Quotes About Generality

Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality.

It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have preference above the accurate.

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though different traditions may emphasize different aspects, it is only the interplay of these antithetic forces and the struggle for their synthesis that constitute the life, usefulness, and supreme value of mathematical science.

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality.

Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.

The certainty of mathematics depends on its complete abstract generality.

Although well meant, many things that are designed just to be general purpose often end up satisfying no purpose. Software components should, first and foremost, be designed for use and to fulfill that use well. Effective generality comes from understanding, and understanding leads to simplification.

The generality of friends puts us out of conceit with friendship; just as the generality of religious people puts us out of conceit with religion.

Are you a meaningful specific or a wandering generality ?

I have the vagary of taking a lively interest in mathematical subjects only where I may anticipate ingenious association of ideas and results recommending themselves by elegance or generality.

Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

A succession of philosophers and historians spent their time studiously attempting to say nothing as successfully as possible. The less that was successfully said, the greater the relief and acclaim. No attempt to address any idea, history or fact was able to pass without first being put through the pit-stop of the modern academy. No generality could be attempted and no specific could be uttered.

For parlor use, the vague generality is a life saver.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

We predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state of affairs of the highest generality.

The basic evil of Russell's logic, as also of mine in the Tractatus, is that what a proposition is is illustrated by a few commonplace examples, and then presupposed as understood in full generality.

Good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality.

My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with aha -- while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over.

What can I tell you further? I once lived among humankind, and found them in their generality to be cruel and cold, and yet could mention the names of three or four that were like angels. I suppose we measure the importance of our days by those few angels we spy among us, and yet aren't like them.

The mathematician could formulate only a handful of interesting theorems without defining concepts beyond those contained in the axioms and that the concepts outside those contained in the axioms are defined with a view of permitting ingenious logical operations which appeal to our aesthetic sense both as operations and also in their results of great generality and simplicity.

When a man believes all women are alike, but wants women from guessing, what does he do? He keeps his beliefs to himself, and pretends, to allay her suspicions, that what she has in common with other women is precisely what makes her different. Thus her sexuality eventually became synonymous with her individuality. The sex privatization of women is the process whereby women are blinded to their generality as a class which renders them invisible as individuals to the male eye.

I wish I could be honest and true, but truth as I see it is not something abstract, a pious generality---It is justice at work, righteous, demanding, disciplined, sincere and unswerving; otherwise, it is not, it cannot be truth at all.

Fuller's procedural categories provide an inadequate definition of the rule of law. A legal regime might offer generality, publicity, clarity, consistency, constancy over time, and congruency with regulators, and still be a legal system from Hell. It might weaken property rights and impose civil liability on the flimsiest of grounds, all the while conforming to Fuller's idea of law.