Canonical Quotes
Hence the ancient architects, following in the footsteps of nature, perfected the ascending rows of seats in theatres from their investigations of the ascending voice, and by means of the canonical theory of the mathematicians and that of the musicians, endeavoured to make every voice uttered on the stage come with greater clearness and sweetness to the ears of the audience. For just as musical instruments are brought to perfection of clearness in the sound of their strings by means of bronze plates or horn, so the ancients devised methods of increasing the power of the voice in theatres through the application of harmonics.
Vitruvius
There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost a canonical status in Protestant theology. But now, we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical.
Karl Barth
Substantial changes, introduced during the last half of the 20th century, have built a structure so expanded beyond the original Darwinian core, and so enlarged by new principles of macroevolutionary explanation, that the full exposition, while remaining within the domain of Darwinian logic, must be construed as basically different from the canonical theory of natural selection, rather than simply extended.
Stephen Jay Gould
It is an assumption that there is always one single dimension for assessing persons and their actions that has canonical priority. This is the dimension of moral evaluation; "good/evil" is supposed always to trump any other form of evaluation, but that is an assumption, probably the result of the long history of the Christianisation and then gradual de-Christianisation of Europe, which one need not make. Evaluation need not mean moral evaluation, but might include assessments of efficiency, ... simplicity, perspicuousness, aesthetic appeal, and so on.
Raymond Geuss
The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen ... The gospels that didn't make it were omitted by those ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were even more embarrassingly implausible than those in the four canonical ones.
Richard Dawkins
As all the aims of the religious Emperor were directed to the spreading of the law of Islam and the overthrow of the practices of the infidels, he issued orders to the high diwani officers that from Wednesday, the 2nd April 1679 / 1st Rabi I, in obedience to the Quranic injunction, "till they pay commutation money (Jizyah) out of their hand and they be humbled”, and in agreement with the canonical tradition, Jizyah should be collected from the infidels (zimmis) of the capital and the provinces. Many of the honest scholars of the time were appointed to discharge the work (of collecting Jizyah). May God actuate him (Emperor Aurangzeb) to do that which He loves and is pleased with, and make his future life better than the present.
Aurangzeb
Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.
Christopher Hitchens
I would almost consider myself a canonical child of Generation X... because I think there is an ethic and aesthetic that goes along with that generation, it may have something to do with the fact that "Never Mind the Bollocks" was released when we were 16-years-old and that was really the album that crystalized a generation.
Mark Pesce
Who was Jesus anyway? After twenty centuries, there is not much anyone can agree on. The four canonical gospels don't measure up to modern standards of biographical writing, and - outside of this material - there is precious little contemporary evidence, apart from a few glancing mentions of Jesus or the movement centered on him.
Jay Parini
For the struggle with the world, ordinary men and women have the spark of the divine. They are embodied spirit, unresigned to belittling circumstance. They can ascend, whether or not with the help of divine grace .... It is not just that the lowly are equal to the lordly and that the vulgar forms of sensibility are as revealing as the hieratic or canonical ones. It is that the lowly and the vulgar are higher. They are higher because they are freer from the posturing and vigilance-over himself and others-that prevent each of us from coming closer to what Shakespeare called the thing itself: unaccommodated man. The more orphaned ordinary men and women are by the established powers of the world, the more reason they have to find the divine within themselves and to struggle against the constraints that established arrangements impose on their rise to a larger life and a higher state of being.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
A nonlinear differential equation of the Riccati type is derived for the covariance matrix of the optimal filtering error. The solution of this 'variance equation' completely specifies the optimal filter for either finite or infinite smoothing intervals and stationary or non-stationary statistics.
The variance equation is closely related to the Hamiltonian (canonical) differential equations of the calculus of variations. Analytic solutions are available in some cases. The significance of the variance equation is illustrated by examples which duplicate, simplify, or extend earlier results in this field.
The duality principle relating stochastic estimation and deterministic control problems plays an important role in the proof of theoretical results. In several examples, the estimation problem and its dual are discussed side-by-side.
Properties of the variance equation are of great interest in the theory of adaptive systems. Some aspects of this are considered briefly.
Rudolf E. Kálmán
Ssu-ma Ch'ien's many-volumed history of China established the frame within which Chinese history continued to be written almost to the present day. Ssu-ma Ch'ien accepted and made canonical the theory that each dynasty began with an especially virtuous ruler and then gradually dissipated that virtue until Heaven lost patience and substituted a new dynasty in its place.
William H. McNeill
The invisibility of women in canonical histories might lead us to believe that women have no history. Surely then a female history is an essential tool in the emancipation of women? This is partly because if we have no history we are ‘trapped' in the present where oppressive social relations can continue unchallenged. Furthermore, history can be seen as evidence that things can and do change.
Dana Arnold
The formal character of a living literature is the same as its inner character: it denies verities; it denies what everyone knows and what I have known until this moment. It departs from the canonical tracks, from the broad highway. ... To literature today the plane surface of daily life is what the earth is to an airplane - a mere runway from which to take off, in order to rise aloft, from daily life to the realities of being, to philosophy, to the fantastic. Let yesterday's cart creak along the well-paved highways. The living have strength enough to cut away their yesterday.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Logion 10 has a parallel in Luke xii. 49, but with a change of emphasis. The canonical version looks to the future: "I came to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!" In Thomas the fire has been kindled: "I have cast fire upon the world, and behold, I guard it until it is ablaze." This raises an interesting problem in relation to the common source of Matthew and Luke, since Matthew (x. 34) records a saying, "I came not to cast peace, but a sword." As already observed, something like this appears in logion 16, but in the saying in Thomas "division" and "fire" are paralleled in Luke, "sword" in Matthew. The question is whether in Thomas we have a conflation of the two synoptic versions, or a form of the saying derived from an independent tradition.
Thomas the Apostle
The point is that there isn't a canonical James Nicoll tale. The point is that whenever a discussion turns to some manner in which a human being can be menaced, injured, or potentially killed, it will turn out that James has already had it happen to him. No matter how funny, unlikely, wierd (sic)), or pedestrian. He hasn't said he has a scar on his arm from being attacked by aliens with laser swords, but I would be only mildly surprised if he did. And I'd believe him.
James Nicoll
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
Friedrich Nietzsche
