Quotes About Coherence

Tocqueville presciently claimed that the strength of the American government was to a large extent the result of its democratic incapacity to run the nation and the economy as coherently and effectively as a monarchical or autocratic government might run it.

Right now, for most people, these four dimensions are aligned in different directions. Your mind is thinking one way; your emotions pull you another way; your physical body another way; your energy another way. This makes you a potential calamity, an accident waiting to happen. You are being hijacked—you are being pulled apart, in four different ways.

Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.

All things are linked and knitted together, and the knot is sacred, neither is there anything in the world, that is not kind and natural in regard of any other thing, or, that hath not some kind of reference and natural correspondence with whatsoever is in the world besides.

What follows coheres with what went before. Not like a random catalogue whose order is imposed upon it arbitrarily, but logically connected. And just as what exists is ordered and harmonious, what comes into being betrays an order too. Not a mere sequence, but an astonishing concordance.

and how all things that are, concur in the cause of one another's being, and by what manner of connection and concatenation all things happen.

The power of an intention multiplies, depending upon how many people are thinking the same thought at the same time.

Anyway, the same words can be found in both books, which makes sense because they're written by the same author.

It was because historians made it sound so coherent, so purposeful, so complete. They'd take an entire century and impose a meaning on it, a personality, a destiny-and his was, of course, a lie.

In fiction if nowhere else, I must have a little meaning, a little coherence, or I will go mad.

I'd known for a long time why I loved history. It was because the historians made it sound so coherent, so purposeful, so complete. They'd take an entire century and impose a meaning on it, a personality, a destiny—and this was, of course, a lie.

In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.

Puzzle pieces don't always connect do they?

It's strange. With all this harmonious interplay of numbers you would have expected the whole system to be a precisely coherent whole. It isn't. There are echoes here from the scientific view of a world formed by broken symmetry, subject to quantum uncertainty and (so far) defying a precise comprehensive 'theory of everything'. Is this why the 'near miss' is so often more beautiful than perfection?

Driven by a concern with institutions, we re-enter the world of the behavioralists. But we do so not in protest against the notion of rational choice, but rather in an effort to understand how rationality on the part of individuals leads to coherence at the level of society. (Bates 1988, p. 399)

Two truths cannot contradict one another.

It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others.

As members of the same species, human beings broadly share notions and precepts of morality, of what is socially regarded as a proper conduct. But again, there is no reason to think that these notions and precepts should fully converge and cohere between different people and different communities, or even in the minds of the individuals themselves.

you start eating like a person who goes to the farmers' market, your brain begins guiding you in the direction of a coherent identity, and adding pumpkin seeds to your salad doesn't sound like such a crazy thing anymore; it sounds natural.

Nature is good at connectivity. The impact of diverse human activities is observed and absorbed throughout nature. Everything is linked. Nature has no problem with coherence. Ecosystems react with their own logic.

To create greater convergence, we need more intergration.

My coherence-creating groups are going to put out all this mischief-mongership in the world.

among this pool are these: (a) explanatory power, (b) explanatory scope, (c) plausibility, (d) degree of ad hoc-ness and (e) conformity with other beliefs. The more explanatory power and scope and the more plausibility and conformity with other beliefs an explanation has, the better it is. The less ad hoc (adjusted, contrived, artificial) the explanation, the better as well. The trick is to subject all explanation options to these

In other words, I have no truck for anyone who goes out and does an eclectic building.