutshell when he says: "First the pragmatist theory of concepts, then the theory theory of concepts, then holism, then relativism. So it goes" (Fodor 1994, p. 111).

The wild gatecrashes our civilised domains, and the domesticated escapes and runs riot. Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life - and the course of evolution itself - refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In doing so they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation.

If a word for a concept isn't in a language, then its culture simply doesn't have the referent the missing word would symbolize." "Oh, twaddle, Stinky! Animals fight—and ants even conduct wars. Are you trying to tell me they have to have words for it before they can do it?

A verbalizing race has words for every old concept . . . and creates new words or new definitions for old words whenever a new concept comes along. Always! A nervous system that is able to verbalize cannot avoid verbalizing; it's automatic.

Mike puts us into trance, pours language - definitions, idioms, concepts - into us for moments that feel like hours... then we dictate at once what he has poured into us, while it's still fresh. But it can't be just anybody. It requires a sharp accent and the ability to join trance rapport and then spill out the results. Sam, for example, has everything but the accent - he manages, God knows how, to speak Martian with a Bronx accent. Can't use him, it would cause endless errata.

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.

The third semantic circuit handles artifacts and makes a "map" (reality-tunnel) which can be passed on to others, even across generations. These "maps" may be paintings, blueprints, words, concepts, tools (with instructions on use transmitted verbally), theories, music, etc.

The problem seems to lie in different concepts of what we mean by a Hidden Variable. Dr. Bohm, the man who suggested the design of the Aspect experiments, means something that Einstein and other proto-Hidden Variable theorists had not conceived. From Bohm's point of view, the Aspect experiments weaken the case for local hidden variables, but they tend to support the concept of non-local hidden variables.

Of course. Chaos and the Abyss are metaphors, of the special kind that we have called metaphors about metaphors. They attempt to describe what is left when abstractions like the leaf and the average — linguistic reality-tunnels — are dropped from our minds.

Religion idolizes concepts and avoids personal experience.