Quotes About Wholes

Poetry, like sanctity, is the orchestration of multiple attributes into vast, compelling wholes.

His anguished mind writhed with contradictions. He was a man of parts and halfs, in a time of wholes and absolutes.

Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.

...evolution is the gradual development and stratification of progressive series of wholes, stretching from the inorganic beginnings to the highest level of spiritual creation.

There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.

A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.

A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical--that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental....

We are always making assumptions about wholes based on knowing only parts.

I didn't know how it had happened. Maybe we'd forgotten the rules of normal society. Maybe we'd finally given ourselves over to the wildness of the island. Or maybe we'd been savage our wholes lives, rash and animalistic in the inside, and never known it till now.

What made the new world picture so potent was that its method of deliberately ignoring the complex reality of organisms was an immense labor-saving device: its pragmatic efficiency counterbalanced its conceptual superficiality. The universe as a whole, the whole that contains all other wholes, is immeasurable and unthinkable in its infinite variety and multi-fold concreteness. Only by samples and abstractions can one put together in the mind a playtoy model.

Nature (and that includes us) is not made up of parts within wholes. It is made up of wholes within wholes. All boundaries, national boundaries included, are fundamentally arbitrary. We invent them and then, ironically, we find ourselves trapped within them. But

Irreducibly metaphysical judgments as to the nature of being, form, time, space, matter, cause, truth, knowledge, explanation, wholes, parts, and the like are the starting point of science, not its conclusions.

The word respect comes from the Latin word respectus, which means the action of looking back. McWilliams (1999) emphasizes that the formulations encourage us to think about our patients as complex wholes, not just their weaknesses, but their strengths, not just their pathology but their health, not just their misperceptions but their surprising, unaccountable sanity under the worst of conditions.