Constructs Quotes

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. ~ Judith Butler

People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs. ~ Nick Hanauer

so many theological terms, words like 'monotheism' are late constructs, convenient shorthands for sentences with verbs in them, and that sentences with verbs in them are the real stuff of theology, ~ N. T. Wright

The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm positivity that he didn't need to waste time resenting real or imagined social constructs because he would always be ahead of them. The individual, not the people, was responsible for success or failure. ~ Jeff Hobbs

That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment. ~ Irvine Welsh

The constructs of organized thought are all around us, the golden age will come when they are freed. ~ Tom Althouse

Dating isn't a natural need; it is a social want. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Much of what is considered "good" in little girls is considered downright repulsive in little boys. Physical timidity or hypercautiousness, being quietly "well behaved", and depending on others for help and support are thought to be natural - if not outright charming - in girls. Boys, however, are actively discouraged from the dependent forms of relating, which are considered "sissyish" in male children. ~ Colette Dowling

Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs. ~ Richard Ford

We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her. ~ Marcel Proust

It's an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that has happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. One is surprised that a construct of one's own mind can actually be realised in the honest-to-goodness world out there. A great shock, and a great, great joy. ~ Leo Kadanoff

Is it to be imagined ... that women were made for no other purpose than to fabricate sweetmeats and gingerbread, construct shirts, darn stockings, and become mothers of possible presidents? Assuredly not. Should the women of America ever discover what their power might be, and compare it with what it is, much improvement might be hoped for. ~ Frances Trollope

Already in 1915, Sophie Tauber divides the surface of her aquarelle into squares and rectangles which she then juxtaposes horizontally and perpendicularly as Mondrian, Itten and Paul Klee did in the same period, fh). She constructs them as if they were masonry work. The colors are luminous, ranging from the raw yellow to deep red or blue. ~ Hans Arp

Your brand image is primarily an emotional construct. Emotion is probably always more powerful in swaying people than reason, but people like to be able to rationalize their choices. ~ Drayton Bird

I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say - Yes; and act like other people. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

She did not make monsters of us. She simply gave us the power to remake ourselves into those inviolable creatures the God of Equality had intended us to be. We knew she was deconstructing the old disabled versions of our sex, and that her ruthlessness was adopted because those constructs were built to endure. She broke down the walls that had kept us contained. There was a fresh red field on the other side, and in its rich soil were growing all the flowers of war that history never let us gather. It was beautiful to walk in. As beautiful as the fells that autumn. ~ Sarah Hall

Know that whatever is happening in your life right now, it's there for a reason. Just accept the things the way they are. Just relax and let go of all the mental constructs that your mind is creating. Acceptance leads to wholesome right action. ~ Brandon Bays

Mother Nature made continents. Human beings made countries. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The catastrophist constructs theories, the uniformitarian demolishes them. ~ William Whewell

Marriage is the commodification of affection, copulation, and, reproduction. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket. ~ Stacy Schiff

(She) could have read for hours, except that recently she had discovered holes and crevices between the words which she immediately had to fill with her own ideas until she was fed up with patching up the makeshift constructs. ~ Gerhard Amanshauser

Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever. Hubris, the professor had called it. When people build, they are trying to make an aspiration physical. When they die, their intentions are buried with them. All that's left is the building.
[Ozymandias syndrome, anyone? Ed.] ~ James S.A. Corey

His mind worked fast, flying in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn't really happened and, if it had happened, hadn't happened much. ~ Terry Pratchett

Nostalgia for people, cultures, everything. There's an ability to use these marks to note things that are erased, deleted. Traces are a species of history, of evidence. It's a way for the way the narrator to construct a semblance of self, even though all of this creates a deception, a way to think of one's traces as a real way to define oneself. The trace is fallible, impermanent. It's one of the motives I had in mind throughout the text. ~ Sergio Chejfec

A woman of color formation might decide to work around immigration issues. This political commitment is not based on the specific histories of racialized communities or its constituent members, but rather constructs an agenda agreed upon by all who are a part of it. In my opinion, the most exciting potential of women of color formations resides in the possibility of politicizing this identity – basing the identity on politics rather than the politics on identity. ~ Angela Y. Davis

One strong idea being put forth these days (...) is that women should above all be given choice. (...) But this "right to choose" whether or not we provide for ourselves has contributed mightily to the female achievement gap. Because they have the social option to stay home, women can - and often do - back off from assuming responsibility for themselves. (...) There is something wrong with this. (...) We want so desperately to believe that we do not have to be responsible for our own welfare. ~ Colette Dowling

