Fundamentally Distinct Quotes

Neuroscientists rarely have to grapple with the issue of presentism versus existentialism. But in practice, neuroscientists are implicitly presentists. They view the past, present, and future as fundamentally distinct, as the brain makes decisions in the present, based on the memories of the past, to enhance our well being in the future. But despite its intuitive appeal, presentism is the underdog theory in physics and philosophy. ~ Dean Buonomano

Was it possible there was some fatal flaw in their matching, that they were ultimately, impossibly different
dissimilar enough to fall in love, but too fundamentally distinct to stay together? ~ Galt Niederhoffer

He stood in the doorway of her office. He was, as always, the consummate scoundrel. He leaned against the doorframe, smiling - almost smirking - at her, as if he knew how rapidly her heart had started beating.

If that was how they were going to do this…

She simply raised an eyebrow in his direction. "Oh," she said with a sniff. "It's you."

"You're not fooling anyone," he said.

She could feel the corner of her mouth twitch up. Last time she'd seen him, he'd kissed her so thoroughly she had not yet recovered.

"I'm not?"

"I heard it most distinctly," he told her. "You might have said 'It's you,' but there was a distinct exclamation mark at the end. In fact, I think there were two."

"Oh, dear." Free looked down, fluttering her eyelashes demurely. "Is my punctuation showing once more?"

His eyes darkened and he took a step into her office. "Don't hide it on my account," he growled. "You have the most damnably beautiful punctuation that I have ever seen. ~ Courtney Milan

Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be ... There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings. ~ Caroline Knapp

Tragically, some people are genetically more susceptible than others to agripoisons and industrial pollutants. Genetic engineering to correct these medical problems is a narrow (reductionistic) and instrumental (mechanistic) response to a problem that is fundamentally conceptual: namely, our attitude toward life and our mistreatment of the Earth, plants, and animals-and ourselves in the process. ~ Michael Fox

Ultimately people don't watch shows because of how realistic they are. They watch them because of the same dramatic elements that have always made stories interesting. And fundamentally if those elements don't work, no amount of reality is going to be enough to keep people watching a show. ~ Michael Loceff

She ate--so, so good--cocooned in the harmonic dissonance of a large family, where every sound was distinct yet blended. ~ Rachel Hauck

If the rays are the souls of living beings, then the light of that same divine Sun is the spirit of the whole of nature. It is the same light; but not divided, not distinct, as are the rays which we call souls. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

So when we talk about God we're using language, language that employs a vast array of words and phrases and forms to describe a reality that is fundamentally beyond words and phrases and forms. ~ Rob Bell

The economy of gift, of art, is fundamentally opposed to the economy of war. ~ Mary Rose O'Reilley

There were times that being a half-blood bothered him, but Flick had stoutly insisted that it was a distinct advantage because it gave him the instincts and character of two races to build upon ~ Terry Brooks

It's a legitimate point to debate. But it's part of the reality. It's happening, but it's also true they (looters) are in the distinct minority. I think there's a hero on every street corner in New Orleans, and I think the reporting has shown that. I think the balance has been there. ~ Dan Rather

Change from below, the formulation of demands from the populace to end unacceptable injustice, supported by direct action, has played a far larger part in shaping British democracy than most constitutional lawyers, political commentators, historians or statesmen have ever cared to admit. Direct action in a democratic society is fundamentally an educational exercise. ~ Tony Benn

Action springs out of what we fundamentally desire ~ Dale Carnegie

Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I had worked for a newspaper of sorts, word got around, and I became editor of our local school newspaper, The Drum. I don't recall being given any choice in this matter; I think I was simply appointed. My second-in-command, Danny Emond, had even less interest in the paper than I did. Danny just liked the idea that Room 4, where we did our work, was near the girls' bathroom. "Someday I'll just go crazy and hack my way in there, Steve," he told me on more than one occasion. "Hack, hack, hack." Once he added, perhaps in an effort to justify himself: "The prettiest girls in school pull up their skirts in there." This struck me as so fundamentally stupid it might actually be wise, like a Zen Koan or an early story by John Updike. ~ Stephen King

Teela turned to Severn. "I'm having trouble remembering why I haven't
strangled her yet."
Severn shrugged. "I have that problem myself some days. At the moment,
though, the only betting pool in the office seems to be on the Sergeant."
"Ha-ha." Kaylin said with a distinct lack of cheer. And then, because she
was a fiefling, "What odds?" He cuffed the top of her head. ~ Michelle Sagara West

the ideas presented in this book culminate a century of research questioning the calorie balance model of obesity, and represent a fundamentally different way to understand why we gain weight and what we can do about it.7 ~ David Ludwig

I do not know what I will think tomorrow and later; today I feel no distinct emotion. ~ Primo Levi

The only way you can be free is to know is that you are worthwhile as a distinct human being. ~ Russell Means

Arts and disciplines of that kind are fundamentally selfish; they're all designed to benefit the pupil - not the world - "Ishmael ~ Daniel Quinn

