Analogy Quotes - page 4
It is not unreasonable nor derogatory to the attributes of Omnipotence, to imagine that some general laws may be observed in the creation of new worlds; and if man could witness the birth of such worlds, he might reason by induction upon the origin of his own. But in the absence of such data, an attempt has been made to fancy some analogy between the agents now employed to destroy, renovate, and perpetually vary the earth's surface, and those whereby the first chaotic mass was formed, and brought by supposed nascent energy from the embryo to the habitable state.
Charles Lyell
Standard economists don't seem to understand exponential growth. Ecological economics recognizes that the economy, like any other subsystem on the planet, cannot grow forever. And if you think of an organism as an analogy, organisms grow for a period and then they stop growing. They can still continue to improve and develop, but without physically growing, because if organisms did that you'd end up with nine-billion-ton hamsters. There is a great video on this.
Robert Costanza
Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington's house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.
John Green (author)
And how does the God's existence emerge from the proof? Does it follow straightway, without any breach of continuity? Or have we not here an analogy to the behavior of the little Cartesian dolls? As soon as I let go of the doll it stands on its head. As soon as I let it go – I must therefore let it go. So also with the proof. As long as I keep my hold on the proof, i. e., continue to demonstrate, the existence does not come out, if for no other reason than that I am engaged in proving it; but when I let the proof go, the existence is there. But this act of letting go is surely also something; it is indeed a contribution of mine. Must not this also be taken into the account, this little moment, brief as it may be – it need not be long, for it is a leap. However brief this moment, if only an instantaneous now, this "now" must be included in the reckoning.
Søren Kierkegaard
I can illustrate the ... approach with the ... image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months - when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado! A different image came to me a few weeks ago. The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration ... the sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it ... yet finally it surrounds the resistant substance.
Alexander Grothendieck
Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it. In the Buddhist tradition the analogy of the sun appearing from behind the clouds is often used to explain the discovery of enlightenment. In meditation practice we clear away the confusion of ego in order to glimpse the awakened state. The absence of ignorance, of being crowded in, of paranoia, opens up a tremendous view of life. One discovers a different way of being.
Chogyam Trungpa
There is little disagreement about what constitutes a healthy state of the organism. But there is much less agreement when one uses the notion of pathology analogically, to describe kinds of behavior that are regarded as deviant. For people do not agree on what constitutes healthy behavior... The medical metaphor limits what we can see much as the statistical view does. It accepts the lay judgment of something as deviant and, by use of analogy, locates its source within the individual, thus preventing us from seeing the judgment itself as a crucial part of the phenomenon.
Howard S. Becker
Composing a score is like getting in one of those mini-submarines that take you to the bottom of the ocean. You crawl into this little bubble, seal yourself away from the outside world and dive deep into uncharted territory. Sometimes the places you explore are dark, sometimes they're light. If you have the right tools and knowledge you can explore wherever you like and have a great experience. It's a crude analogy to genre hopping, but it's accurate. I was lucky as a kid to be exposed to so much different material. I watched cartoons and read all kinds of comics as much as I buried my head in scary stuff. It makes going from talking animals one day to shape-shifters the next pretty easy. Truth is, most composers are pinballs. They can bounce around from style to style and adapt really well.
Michael Wandmacher
In order to supply the defects of experience, we will have recourse to the probable conjectures of analogy, conclusions which we will bequeath to our posterity to be ascertained by new observations, which, if we augur rightly, will serve to establish our theory and to carry it gradually nearer to absolute certainty.
Johann Heinrich Lambert
Language death is a terrible loss, to all who come into contact with it: `Facing the loss of language or culture involves the same stages of grief that one experiences in the process of death and dying.”‘ We do not have to be members of an endangered community to sense this grief, or respond to it. Anyone who has worked with these communities, even over a short period, knows that it is a genuine insight, well justifying the dramatic nature of the analogy. And it is this keen, shared sense of loss which fuels the motivation and commitment of linguists, community groups, and support organizations in many parts of the world.
David Crystal
The physicists of Gilbert's time had recourse to mechanism infrequently, and its effective explanations touched only a few disconnected phenomena. The virtuosity, inventiveness, and optimism of Descartes, however, and the counter-example of latter- day hermetists like Robert Fludd, persuaded many that mechanical models offered the only hope for a precise and comprehensible physics. Expectations rose. Physicists demanded more from models, perhaps even a complete fit with phenomena, with little or no negative analogy.
Gilbert's countrymen, S. J., 'a veritable giant in science' and a liberal and candid physicist whenever his Society's obligation to combat Copernicans did interfer.
John L. Heilbron
The analogy with bibliographic classifications and thesauri is obvious... despite the differences, it is to be regretted that 'ontological engineers' make little or no reference to work in information science. As a consequence, they do not appear to draw at all on the rich experience of constructing knowledge schedules ... or... developing concept lexicons.
Brian Campbell Vickery
