Quotes About Concepts

And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.

John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I'm working on parts. I'm working on concepts.

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

But now we have with us some concepts that greatly alter the whole understanding of things. Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts into a practical, down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more practical or down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along—the repair of an old motorcycle.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

Without the discovery of uniformities there can be no concepts, no classifications, no formulations, no principles, no laws; and without these no science can exist.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

Images of the world are Renormalization Group fixed points.

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

Science advances, not by the accumulation of new facts, but by the continuous development of new concepts.

What is algebra exactly; is it those three-cornered things?

... mathematics is the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose.

The techniques have galloped ahead of the concepts. We have moved away from studying the complexity of the organism; from processes and organisation to composition.

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.

Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts

In a world beset by fundamentalists of both believing and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.

The Sun has come to represent enlightenment and salvation across many cultures. I think that if we remove such comforting concepts we are required to do more soul searching but eventually our eyes become accustomed to the dark and our lives become richer.

Vedas are the earliest sacred scriptures of Hinduism and are full of abstract hymns containing esoteric concepts. The Puranas were written later and use stories and characters to make those esoteric concepts more accessible.

All the things that we value—justice, equality, free speech, human rights—are actually concepts churned out of imagination, just like ideas such as God, heaven, hell, rebirth and immortality. We may classify these ideas as secular or religious, rational or supernatural, value one over the other, but they are essentially creations of humans, by humans, for humans. They are artificial constructions, not natural phenomena. They have no independent existence outside humans.

Imagination helps us create concepts, which filter our sensory inputs and ultimately impact our emotional experience. Thus,

our breath resides within our flesh, our mind resides within our breath, our concepts reside within our mind and our emotions reside within our concepts. We can only see the flesh and breath. We can sense the emotions by the way they are expressed through the body and the breath. Sensations received by the mind are filtered by concepts to create emotions. Emotions

Or perhaps we were short-changed by evolution, and lack the concepts needed to understand the relationship between brains and consciousness. Cats can't do calculus and monkeys can't do quantum theory, so why assume that Homo sapiens can demystify consciousness?

Life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision.