Best 59 quotes in «context quotes» category

Conformity is a problem for many small groups. Members put a higher priority on cohesion than on coming up with a well-reasoned choice. They pressure dissenters, shield themselves from negative feedback, keep silent when they disagree ...

Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges the context of human work. Contexts become wrong by being too small - too small, that is, to contain the scientist or the farmer or the farm family or the local ecosystem or the local community - and this is crucial.

Community is a context and can either facilitate or inhibit the movement of change for the individual.

Context is all; or is it ripeness? One or the other.

Corporate & personal branding both require storytelling to be captivating. Stories provide context, meaning & the opportunity for relationship.

Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects - inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity - perhaps rarity most of all - combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury - one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way - as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick - to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.

But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came. That is why history should be taught in school. to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.

Did you heard of a man without land? Probably not! You might think that there is no man without land! But you got it wrong. Here is the first man who is lost and years feels that has no land! And if you put it in context, his feeling would be 99.9% correct.

...Data itself... was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.

Having contact sheets for all sorts of episodes in your life seemed to me intriguing and desirable. So much of my own history is beclouded by time, but a few sharp rays, in the form of pictures, falling upon a given day would resuscitate whole contexts. And from this archipelago of moments, scenes, episodes, you could see the larger tectonic movements of your life forming and unforming. You would be reminded of who you are. Or at least of who you were.

Do you follow the wrestling? Most people think it's illegal, but you can watch it there. Ruby and Python are on display this evening.

Great experiences are built on a foundation of bad experiences.

How many thefts have there been?’ I asked. ‘That depends on how you define it,’ said Adrian. Because material went missing off sites all the time, which is why important finds were collated and secured the day they were found. Important in archaeological terms not always being the same as valuable – at least not in the fenceable sense. Archaeology came in all shapes, sizes, and apparent degrees of nickableness. ‘We wouldn’t have even noticed some of the thefts if they hadn’t been important to the context,’ said Adrian. Context being the key concept of modern scientific archaeology, and what separates your modern professional from the fumbling archivists and swivel-eyed tomb raiders of the past. It’s a religion they share with scene of crime technicians and it had been drummed into me from my first day at Hendon. Context – where you find an object – is more important than the actual object. In policing it’s whether the broken glass is on the inside or the outside. In archaeology it’s whether that datable coin is found in the wall foundations or its demolition infill. You can live without the coin, but you need the dating information.

Hillalum wondered what sort of people were forged by living under such conditions; did they escape madness? Did they grow accustomed to this? Would the children born under a solid sky scream if they saw the ground beneath their feet?

Hippasus’ proof—or at least Nico’s retelling of it—was really so simple that when he finished sketching it out, I wasn’t even aware that we had actually proven anything. Nico paused for a few minutes to let us mull it over. It was Peter who broke the silence, “I’m not sure I understand what we have done.” Nico seemed to be expecting such a response. “Step back and examine the proof; in fact, you should try and do this with every proof you see or have to work out for yourself. ..." He again waited for his words to sink in, and it began to make sense for me. All my mathematics teachers (other than Bauji and Nico) always seemed to evade this part of their responsibility. They had been content to merely write out a proof on the blackboard and carry on, seemingly without concern for what the proof meant and what it told us. “But you should not stop here. Even when you have understood a proof, and I hope you have indeed understood this proof, ask yourself the next question, the obvious one, but as critical: So what? Or, why are we proving this? What is the point? What is the context? How does it relate to us? To answer these questions we have to step back a little. Let me show you—it’s really quite delightful.” Now there was excitement in Nico’s voice.

If I was the dictator, with my profound understanding of Marx’s real intent, and my universal benevolent compassion, uncontaminated by any proclivity toward darkness or sin, I would bring on the socialist Utopia.

I don't think you understand," said Milo timidly as the watchdog growled a warning. "We're looking for a place to spend the night." "It's not yours to spend," the bird shrieked again, and followed it with the same horrible laugh. "That doesn't make any sense, you see—" he started to explain. "Dollars or cents, it's still not yours to spend," the bird replied haughtily. "But I didn't mean—" insisted Milo. "Of course you're mean," interrupted the bird, closing the eye that had been open and opening the one that had been closed. "Anyone who'd spend a night that doesn't belong to him is very mean." "Well, I thought that by—" he tried again desperately. "That's a different story," interjected the bird a bit more amiably. "If you want to buy, I'm sure I can arrange to sell, but with what you're doing you'll probably end up in a cell anyway." "That doesn't seem right," said Milo helplessly, for, with the bird taking everything the wrong way, he hardly knew what he was saying. "Agreed," said the bird, with a sharp click of his beak, "but neither is it left, although if I were you I would have left a long time ago.

