I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order t...o extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you... will, balances itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Music, theoretically considered, consists altogether of lines of tone. It more nearly resembles a picture or an architectural draw...ing, than any other art creation; the difference being that in a drawing the lines are visible and constant, while in music they are audible and in motion. The separate tones are the points through which the lines are drawn; and the impression which is intended, and which is apprehended by the intelligent listener, is not that of single tones, but of continuous lines of tones, describing movements, curves and angles, rising, falling, poising--directly analogous to the linear impressions conveyed by a picture or drawing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain... that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious--to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction--a period in which past, present, and future are rewo...ven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two kinds of symbol must surely be distinguished. The algebraic symbol comes naked into the world of mathematics and is clothed wi...th value by its masters. A poetic symbol--like the Rose, for Love, in Guillaume de Lorris--comes trailing clouds of glory from the real world, clouds whose shape and colour largely determine and explain its poetic use. In an equation, x and y will do as well as a and b; but the Romance of the Rose could not, without loss, be re-written as the Romance of the Onion, and if a man did not see why, we could only send him back to the real world to study roses, onions, and love, all of them still untouched by poetry, still raw.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Newspapers had a different perceptual impact on the reader than the printed book. Unlike the linear development of a plot or an ar...gument in the book, the concurrent reporting of news from different parts of the world made newspapers a mosaic of unrelated events. Newspapers contracted time to the instantaneous and the sensational, expanded space to include anything from everywhere. The present became much more diverse and complex, no longer containable within a single chronological framework. And the reader had to provide the connection between the different news items.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldie...r in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and... rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »