Lescure Mechanical Quotes

I am willing to allow that smoking is a moral weakness, but on the other hand, we must beware of the man without weaknesses. He is not to be trusted. He is apt to be always sober and he cannot make a single mistake. His habits are likely to be regular, his existence more mechanical and his head always maintains its supremacy over his heart. Much as I like reasonable persons, I hate completely rational beings. ~ Lin Yutang

Kissing's a very organic and mechanical process. It's like a slap. You slap your co-star once and it's done. ~ Alia Bhatt

Western medical practitioners, except for a few enlightened exceptions, still regard the human body as a car and discuss problems and solutions in mechanical terms. If the human being is not working properly, for example, the solution is to find and change the defective part or in some way modify it. ~ Jan Benham

A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the true qualities of photography are recognized, the process of representation by mechanical means will be brought to a level of perfection never before reached. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

In the manner characteristic of their species they had lived hitherto without serious thought for matters of public concern. They were fully occupied in keeping themselves and their families afloat in the maelstrom of economic individualism. Inevitably their chief concern was private fulfilment, and its essential means, money. National affairs, racial affairs, cosmical events, were of interest to them only in their economic bearing, or at most as occasions of curiosity, wonder or ridicule. They produced and consumed, bought and sold, played ritual games with balls, and transported themselves hither and thither in mechanical vehicles in search of a goal which ever eluded them. They indulged in illicit sexual intercourse; or with public applause they married, propagated, launched their children upon the maelstrom. The overwhelming majority were enslaved by the custom of the herd. Nowhere was there any clear perception of the issues at stake, nowhere any recognition that the species was faced with the supreme crisis of its career. Scarcely a man or woman in Europe or America, still less in the remote East, realized that the great test of the human animal had come, and come, alas, too soon. ~ Olaf Stapledon

You don't have to find out what someone's mechanical abilities are. All those factors are already a known commodity. I've seen teams win championships and have their entire team quit the next day because they weren't happy. ~ Larry Dixon

I often thought that the simples fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinantes me. I try to find them, collect them, protect them. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

A man who can do everything fully consciously becomes a luminous phenomenon. He is all light, and his whole life is full of fragrance and flowers. The mechanical man lives in dark holes, dirty holes. He does not know the world of light; he is like a blind man. The man of watchfulness is really the man who has eyes. ~ Rajneesh

a huddle of robot sheep bleating their terror with mechanical lungs of a hundred horsepower. ~ Sinclair Lewis

An axiomatic system comprises axioms and theorems and requires a certain amount of hand-eye coordination before it works. A formal system comprises an explicit list of symbols, an explicit set of rules governing their cohabitation, an explicit list of axioms, and, above all, an explicit list of rules explicitly governing the steps that the mathematician may take in going from assumptions to conclusions. No appeal to meaning nor to intuition. Symbols lose their referential powers; inferences become mechanical. ~ David Berlinski

What is your itinerary?"
"To meet my maker."
"Ah. Well. You're in luck. And what do you want to say to your maker?"

"A most mechanical and dirty hand [laughs]. I shall have such revenges on you...both. The things I will do, what they are, yet I know not. But they will be the terrors of the earth. You don't know where you are, do you? You're in a prison of your own sins. ~ Michael Crichton

In the name of economy a thousand wasteful devices would be invented; and in the name of efficiency new forms of mechanical time-wasting would be devised: both processes gained speed through the nineteenth century and have come close to the limit of extravagant futility in our own time. But labor-saving devices could only achieve their end-that of freeing mankind for higher functions-if the standard of living remained stable. The dogma of increasing wants nullified every real economy and set the community in a collective squirrel-cage. ~ Lewis Mumford

Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary points. But nowadays, you may look for them with a microscope, they are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and mechanical days. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I am a mechanical techie. I can build things with my hands. ~ Evan Glodell

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. ~ David Foster Wallace

Mechanical Notation ... I look upon it as one of the most important additions I have made to human knowledge. It has placed the construction of machinery in the rank of a demonstrative science. The day will arrive when no school of mechanical drawing will be thought complete without teaching it. ~ Charles Babbage

I looked at my hands. I was holding onto the steering wheel so tightly, all my knuckles where shiny points of white, and my blinker was on, CLICK-click CLICK-click CLICK-click, so certain, so plain, so clear, and yet for all its mechanical conviction, blinking me in the wrong direction. ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