I don’t think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

If the context is lost and merely bits and pieces remain from a scattered existence, only the connection of anchor points may reinstate a distorted mental balance in an upset life story. ("Lost the global story." )

If that moment was a Russian nesting doll, I was paying attention to the smallest figurine. I did not see all the other metaphorical dolls. The one wrapped around the smallest one, and the one wrapped around the next-smallest one and the next and the next after that. What neurotypical people call the context.

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to." [MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]

It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).

[Mood allocates] investments of time, effort, resources, and risk taking to maximize Darwinian fitness in situations of varying propitiousness. High and low moods adjust cognition and behavior to cope with propitious and unpropitious situations.

Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.

Man is a coward in space, for he is by himself.

Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.

One who has lived through the days of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and the Japanese war lords feels something that a younger generation does not concerning the aberrations that are possible in this world.

Please don't use this sentence out of context.

Separate text from context and all that remains is a con.

Scranton describing Sen. Robert A. Taft's conservatism as compared to Goldwater's said Taft was "a conservative in the truest sense of the word. He sought to conserve all the human values that have been carried down to us on a long stream of American history. He saw history as the foundation on which a better future might be built, not a Technicolor fantasy behind which the problems of the present might be concealed.

Though usually adroit enough where her own interests were concerned, she made the mistake, not uncommon to persons in whom the social habits are instinctive, of supposing that the inability to acquire them quickly implies a general dulness. Because a bluebottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane, the drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial conditions it is capable of measuring distances and drawing conclusions with all the accuracy needful to its welfare...

The frame, the definition, is a type of context. And context, as we said before, determines the meaning of things. There is no such thing as the view from nowhere, or from everywhere for that matter. Our point of view biases our observation, consciously and unconsciously. You cannot understand the view without the point of view.

There are many voices in the world. The social environment will try to mould us in the image and likeness of man. People will influence us one way or another, but we have in our hearts the voice of God, calling us in every moment to return to love, to return to Truth. We have been given everything we need to make our dreams a reality, and fulfill our destiny. Believe it or not, the freedom to do so is ours.

There are secrets hidden in our flesh. Our cells being born and dying with the same force that makes galaxies form and deconstruct.

The truth is the truth, in this context, the Muslim of the world will never be able to liberate the occupied territories as like Palestine and Kashmir until they first liberate their lands from the traitors in uniform, and dictators, who rule as the enemies of own people of the Muslim world.

The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew

The road itself tells us far more than signs do.

The will to truth is enshrined in the mind. It is undeniable, inescapable, mutable only if one’s humanity itself is rejected, itself muted. Yet the form of this truth, whether it be elaborate, simple, exclusive and regulatory or comprehensive and positive… this is a matter of aesthetics, taste... ...It is all inherently meaningless, the puzzle just as much as the pieces themselves, ephemeral. Yet more than this it is concrete, eternal, heavy and inescapable, a preponderous amalgam of things small and large, the actuality of which is imminent, the meaning of which is too great to acknowledge, let alone comprehend. So we tell stories. We read stories, write them, consider them and like them, or not. Simply ways, simple ways, to limit the All to that which can be understood.

The world is better served by syncretic economists and policymakers who can hold multiple ideas in their heads than by ‘one-handed’ economists who promote one big idea regardless of context.

We all hygger: gathered around a table for a shared meal or beside a fire on a dark night, when we sit in the corner of our local cafe or wrap ourselves in a blanket at the end of a day on the beach. Lying spoons, baking in a warm kitchen, bathing by candlelight, being alone in bed with a hot water bottle and a good book - these are all ways to hygge. Hygge draws meaning from the fabric of ordinary living. It'a a way of acknowledging the sacred in the secular, of giving something ordinary a special context, spirit and warmth and taking time to make it extraordinary.

Until you've been washed ashore you can't know how all encompassing the sea has become.

Until modern times it was as easy to travel across water as it was across land, where roads were frequently unusable.

We are all lumps, and of so various and inform a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others.

What's writ is what's read, yet the meaning is gone, since context is what gives each quote its own home.

What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?

What we think of man and God, of sin and salvation, is partly prompted by the comparative comforts or discomforts in which we live. It is a very sobering reflection on the lack of transcendence of the human spirit over the flux of historical change.

When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least say. It's taken for granted that he has no voice and the reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced -- since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea. Though how in the hell one passes judgement on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I'll ever understand.

When I interview candidates, I like to go where they live, so I can see them in their environment, not just in mind.

...you do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ...

When our mental functioning is whittling away and our mind becomes a lame duck, perception does not form the context anymore and all connections on the social chessboard are conked out. Only patience and endurance may draw us out of the quagmire of numbness and allow us to tear open the cloudy screen that is hiding our points of ‘interest’ and ‘attention’, so long as we focus on the ‘singular moments’ and the ‘appealing details’ in our life. Awareness can help us shape a comprehensive picture for a functional future. ("Lost the global story.")