The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart. ~ Marsha Norman

Talk about painting: there's no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can't be said but are always the most important. ~ Gerhard Richter

A female who spoke her mind and called it like it was, was considered trouble. When a male did it, he was considered a leader and desirable. ~ Dianna Hardy

For man is a symbol-making animal. He constructs a symbolic model of outer reality in his brain, and expresses it by a second set of symbols in terms of words, equations, pigment, or stone. All he knows directly are bodily sensations, and all he can directly do is to perform bodily motions; the rest of his knowledge and means of expression is symbolical. To use a phrase coined by J. Cohen, man has a metaphorical consciousness. Any attempt to get a direct grasp at naked reality is self-defeating; Urania, too, like the other muses, always has a last veil left to fold in. ~ Arthur Koestler

It is easy to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality. ~ Maria Montessori

A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields ... leading towards a "system of systems." ... I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse ... (vi) ... the "animal" level, characterized by increased mobility, teleological behavior and self-awareness ... ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

The purpose of my work was never to destroy but always to create, to construct bridges, because we must live in the hope that humankind will draw together and that the better we understand each other the easier this will become. ~ Alphonse Mucha

When you engage with people, you build your own insight into what's being discussed. Someone else's understanding complements yours, and together you start to weave an informed interpretation. You tinker until you can move on. ~ Marcia Conner

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. ~ David Foster Wallace

If God had sufficient wisdom and power to construct such a beautiful world as this, then we must admit that his wisdom and power are immeasurably greater than that of man, and hence he is qualified to reign as king. ~ Orson Pratt

I had never stopped thinking about the ideal car ... All I had to do was construct a plant to build it. ~ Ferruccio Lamborghini

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins. ~ Salman Rushdie

Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it. ~ H.L. Mencken

Human fears are very often irrational constructs of the mind. ~ Matthew Reilly

While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me. ~ Raquel Cepeda

Making a history was not what I wanted to do. I wanted to construct something more powerful than that ~ Claude Lanzmann

That light called history is pitiless; it possesses this peculiar and divine quality, that, pure light as it is, and precisely because it is wholly light, it often casts a shadow in places where people had hitherto beheld rays; from the same man it constructs two different phantoms, and the one attacks the other and executes justice on it, and the shadows of the despot contend with the brilliancy of the leader. ~ Victor Hugo

Radio is truly the theater of the mind. The listener constructs the sets, colors them from his own palette, and sculpts and costumes the characters who perform in them. ~ Mercedes McCambridge

But why must the system go to such lengths to block our empathy? Why all the psychological acrobatics? The answer is simple: because we care about animals, and we don't want them to suffer. And because we eat them. Our values and behaviors are incongruent, and this incongruence causes us a certain degree of moral discomfort. In order to alleviate this discomfort, we have three choices: we can change our values to match our behaviors, we can change our behaviors to match our values, or we can change our perception of our behaviors so that they appear to match our values. It is around this third option that our schema of meat is shaped. As long as we neither value unnecessary animal suffering nor stop eating animals, our schema will distort our perceptions of animals and the meat we eat, so that we feel comfortable enough to consume them. And the system that constructs our schema of meat equips us with the means by which to do this. ~ Melanie Joy

Empathy is a breaking down of the false constructs of division between the observer and the observed. ~ Chris Matakas

For millenia, scientists always try to measure
the size of this vast universe. One way to know
that is first to find the smallest single thing that
constructs this universe. When they get it, the
real measurement of universe can be understood for sure. ~ Toba Beta

It is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance. ~ Bell Hooks

As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don't know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written). ~ Fernando Pessoa

When being objective, we can transcend and look back at our constructs with powerful clarity; instead of looking through them, which can give a murky and distorted view. ~ Jay Woodman

Public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self. ~ Sigmund Freud

You do need some successes as a young person. They don't inflate the ego necessarily, they just give you identity and ego structure. But, don't construct your life around creating those. Or you will become narcissistic and ego-centric. That won't get you anywhere. ~ Richard Rohr

Strength and weakness are both mental constructs. Now you choose, what's preferable for you. ~ Abhijit Naskar

A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning. ~ Philip Roth

Well, part of it is a longstanding belief - it's been in our education establishment at least since the 1930s - that somehow children should be allowed to discover knowledge for themselves, that they should construct their own knowledge. This has surfaced most recently in connection with mathematics instruction, where the idea is that they need to discover how to add for themselves. Rather than being taught how to add, they should construct this knowledge on their own. ~ Lynne Cheney

