Quotes About Clarity

The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us

Alle, die professionell schreiben, wissen, dass sich ein Gedanke oft erst in der Arbeit an der genauen Formulierung klärt. Sie wissen, dass wir vieles nur schreibend wirklich zu Ende denken können. So wie auch unsere besten Gedanken nicht selten aus dem konzentrierten Prozess des Schreibens heraus entstehen und plötzlich da sind, zu unserer eigenen Überraschung.

Add to that the age-old principle of Ockham's razor in problem-solving: "If there are a number of possible solutions, the simplest one, based on the fewest assumptions, is most likely to be correct.

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. —MARK TWAIN

A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half asses way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on try. We focus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back

YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH, AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU MAD. —Aldous Huxley

Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot.

And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from the nearest sunlight, that it's only dark when the lights are on.

Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. There have always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity.

Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding.

I HAVE NEVER FOR ONE INSTANT SEEN CLEARLY WITHIN MYSELF. HOW THEN WOULD YOU HAVE ME JUDGE THE DEEDS OF OTHERS? —MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Details, when they are successful, are not mere decoration. They do not distract or entertain. They lead to an understanding of the whole of which they are an inherent part.

Who overrefines his argument brings himself to grief.

En çirkin merhamet, hedefini ?a??rand?r.

Ah ben ruhumun içindeki o ikinci ruhu bilirim, esrar? gören gözleriyle ve esrar? duyan kulaklar?yla her ?eyi sezer ve bana sezdirir ve beni aldatamaz, ah, içim beni aldatmaz.

The only problem with seeing too much is that it makes you insane.

To learn, you must understand what you do not know. It is not enough to know you do not understand.

When the mind is allowed to relax, inspiration often follows.

Suzuki had just finished giving a talk to a group of Zen students when someone in the audience said, "You've been talking about Buddhism for nearly an hour, and I haven't been able to understand a thing you said. Could you say one thing about Buddhism I can understand?" After the laughter died down, Suzuki replied calmly, "Everything changes.

Eighty percent of all questions are statements in disguise.

The truth is, the truth is elusive.

effective learning from experience can't happen without clear feedback, and you can't have clear feedback unless your forecasts are unambiguous and scorable. Sound familiar? It should. Drezner cited an article about the IARPA tournament.