Collection Quotes - page 22
What is easier to remember, a collection of facts glued together, or a story, something that offers a series of logical links? Causality is easier to commit to memory. ...What is induction exactly? ...It is very handy, as the general takes much less room in onel's memory than a collection of particulars. The effect of such compression is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Republic of Mhari contains five thousand times more cells than there are humans on earth, but is somehow both more and less than the sum of her parts. If all those cells die, then I am, by definition, dead. But the relationship between cell-citizens and the Republic of Me is less obvious than you might think.
At any point in time some of my cells are dying and being replaced, and the me that exist today consists almost entirely of different cells from the me of a couple of years ago-although I'm still me. But if you were to separate all my cells and then keep them alive in a mad scientist's test-tube collection, I'd be dead, though all my bits live on. The Republic of Self can be dissolved, or taken over in a coup, or drastically reformed. I harbor this illusion of unitary identity-but in reality I'm what biologists call a superorganism, a swarm, and ensemble entity. I am not me: I am Hobbes's Leviathan, or Leviathan's Representative.
Charles Stross
They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
Robert M. Pirsig
It was first surmised by the ancient philosopher, Democritus, that the faintly white zone which spans the sky under the name of the Milky Way, might be only a dense collection of stars too remote to be distinguished. This conjecture has been verified by the instruments of modern astronomers.
Robert Chambers (publisher born 1802)
During a later period of his life, Rembrandt became bankrupt, mainly through his own extravagance... he could not help but collect things. At this time, his marvelous collection of paintings, jewels, swords, armor and precious costumes were publicly sold for a pittance. He had to leave his big, beautiful house in the fashionable part of Amsterdam and go to a very poor quarter. His original, fine house is now open to view. He dressed his subjects in oriental costumes, weapons and armor to give a rich, romantic and mysterious radiance to his paintings. At the same time he was a very down-to-earth Dutchman with a passion for reality. His art is the synthesis of a tremendous attraction to reality, with a need to draw things as they really were, and a desire for the exotic, the dramatic, the radiant, the unusual and the mysterious. p. 402.
Rembrandt
What I mean by "liberal"...is a moral rectitude and intellectual certainty claimed by a small but powerful sect of publicists and politicians on behalf of an arbitrary collection of policies, some of which are sensible and some bogus, but which in bulk are made offensive by the way in which they are presented.
Maurice Cowling
Research is a matter of overcoming obstacles. That's what research is about. There are problems. There are difficulties. It's hard to make sense of a collection of information or whatever. Obstacles are the nature of research. Maybe that's why some people give up. There's always an obstacle. You overcome one to find there's another one.
Alexander Dalgarno
I reject and disown all my pre-2011 writings and effusions, with the exception of my Greek translations, the poetry included in the published collection One Exquisite Silence ISBN 978-1484179932, some private letters written between 2002 and 2011, and those few items about my since revised 'numinous way' which are included in post-2012 publications such as The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos ISBN 978-1484096642. My rejection of all forms of extremism is explained in (i) the 2013 compilation Understanding and Rejecting Extremism ISBN 978-1484854266 and (ii) Myngath ISBN 978-1484110744. My weltanschauung - the result of my own pathei-mathos - is outlined in texts such as (i) the aforementioned The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos and (ii) Religion, Empathy, and Pathei-Mathos ISBN 978-1484097984.
David Myatt
