Embodied Realism Quotes

There is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false. ~ George Lakoff

The embodiment of mind leads us to a philosophy of embodied realism. Our concepts cannot be a direct reflection of external, objective, mind-independent reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world. ~ George Lakoff

Any truth must be in a humanly conceptualized and understandable form if it is to be a truth for us. If it's not a truth for us, how can we make sense of its being a truth at all? ~ George Lakoff

[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework. ~ George Lakoff

The real reality is always just around the corner. ~ Mason Cooley

You are not called to believe in your love to God, but in God's love to you! Do not argue, 'I cannot love God! I have striven to my uttermost to do so, but have failed in all my endeavors, until in despair I have abandoned the thought and relinquished the attempt.' Be it so- no effort of your own can strike a spark of love to God from your heart. Nor does God demand the task at your hands. All that He requires of you is faith in His love, as embodied and expressed in Jesus Christ to poor sinners. ~ Octavius Winslow

. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness - without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live - is no longer a rarefied project. Just as machinery has embodied ideas of good, so the technology of destruction has also acquired a metaphysical character. The practical questions have thus become the ultimate questions as well. Annihilation is no longer a metaphor. Good and Evil are real. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter. It is not reserved for gods, kings, poets, priests, shrines, but belongs to mankind and to all of existence. ~ Saul Bellow

Much of contemporary "realism" turns out to be just a variation on good old fashioned fatalism: people feel relieved of responsibility by recourse to the concept of 'nature'. By nature, however, we are born ignorant. Therefore should we try not to learn? Some people produce more than the usual amount of androgens and therefore become excessively aggressive. Does that mean we should freely express violence? We cannot. Submission to genetic programming can become dangerous, because it leaves us helpless. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life. ~ Oscar Wilde

Without any intended hubris, I've lead a pretty exciting life. What I've tried to do in Mission Compromised is draw on those experiences to create a sense of excitement and realism within the story. ~ Oliver North

The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye. ~ Shana Alexander

Truth is God, and Truth overrides all our plans. The whole Truth is only embodied within the heart of Great Power-Truth. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

A recent canvass of professional philosophers found the percentage of respondents who "accept or leans toward" various positions. On normative ethics, the results were deontology 25.9%; consequentialism 23.6%; virtue ethics 18.2%. On metaethics, results were moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism 27.7%. On moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0% (Bourget and Chalmers 2009). ~ Nick Bostrom

When you stop chasing the wrong things, you give the right ones a fighting chance- Victoria Barron- dedicated attorney and protagonist of Misplaced ~ SL Hulen

The truth is there isn't anything to me at all. All I know is that I can't sleep well, I can't dream well and I'm quite in love with you. That's all there is to me. My greatest feature is my admiration for you. I know it's not healthy. Like my insomnia. Like my dreamless nights. You make living alright. My nightmares come when I think of a night without Valeria. That's when I realise you're dead. That's when I remember you've been gone for years. That's when I remember I'm awake. And I wait for this dream called Life to leave me to my peace once and for all and forever. ~ F.K. Preston

To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of stereoscopic realism, but is it not something that actually exists? ~ Vincent Van Gogh

When we get to Heaven, we can try a monarchy, perhaps." John Hay ~ John Taliaferro

Here's the most startling irony I know in film history: Antonioni, who is often denigrated by left-wing critics as a formalist and aesthete gives us radical realism through the long take, and what he gives us
this is his metaphysical wager
is real outside the film, off the set, beyond the camera and underneath the surface of everyday life. ~ Frank Lentricchia

Scientific realism in classical (i.e. pre-quantum) physics has remained compatible with the naive realism of everyday thinking on the whole; whereas it has proven impossible to find any consistent way to visualize the world underlying quantum theory in terms of our pictures in the everyday world. The general conclusion is that in quantum theory naive realism, although necessary at the level of observations, fails at the microscopic level. ~ Ravi Gomatam

A thing that many young fellows don't seem to realism at first is that success depends on oneself and not on a kindly fate, nor on the interest of powerful friends. ~ Robert Baden-Powell

Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism! ~ Carl Andre

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives. ~ George Lakoff

The bed lets out a slight gasp of air from the mattress like an old cat fart, but it looks like she's too caught up in herself to notice. ~ John Bowie

Yes, Cinderella won a real prize - a man who couldn't see her true worth until she fitted in the shoe properly. ~ Lily Morton

His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them ~ J.D. Salinger

What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you? ~ James Carville

One of my favorite things about the Kung Fu Panda 3 is the look of it. We never go for realism. I think a lot of time when people go for 3D that's the mistake. Because we're never going for full realism - for computer generated live action films like Avatar the goal is realism, to make the audience feel like they are seeing something that is real. Lord of the Rings had character design and environments to make it look real, whereas we aren't going for that, we are going for something that is theatrically, viscerally, and emotionally real. ~ Jennifer Yuh Nelson

Why did I revive that old word? Because with the notion of habitus you can refer to something that is close to what is suggested by the idea of habit, while differing from it in one important respect. The habitus, as the word implies, is that which one has acquired, but which has become durably incorporated in the body in the form of permanent dispositions. So the term constantly reminds us that it refers to something historical, linked to individual history, and that it belongs to a genetic mode of thought, as opposed to essentialist modes of thought (like the notion of competence which is part of the Chomskian lexis). Moreover, by habitus the Scholastics also meant something like a property, a capital. And indeed, the habitus is a capital, but one which, because it is embodied, appears as innate. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

Thus, Symbolism and Decadence are not a separate new school which arose in France and spread throughout all of Europe: they represent the end and culmination of a certain other school whose links were very extensive and whose roots go back to the beginning of the modern age. Symbolism, easily deduced from Maupassant, can also be deduced from Zola, Flaubert, and Balzac, from Ultra-realism as the antithesis of the previous Ultra-idealism Romanticism and "renascent" Classicism. It is precisely this element of ultra - the result of ultra manifested in life itself, in its mores, ideas, proclivities, and aspirations - that has wormed into literature and remained there ever since, expressing itself, finally, in such a hideous phenomenon as Decadence and Symbolism. The ultra without its referent, exaggeration without the exaggerated object, preciosity of form conjoined with total disappearance of content, and "poetry" devoid of rhyme, meter, and sense - that is what constitutes Decadence. ~ Vasily Rozanov

Maxwell's greatest work shows two unique characteristics which stem from his philosophical insight. The first is the way he could return to a subject, often after a gap of several years and take it to new heights using an entirely fresh approach. He did this twice with electromagnetism. The second is even more remarkable. His electromagnetic theory embodied the notion that things we can measure directly, like mechanical force, are mery the outward manifestations of deeper processes, involving entities like electric field strength, which are beyond our powers of visualization. This presages the view that twentieth century scientists came to. As Banesh Hoffmann puts it in The Strange Story of the Quantum: "There is simply no way at all of picturing the fundamental atomic processes of nature in terms of space, time and causality. ~ Basil Mahon

Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism. ~ Russell Smith

The hypothesis of value realism is superfluous - a wheel that spins without being attached to anything. From a Darwinian perspective our impressions of value, if construed realistically, are completely groundless. And if that is true for our most basic responses, it is also true for the entire elaborate structure of value and morality that is built up from them by practical reflection and cultural development - just as scientific realism would be undermined if we abandoned a realistic interpretation of the perceptual experiences on which science is based. Even a system based on the maintenance of coherence or consistency among one's responses does not need the idea of mind-independent truth about value (as opposed to logic), ~ Thomas Nagel

I don't have any other skills. Some artists say that to mean that their embodied passion for art gave them no choice. I say it, very specifically, to say that I really didn't have any other options. ~ Rashid Johnson

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings? ~ Graham Swift

These maxims and the art of interpreting them may be said to constitute the premisses of science but I prefer to call them our scientific beliefs. These premisses or beliefs are embodied in a tradition, the tradition of science. ~ Michael Polanyi

Embodied devotion and dedication is about how we give ourselves to the world; it's about our relationships with other embodied beings. ~ Julie J. Morley