Quotes About Discontinuity

“No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. Simultaneously the others with whom we are in relation are themselves in relation. We cannot relate to anyone who is not also relating to us. Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character ... this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons.”

— James P. Carse

“Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation ... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.”

— Leonard Woolf

“The sound is the key; audiences will accept visual discontinuity much more easily than they'll accept jumps in the sound. If the track makes sense, you can do almost anything visually.”

— Paul Hirsch

“Certainly, it may bring to light such a deeper knowledge of the structure of matter as to constitute a veritable discontinuity in the progress of science.”

— Ernest Lawrence

“Christianity is a religion of continuity and discontinuity as well. It's about what stays the same and what changes in the twinkling of an eye. Both are necessary truths, but sometimes it's important to accentuate the discontinuity, the sudden leap, the way you go up a tree, Zacchaeus, and come down a saint.”

— Francis Spufford

“Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next.”

— Gregory Bateson

“More important than any one new application is the new 'materials' concept itself. It marks a shift from concern with substances to concern with structures, a shift from artisan to scientist as man's artificer, a shift from chemistry to physics as the basic discipline, and a shift, above all, from the concrete experience of the workshop to abstract mathematics, a shift from starting with what nature provides to what man wants to accomplish.
-The Age of Discontinuity, 1969”

— Peter F. Drucker

“Giving up isn't a deed. It is 'discontinuity' of a deed.”

— Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

“In Detroit, in a city that in many cases the world has rejected, that's where God shows up. Every example in the Gospels where God shows up, it's always when the seas are the stormiest, where there is discontinuity.”

— Clark Durant

“I have sometimes thought that all philosophical disputes could be reduced to an argument between the partisans of "prickles" and the partisans of "goo." The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things. They prefer particles to waves, and discontinuity to continuity. The gooey people are tender-minded romanticists who love wide generalizations and grand syntheses. They stress the underlying unities, and are inclined to pantheism and mysticism. Waves suit them much better than particles as the ultimate constituents of matter, and discontinuities jar their teeth like a compressed-air drill.”

— Alan W. Watts

“Specific units - such as memes are intended to represent have meaning when there is essential discontinuity between categories. Such convenient discontinuities are found in atoms, elementary particles, genes, and DNA.”

— Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

“A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity
culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“I don't do match cuts really. That's a ridiculous thing to say - I do. But we always explore how we can propel a scene, and that's including dialogue, without doing match cuts. Because the audience is really willing to accept a lot of discontinuity.”

— Sally Menke

“The draw by stalemate looks like a spot of discontinuity in the otherwise harmonious universe of values. To save a game by letting yourself be so completely humiliated as not being able to make a move looks rather undeserved.”

— Mihail Marin

“A discontinuity, like a vacuum, is abhorred by nature.”

— Harold Hotelling

“I've lived in a preindustrial (rural Argentina) as well as an industrial world. You experience a different sense of time in a community that works the land. Human relationships aren't professionalized or contractualized; family and friends take primacy. Life has much more continuity than discontinuity. There's a great deal of poetry in everyday life.”

— Shoshana Zuboff

“Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer.”

— Henry Roth

“The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.”

— Tillie Olsen

“Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for origin.”

— Michel Foucault

“How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like?”

— Steven Weinberg