The ads made me feel bilious and love-stricken, invaded and debauched by a coldly mechanical lust for whatever fetish the desire machines were pushing at their victims at any given instant. ~ Charles Stross

It happens that I despise that locution, "having sex," which describes something a good deal more mechanical than making love and a good deal less fun than fucking. ~ Wallace Stegner

Speaking of novels,' I said, 'you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described - by Cocteau, I think - as "a mirage of suspended gardens," and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but - and now let me finish sweetly - we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking "human interest": it is there, it is there - maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I set out to show that there exists single creative activity,which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind. ~ Jacob Bronowski

A mechanical encounter or other energy-exchange may cause tissue damage. ~ James J. Gibson

What we are after is the root and not the branches. The root is the real knowledge; the branches are surface knowledge. Real knowledge breeds 'body feel' and personal expression; surface knowledge breeds mechanical conditioning and imposing limitation and squelches creativity. ~ Bruce Lee

This raises the age-old problem of mind-body reductionism. I'm not about to solve it and fortunately I don't need to. I can take a pragmatic approach. Sometimes, it works to think of myself as a mechanical system. Sometimes, it works to think of myself as a perceiver and maker of meaning. Sometimes thinking of myself as an agent with free will helps and sometimes, especially when the scope of the will is exaggerated, it doesn't. (At times telling myself to "buck up" just leads to a debilitating kind of neurochemical backfiring.) The ~ Susan J. Brison

Our megatechnic culture, based as it is on the strange supposition that subjective malice has no reality and that evils do not exist, except in the sense of reparable mechanical defects, has proved itself incompetent to take on such responsibilities. ~ Lewis Mumford

One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. ~ William James

Amazon.com took the idea of a man inside the computer and created a service with the same name. A person or company can present a task to the Mechanical Turk Web site, and hordes of invisible people will chip away at it, doing work that's eerily human but requires no personal interaction and very little money. These hardworking people are like the little man inside the chess computer: you can't see them, but they're doing all the work. ~ Seth Godin

In truth, one cannot, it seems, oppose mechanism and finalism, one cannot oppose mechanism and anthropomorphism, for if the functioning of a machine is explained by relations of pure causality, the construction of a machine can be understood neither without purpose nor without man. A machine is made by man and for man, with a view toward certain ends to be obtained, in the form of effects to be produced ... a mechanical model of any phenomena is explanatory only so long as we take machines as already granted. ~ Georges Canguilhem

No, it wasn't an accident, I didn't say that. It was carefully planned, down to the tiniest mechanical and emotional detail. But it was a mistake. ~ John Paxton

Under the heading of "defense mechanisms," psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These "mechanisms" are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves "unconscious," that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that "splitting", for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, an impersonal process, so to speak, which has taken over and which he can observe but cannot control or stop. There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such "defenses" by the term "mechanism." But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology. But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de-alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realizing that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent. ~ R.D. Laing

We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone´s intention. We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all. ~ Daniel Kahneman

[People] cannot live without seeking to describe and explain the universe to themselves. The models they use in doing this must deeply affect their lives, not least when they are unconscious; much of [their] misery and frustration ... is due to the mechanical and unconscious, as well as deliberate, application of models where they do not work ... The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist [people] to understand themselves and thus operate in the open and not wildly, in the dark. ~ Isaiah Berlin

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Philosophically defined, growth is the struggle of life to control its environment or, rather, to include more and more of its environment within the area of its own self-knowing. Perfect freedom of expression is the goal of all life. All things, both animate and inanimate, are striving for that freedom which lies in perfect expression. It naturally follows that there is but one freedom – perfection. Every creature is a slave to those parts of itself as yet unresponsive to the impulses of its internal life principle. Every individual consequently is a slave to his own material constitution; he is a prisoner held in by walls of unresponsive substance. Thus the natural expression of the inner life principle is to refine and improve the qualities of its outer vehicles that it may the more easily control and direct them. It is evident that the more refined the substance, the more easily it is influenced by subtle forces. By a certain definite organization, consciousness equips its outer nature with organs of responsiveness, so that the lower self comes ever more nearly en rapport with its own Cause. A common example is the radio, which is a mechanical contrivance constructed according to definite scientific principles which enable it to pick up vibratory rates of sound inaudible to even the delicate mechanism of the human ear. ~ Manly P. Hall

