Quotes About Particularity

The Incarnation is not about a God who steps in for a while to rescue a few souls from a godless world. It is a cosmic work of God in history that impacts the whole of creation for all time. Its particularity has consequences that are universal and eternal.

Universalism is a corruption of objectivity. Whereas objectivity is achieved from particular things, universalism claims to define particularity from an abstract notion posed arbitrarily.

God has become human. The absolute has become particular. The ideal has become real. The divine has taken up a human nature.

Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.

With all my clients I work with, they all have their absolute specialness about them.

I am fearful, or suspicious, of generalizations... They cannot guide me reliably in making decisions about particular individuals.

Four billion people on this earth but my imagination is still the same. It's bad with large numbers. It's still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go by, never coming to mind and never really missed.

Beauty always takes place in the particular.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

I've never met a detail I didn't like.

While using generics, people describe themselves as who they want to be, not who they actually are. You need to get specific to bring out the edge cases.

One might say that any sermon involves both an "itch" and a "scratch" and sermons are born when at least implicitly in the preacher's mind the problematic itch intersects a solutional scratch—between the particulars of the human predicament and the particularity of the gospel.

But I know you'd have done what you did for anyone. That's your code, isn't it? And I always wanted something particular from you, something you wouldn't give anyone else. Funny, I've started to appreciate people who're decent to everyone, but it's too late for that, too, isn't it?

the relation of mathematics to the world of temporal change and of phenomenal particularity is direct: less by induction than by what Pierce called abduction – an imaginative jumping off from an open-ended series of particulars.

Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

Broadly speaking, the thing you need to avoid is the general as contrasted with the particular (reptile creates a less vivid image than does rattler); the vague as contrasted with the definite (them guys is less meaningful than those three hoods who hang out at Sammy's poolroom); and the abstract as contrasted with the concrete (to say that something is red tells me less than to state that it's exactly the color of the local fire truck).

Be particular. That is, without a doubt, the Best Advice Ever Given in the History of the Entire World. Consider, if you will, the profound effect that following that advice would have on, say, your diet, your love life, your financial situation, your decision on whether to have that next drink. I mean, what do those two words not cover?

The novelist's job is to] make everything, even an ultimate concern, as solid, as concrete, as specific as possible.

But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.

We are all special cases.

Third, the purpose is to be described as concretely as possible, not abstractly.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.

because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known

Parece que en esto radicaría la supuesta magia que obra un buen poema: ideas, recuerdos y todos los detalles de un escenario presente y la acción que lo ocupa tienen igual rango y el mismo peso; infundido de una fuerza verbal animadora (pero vaga), el mundo irradia particularidad.