Concepts Quotes

“What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell

“There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.”
― Simone Weil

“Christianity, like genius, is one of the hardest concepts to forgive. We hear what we want to hear and accept what we want to accept, for the most part, simply because there is nothing more offensive than feeling like you have to re-evaluate your own train of thought and purpose in life. You have to die to an extent in your hunger for faith, for wisdom, and quite frankly, most people aren't ready to die.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.”
― Bede Griffiths

“True virtue is knowing the self not by intellectual knowledge but by pure silence.”
― Amit Ray, Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity

“Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody Poor;
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.

And mutual fear brings peace,
Till the selfish loves increase:
Then Cruelty knits a snare
And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head,
And the Catterpiller and Fly
Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat,
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.

The Gods of the earth and sea
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree,
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain.”
― William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience

“Some concepts are so incredibly risky they take an honest fool to try to articulate them.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“To say "all that which does not exist" is to introduce, effectively, a new concept, but it does not bring into existence anything more than that very concept which it introduces. That is, a certain entity about which we know nothing except that it bears the name of "all that which does not exist.”
― Pablo Tusset, The Best Thing That Can Happen to a Croissant

“I think actually if you take the analogy with other areas of engineering, and increasingly of science and even mathematics, you can see people do not have to learn the vast number of formulae they used to learn. Instead, they have to learn to use the computer effectively. This frees them, I feel, to understand concepts and the foundations while they’re learning the mechanics of the application of the theory.”
― C.A.R. Hoare

“Moral concepts do not move about within a hard world set up by science and logic. They set up, for different purposes, a different world.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Funny, how you get a kiss but lose your virginity. I don't feel like anything's been taken or added at all.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“We tend to find Horcruxes in humans. A different concept - who'd have thought it like that, right?”
― Sijdah Hussain, Red Sugar, No More

“...the world has a fair percentage of people who go through life trying to find comfort and relief for their souls by seeking a receptive ear. This could be someone they can communicate with on the subject of sharing their hopes, dreams, doubts, fears, concepts, perceptions, love, joys, grief, regrets, impulses and compulsions.”
― Janvier Chouteu-Chando, The Girl on the Trail

“Biology taught me that a field undergoing development should be investigated always from the viewpoint of its past development. Who today would study anatomy without embryology? In exactly the same way epistemology without historical and comparative investigations is no more than an empty play on words or an epistemology of the imagination.”
― Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact

“It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems”
― Donna Haraway, "Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene"

“A reality that is formed by concepts that you desire has more power than those realities that fate would throw in your way given the chance.”
― Steven Redhead, Life Is A Circus

“It is the eternal truth that you must always seek and promote otherwise you are just holding on to unsupported concepts that are the seeds of future lies.”
― Steven Redhead, Life Is A Circus

“As useful as science is, it will never provide a way for us to wake up to Ultimate Reality. Science remains forever in the conceptual. It wouldn't be science otherwise. This isn't a criticism. It's a necessary and unavoidable limitation.”
― Steve Hagen, The Grand Delusion: What We Know But Don't Believe

“As ultimate reality emerges, concepts submerge. As concepts emerge, ultimate reality submerges.”
― Mahasi Sayadaw, Manual of Insight

“. Consciousness is based in language and that means that people with superior language skills are more conscious than those who struggle with language. Consciousness is also about concepts. The more conceptual you are, the better able you are to understand reality since reality is not made from empirical “matter” but from rational, analytic concepts. Hegel imagined reality’s defining concepts to be philosophical. In fact, they are mathematical concepts, the quintessence of rationalism. You expand and heighten your consciousness by attaining a far superior understanding of concepts. This requires thinking, not feeling, not sensing, and not mystical intuiting.”
― Rob Armstrong, Children See Dead People: Children's Spooky Powers

“He does not define concepts, he does not analyse them, he does not criticize them: he murders them (but the crime is never perfect).”
― Jean Baudrillard

“Nécessairement imparfait, un traité de paix ne peut, à lui seul. résoudre tous les problèmes qui ont justifié la guerre à laquelle il est supposé mettre fin, pas plus que ses concepteurs ne peuvent anticiper tous les changements entraînés par la guerre elle-même. Il n'est, en définitive, que ce que les puissances qui l'ont signé, (…), veulent bien en faire. Il participe d'une construction en devenir qui, (…), suppose modération et compréhension - (Pierre Journoud, page 79, 2012).”
― Laurent Henninger et Thierry Widemann, Comprendre la guerre : Histoire et notions

“Things are dynamic and living, while our concepts of them are static and poor.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice

“Truth is reality itself and not concepts. If we cling to a certain number of concepts and consider them as being reality, we lose reality.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice

“All concepts, including those of “unity” and of "duality," are foreign to experience which can be described as non-conceptual.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice

“I’ve invested close to ten years of my time figuring out what exactly their criteria are. My conclusion is that there are no such criteria.”
― Dolki Min, Walking Practice