Innovation - the heart of technological change - is fundamentally a learning process. ~ Peter Dicken

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it ... ~ George Bernard Shaw

It pains me, my dear," I said with a distinct emotional warble in my throat, "to be forced to choose between you and the quest for the buzzard's bellybutton." I calculated my words to demonstrate the depth of my affection and the full weight of my courage. I hung my head dramatically (but sincerely!) and said, "I choose the crusty navel." Truly, her heart broke to see me go. ~ Andrew Peterson

All too often, parents and kids struggle to find an empathetic ear when confronting bullying situation; these escalate and too often result in marginalization, on top of what may well be a daily gauntlet of harassment and abuse that is fundamentally torture. ~ Lee Hirsch

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves. ~ Harold Bloom

Drama school is fundamentally practical. I didn't write any essays, so I came out with a BA honors degree in acting. ~ Emilia Clarke

As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience. ~ Orson Scott Card

Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness. ~ Fritjof Capra

They were a form of mutated twinning, joined at the base of the skull so that a single cephalic structure served both separate bodies. Evidently the personality George inhabited one hemisphere of the brain, made use of one eye: the right, as he recalled. And the personality Walt existed on the other side, distinct with its own idiosyncrasies, views and drives - and its own eye from which to view the outside universe. ~ Philip K. Dick

When has the world seen a phenomenon like this? a lonely uninstructed youth, coming from amid the moral darkness of Galilee, even more distinct from His age, and from every thing around Him, than a Plato would be rising up in some wild tribe in Oregon, assuming thus a position at the head of the world and maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure self-evidence of His life and doctrine. ~ Horace Bushnell

The romance that has surrounded the Beat generation since the mid-Sixties has acted as a kind of sentimental glaze, obscuring its fundamentally nihilistic impulse under a heap of bogus rhetoric about liberation, spontaneity, and 'startling oases of creativity', Notwithstanding their recent media media make-over, the Beats were not Promethean iconoclasts. They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius. We have to thank Lisa Phillips and the Whitney for inadvertently reminding us of this with such vividness. If nothing else, 'Beat Culture and the New America' showed that the Beats were not simply artistic charlatans; the were -- and, in the case of those who are still with us, they remain -- moral simpletons, whose destructive influence helped fuel the cultural catastrophe with which we are now living. ~ Roger Kimball

Because the traditional mode of dress for Muslim women is so distinct - the headcovering, which is not there for guys - women carry a greater burden of representation than Muslim men do in non-Muslim societies. ~ G. Willow Wilson

I was going to make a confession. Then I remembered I don't make them very well. We still need to see the monkeys."
"You don't really think I'm going to let a provocative statement like that slip by,do you?"
"Well...I thought the best way to discourage you was to agree to go out with you-to some place like this, which I thought would bore you to distraction-then be as obnoxious as possible."
"Have you been obnoxious?" His tone was mild and entirely too serious. "I thought you've been behaving very naturally."
"Ouch." Shelby rubbed at the figurative wound under her heart. "In any case, I get the distinct impression that I haven't discouraged you at all."
"Really?" Reaching for more popcorn, he leaned close and spoke gently in her ear "How did you come by that?"
"Oh-" She cleared her throat. "Just a hunch."
He found that tiny show of nerves very rewarding. Yes, the puzzle was coming together, piece by careful piece. It was the way he'd always structured his life. "Odd.And not once since we've been here have I mentioned that I'd like to find a small, dim room and make love to you,over and over."
Warily, Shelby slid her eyes to his. "I'd just as soon you didn't.
"All right." Alan slipped an arm around her waist. "I won't mention it while we're here."
A smile tugged at her mouth, but she shook her head. "It's not going to come to that, Alan.It can't."
"We have a fundamental disagreement." He paused on a bridge. Beneath them, s ~ Nora Roberts

This possibility was not flattering to me; it was terrifying. There were other things a guy could think I was, and he wouldn't be entirely wrong - nice, or loyal, or maybe interesting. Not that I was always any of those thing, but in certain situations, it was conceivable. But to be seen as pretty was to be fundamentally misunderstood. First of all, I wasn't pretty, and on top of that I didn't take care of myself like a pretty girl did; I wasn't even one of the unpretty girls who passes as pretty through effort and association. If a guy believed my value to lie in my looks, it meant either that he'd somehow been mislead and would eventually be disappointed, or that he had very low standards. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves. ~ Marcel Proust

And this is the great challenge of our time, the evolutionary imperative for the masculine to see through and overcome its hubris and one-sidedness, to own its own unconscious shadow, to choose to enter into a fundamentally new relationship of mutuality with the feminine in all its forms. ~ Richard Tarnas

Happiness had a pungent scent, like the sourest lime or lemon. Broken hearts smelled surprisingly sweet. Sadness filled the air with a salty, sea-like redolence; death smelled like sadness. People carried their own distinct personal fragrances. ~ Leslye Walton

Bland friendliness is easier than spending even one joule of energy formulating an opinion on someone fundamentally irrelevant to you. ~ Elan Mastai