Incoherence Quotes

I like complexity and contradiction in architecture. I do not like the incoherence or arbitrariness of incompetent architecture nor the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism. (Robert Venturi)
Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said. View quote
Alan Greenspan
Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible. View quote
Judith Butler
For all their incoherence and senseless rage, their message is attractive to those layers of the population who yearn for some order in their lives. If the fanatics promise to feed them and educate their children they are prepared to forgo the delights of CNN and BBC World. View quote
Tariq Ali
If your love and devotion are sufficient, you can literally liberate that soul from its state of bondage or incoherence. [...] As a spiritual warrior and light bearer, a loving person can fight such an entity in order to release its soul and send it on its way. View quote
Bhakti Tirtha Swami
When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence. View quote
P. J. O'Rourke
Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy. View quote
Luke Davies
The new coherent picture is not yet available. With all their immense empirical success, G(eneral)R(elativity) and Q(uantum)M(echanics) have left us with an understanding of the physical world which is unclear and badly fragmented. At the foundations of physics there is today confusion and incoherence. View quote
Carlo Rovelli
The old masters are perfect and admirable examples, on condition that we remember that the spirit gives life and the letter kills, and that even the best pastiche is inferior to the harmonious stammering or incoherence of a child trying to speak. View quote
Georges Rouault
All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence. View quote
Wallace Stevens
.. I have never managed to grasp what exactly 'pataphysics' consisted of; but in short what I have always seen in it is a desire to disconnect philosophy from the discipline of logic, and to admit incoherence as a legitimate component of it. [comment on visiting frequently the Collège de 'Pataphysique']. (Jean Dubuffet)
Incoherence is not the monopoly of madness: all the main ideas of a sane man are irrational erections build up, for better or worse, to express his deepest feelings. View quote
André Maurois
And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call 'sustained incoherence. View quote
David Bohm
The emotional quality of what we moderns call our thought produces an extreme violence of conviction combined with extreme incoherence in our arguments. I refer here to ordinary people and not to an intellectual elite. We do not involve ourselves in studying the meaning and consequences of a fact calmly and objectively. The fact asserts itself through its image and associates itself in unchallengeable fashion with other images which, in this mode of thinking, are its true context. Emotions justify as well as provoke or command opinions, which still seem intellectual and reasoned. View quote
Jacques Ellul
Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so much of it, everything entangled in everything else... What large thought Sabbath was struggling to express? Is he asking, "Whatever did happen to my own true life?" Was it taking place elsewhere? But how then can looking out of this window be so gigantically real? Well, that is the difference between the true and the real. We don't get to live in the truth. That's why Nikki ran away. She was an idealist, an innocent, touching, talented illusionist who wanted to live in the truth. Well, if you found it, kid, you're the first. In my experience the direction of life is toward incoherence-precisely what you would never confront. Maybe that was the only coherent thing you could think to do: die to deny incoherence. View quote
Philip Roth
Incoherence is a common hazard for journalists who dabble in ethical judgments. View quote
Andrew Ferguson
It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence. View quote
Deborah Levy
There was no credible strategy, nor courage or leadership – instead we had chaos and incoherence, interspersed with the occasional gesture. It's been a masterclass in how not to do foreign policy. View quote
Jo Cox
Brother Nabi - to a philosophical letter [he received from Denis ] a philosophical answer... [but] first of all, forgive the incoherence of my last letter. I am feeling remorsed about what I told you about Gauguin. There is no humbug about him, not, at any rate, with respect to those he knows are capable of understanding him. I have lived with him for the past fifteen days in the closest association [in Pont-Aven]. We share a room. I have told him what I dislike about his work; what I said can be regarded as a sally against the ingrained habits of contemporary painting. But let's go back to our philosophy....(a:) Immutable principles exist in art. There is a science, namely aesthetics, that teaches them. Today this science is dead. It was alive in the days of the beatific primitives... View quote
Paul Sérusier
Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and strategies that are distinguished as innovative in their first incarnation can quickly become stale in the hands of lesser artists. View quote
Joanna Scott
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. (Oscar Wilde)
Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete. View quote
William Butler Yeats
Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange. View quote
Neil Patrick Harris
The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room. View quote
Henry Kissinger
The alternative, of course, is to get on offense, to batter McCain for his gaffes and incoherence, hammer him for his flip-flops, highlight how his maverick status is a thing of the past, and turn him into a combination of Bush and Grandpa Simpson. God knows there are those in Chicago champing at the bit to do just that-not least, one imagines, Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, who can wield the cudgel of negative ads with as much vigor and glee as any Republican. Yet Obama seems reluctant to go there. Tough pol though he is, he's a conciliator and not a confrontationalist at heart; he seems to believe that once undecided voters know him better, he will have them eating, along with so many others, out of the palm of his hand. View quote
John McCain