I don't know how to construct a career that'll make me famous. Except maybe get my ears pinned back, get my teeth done, and go to America. But then I'll be competing with billions of actors who haven't got false teeth, and who are 25. ~ Ian Hart

Being Latino means being from everywhere, and that is exactly what America is supposed to be about. ~ Raquel Cepeda

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work - that is correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. Furthermore, it must satisfy certain esthetic criteria - that is, in relation to how much it describes, it must be rather simple. ~ John Von Neumann

A source of strength in the early days was that groups in various parts of the world were prepared to construct experimental computers without necessarily intending them to be the prototype for serial production. As a result, there became available a body of knowledge about what would work and what would not work. ~ Maurice Wilkes

Song
Allen Ginsberg

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human -
looks out of the heart
burning with purity -
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love -
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
- cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

- must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye -
**
yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was bor ~ Allen Ginsberg

One of the more fascinating things about human behavior is the degree to which we conceive of countless boundaries that constrain and inhibit us in extraordinary ways, even though they are nothing but mental constructs that, in reality, do not exist. ~ Dee Hock

I see stardom very clearly as a construct that's been created in order to sell things. ~ Julie Christie

Insanity - to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others. ~ Philip K. Dick

How can you construct a morality if there's no morality inherent in the way things are? You might be able to delude yourself into thinking you had 'created' a morality, but that's all it would be, an illusion. ~ John Lennox

I think 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy has a very satisfying ending, and there's not really that deep of a mythological construct. ~ Damon Lindelof

As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail. ~ Aristotle.

Lucifer had been ranting his endless laundry list of complaints for forty-five minutes now, and Louhi still didn't know exactly what she was supposed to apologize for. There was something about her plant having eaten his cape while he had been waiting, as for the rest… She wished she could read an immortal's thoughts, but their brains were constructs, simulations… Which actually explained a lot. ~ Gabriele Russo

We must let go of any fantasy concerning the church as a stable, predictable, well-regulated organization. If the church is truly the place in the world where the existence of God is brought to the level of narrative discernment, the the church will always be disorderly.
…We must let go of the desire for theology to be a finished product of complete conceptual symmetry. If theology is in fact the attempt to understand living faith, then it must always be an unfinished process, for the data continues to come in, as the Living God persists in working through the lives of people and being revealed in their stories.
…We must let go of any pretense of closing the New Testament within some comprehensive, all-purpose, singular reading which reduces its complexity to simplicity. We must recognize our attempts to reduce multiplicity to unity. We must recognize our tendency to seek a stable package of meaning that we can then apply to other situations or fit within our systematic theological constructs, so that, ideally, we need never really read the texts again. ~ Luke Timothy Johnson

God is Godless. God is an idea that we have, another construct, a prop, which doesn't suggest that God doesn't exist. God is existence. But your idea of God and existence are two different things at the moment. ~ Frederick Lenz

Through vigilance, restraint and control the wise will construct and island that no flood will overcome. ~ Gautama Buddha

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Man is a disgusting thing. If you beat him he starts to scream, but if it is the other one who is beaten, then he constructs a theory. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

You need an entire drama to construct your life around to avoid living it. ~ Jerry Stahl

What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life. ~ Dorothy Allison

Of rhythm is image/ of image is knowing/ of knowing there is/ a construct ~ Charles Olson

If a man loves a girl who is in the first place young and inexperienced; who in the second place is educated with a background of caveman tradition, a middle-ground of poetry and romance, and a foreground of unspoken hope and interest all centering upon the one Event; and who has, furthermore, absolutely no other hope or interest worthy of the name - why, it is a comparatively easy manner to sweep her off her feet with a dashing attack. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Let's admit that feminism came from liberalism and it was very positive. But then it went dark. Feminism replaced biology with social construct. Like you didn't achieve what you could get because it was your fault. They denied traits that are applied across all cultures. And that's where feminism went wrong is it denied biology and makes them look foolish. ~ Greg Gutfeld

I often see the materials of photography as being a type of terrain. Emulsions, liquid developers, silver salts, and fixers interact, and I construct a landscape that I need to first explore in my mind's eye if I am to make it manifest as an artful image in silver. ~ Paul Caponigro