The hemorrhages in vitamin K deficiency develop in this way that minute vascular lesions caused by minor mechanical trauma are not closed by rapid clotting, as is the case in normal animals. ~ Henrik Dam

Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers. Self-organization ~ Donella H. Meadows

Though they play an important role in the early stages, the techniques should not be too mechanical, complex, or restrictive. Remember, you are expressing the techniques and not doing the techniques. When attacked, your response is not technique 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
rather you simply move in like sound and echo, without any deliberation. React as when I throw something to you, you catch it. Nothing else. ~ Bruce Lee

Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial ... The camera ... is so utterly unmechanical. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The scientific world-picture vouchsafe a very complete understanding of all that happens - it makes it just a little too understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clock-work, which for all that science knows could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavour, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it - though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this, that, for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it it gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed.

In particular, and most importantly, this is the reason why the scientific world-view contains of itself no ethical values, no aesthetical values, not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination, and no God, if you please. Whence came I, whither go I?

Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.

Science, we believe, can, in principle, describe in full detail all that happens in the latter case in our sensorium and 'motorium' from the moment the waves of compression and dilation reach our ear to the moment when certain glands secrete a salty fluid that emerges from our eyes. But of the feelings of delight and sorrow that accompany the process science is completely ignorant - ~ Erwin Schrodinger

Things mechanical are like the ladies,' continued Toby. 'You need to understand their ways. If you understand them, they'll do what you want from the start. If you don't, they've got you. And then God help you. ~ Robert Aickman

Who are we really? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random for some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply?
Or the same soul, immortal and eternal, refurbished and reused through endless lives, by that thrifty Housekeeper? In Her wisdom and benevolence She wipes off the memory slates, as part of the cleaning process, because if we could remember all the things we have experienced in earlier lives, we might object to risking it again. ~ Barbara Michaels

Chronological time is what we measure by clocks and calendars; it is always linear, orderly, quantifiable, and mechanical. Kairotic time is organic, rhythmic, bodily, leisurely, and aperiodic; it is the inner cadence that brings fruit to ripeness, a woman to childbirth, a man to change the direction of his life. ~ Sam Keen

Woman"

this head like a saucer
decorated with everything
as lip to lip we hang
in mechanical joy;
my hands blaze with arias
but i think of books
on anatomy,
and i fall from you
as nations burn in anger…

to recover from most pitiful error
and rebuild, this is it
loss and mending
until they take us in.

the glory of a saturday afternoon
like biting into an old peach
and you walk across the room
heavy with everything
except my love. ~ Charles Bukowski

The American novel
claims to find its unity in reducing man either to elementals or to his external reactions and to
his behavior. It does not choose feelings or passions to give a detailed description of, such as we find in classic
French novels. It rejects analysis and the search for a fundamental psychological motive that could explain and
recapitulate the behavior of a character. This is why the unity of this novel form is only the unity of the flash of
recognition. Its technique consists in describing men by their outside appearances, in their most casual actions, of
reproducing, without comment, everything they say down to their repetitions,
and finally by acting as if men were
entirely defined by their daily automatisms. On this mechanical level men, in fact, seem exactly alike, which
explains this peculiar universe in which all the characters appear interchangeable, even down to their physical
peculiarities. This technique is called realistic only owing to a misapprehension. In addition to the fact that realism
in art is, as we shall see, an incomprehensible idea, it is perfectly obvious that this fictitious world is not attempting
a reproduction, pure and simple, of reality, but the most arbitrary form of stylization. It is born of a mutilation, and
of a voluntary mutilation, performed on reality. The unity thus obtained is a degraded unity, a leveling off of human
beings and of the world. It would ~ Albert Camus

Many people are so imprisoned in their minds that the beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might say, 'What a pretty flower,' but that's just a mechanical mental labeling. Because they are not still, not present, they don't truly see the flower, don't feel it's essence, it's holiness-just as they don't know themselves, don't feel their own essence, their own holiness. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Archimedes to Eratosthenes greeting ... certain things first became clear to me by a mechanical method, although they had to be demonstrated by geometry afterwards because their investigation by the said method did not furnish an actual demonstration. But it is of course easier, when we have previously acquired by the method, some knowledge of the questions, to supply the proof than it is to find it without any previous knowledge. ~ Archimedes

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical. ~ Ralph Adams Cram