Yquotes.com

 

No reference is truly direct—every reference depends on SOME kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.
--
"Six-Part Ricercar"

 

Douglas Hofstadter

» Douglas Hofstadter - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity.

 

Karl Marx

 

Einstein's theory was that everything about the laws of the universe and nature was relative. What you observe about something depends greatly upon your frame of reference at the time. That's why I can stand here in this concord cabin and drop my pen in comfort. In here I'm not traveling 1,400mph, am I? Everything works like that. Conditioned by its frame of reference. All the electronics in all the instruments in this cockpit obey the exact same laws they would if the plane were standing still. Because in this frame, like me they are not traveling at Mach two. And all the laws of nature behave the same way. This beam of light is going out in all directions at 186,000 miles per second. Being on the concord makes no difference to it's speed going forward, backwards sideways.

 

James (science historian) Burke

 

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

 

Ernest Hemingway

 

Second, by this and other means we are driven to perceive, what is quite evident in itself, that instantaneous feelings flow together in a continuum of feeling, which has in a modified degree the peculiar vivacity of feeling and has gained generality. And in reference to such general ideas, or continua of feeling, the difficulties about resemblance and suggestion and reference to the external, cease to have any force.

 

Charles Sanders Peirce

 

Nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race, and secretly admonished them to allow none of these biases to draw too much, so as to incapacitate them for other occupations and entertainments. Indulge your passion for science, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

 

David Hume