For when man is faced with a curse he answers, "I'll take care of my problems." And he puts everything to work to become powerful, to keep the curse from having its effects. He creates the arts and the sciences, he raises an army, he constructs chariots, he builds cities. The spirit of might is a response to the divine curse. ~ Jacques Ellul

I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations. ~ Carol Shields

Today, when we look at a brain, we see an intricate network of billions of neurons in constant, crackling communication, a chemical labyrinth that senses the world outside and within, produces love and sorrow, keeps our hearts beating and lungs breathing, composes our thoughts, and constructs our consciousness. ~ Carl Zimmer

How strange. The power of the spirit over the permanence of celluloid. A fantasy, fixed in time yet fleeting. The spirit. He pauses & nods perceptibly. The Spirit is the Reader. What the reader constructs is the Other, & the Other is contained in his flight, the definition of the Other is flight. To fix the Other is to lose him, to let him flee & grow is to keep him. ~ Christine Brooke-Rose

Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure. ~ Anthony De Jasay

There have been some nations who could do nothing but construct tombs, and these are the only traces which they have left. They are the heathen. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Healing is essential for lasting change. ...healing is a transformation, not just a quick fix; a change from an inhibited or impaired state to one of greater health, integration and connection. What was damaged must be soothed, repaired, restored, and given new pathways in which to grow and flourish. In order for change to be thorough, old patterns need to be dissolved, and new, more coherent and refined constructs, formed. In creating coherency in new forms, what has become fragmented or separated, injured or diseased must be made whole again, or perhaps made whole for the first time. ~ Sharon Weil

Every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence. ~ Erwin Schrodinger

The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories. ~ Alan W. Watts

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense. ~ Kate Atkinson

Eco" comes from the Greek word oikos, meaning home. Ecology is the study of home, while economics is the management of home. Ecologists attempt to define the conditions and principles that govern life's ability to flourish through time and change. Societies and our constructs, like economics, must adapt to those fundamentals defined by ecology. The challenge today is to put the "eco" back into economics and every aspect of our lives. ~ David Suzuki

The question of the origin of life is essentially speculative. We have to construct, by straightforward thinking on the basis of very few factual observations, a plausible and self-consistent picture of a process which must have occurred before any of the forms which are known to us in the fossil record could have existed. ~ John Desmond Bernal

The problem of education in a democratic society is to do away with ... dualism and to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it. ~ John Dewey

It is a truly radical experience for a clergyperson to admit that their beliefs, and the faith that they have long articulated, have lost their meaning. It is more than the dark night of the soul; it is the utter abandonment of a worldview that, after thorough study, reflection, and lived experience, fails to withstand critique both intellectually and emotionally. It is a revelation that uncomfortably exposes the internal architecture of self-delusion and the social and religious constructs that buttress these imaginative ideologies. It is a journey that all members of the Clergy Project have taken, myself included. ~ Catherine Dunphy

Character and emotionality don't always have to be relegated to quieter, more simple constructs. ~ Kathryn Bigelow

It is important to measure ourselves at least once in life, undertake a personal odyssey that constructs a clarifying prism of our being. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If something is easy to repair, it is easy to construct. ~ Leo Fender

Inevitably we construct ourselves. Let me explain. I enter this house and immediately I become what I have to become, what I can become: I construct myself. That is, I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you. And, of course, you do the same with me. ~ Luigi Pirandello

The naturalistic hypothesis that it's the brain that constructs the sense of self, now being explored by neuroscientists and neuro-philosophers worldwide, is entirely consistent with what meditation might reveal. Since experience seems a function (somehow – explaining consciousness is just getting underway) of what the brain and body do, the very sense of being a subject which purportedly "has" experience and "to whom" things happen is itself simply another neurally-instantiated aspect of subjectivity, albeit psychologically fundamental. What the brain constructs can perhaps be temporarily deconstructed, given the right conditions and sufficient practice. Thus the first-person meditative experience of the dropping away of ego, should it occur, is to experience what third-person science shows to be the dependent arising, and non-arising, of the phenomenal self. In this way, the scientific-physicalist and meditative-experiential perspectives, both empirical in different senses, end up with the same conclusion: the very core of self – the experienced locus of all our concern and striving – is a mutable, perishable, dependent phenomenon, just as the Buddha taught. Seeing this clearly from both perspectives might give us some psychological distance from the very self on behalf of which we're striving, giving us a measure of equanimity and opening space for compassion centered on others. Science and Buddhist practice are thus consilient partners in the quest for liberation. ~ Thomas W. Clark