Process Over Product Quotes

Emphasizing the body as art, these artists amplified the role of process over product and shifted from representation objects to presentational modes of action. ~ Kristine Stiles

I am a documentarian of what I do. ~ Gay Talese

Suppose we humans are, as a species, exhibiting disease
behavior: we're multiplying with no regard for limits, consuming natural
resources as if there will be no future generations, and producing
waste products that are distressing the planet upon which our
very survival depends. There are two factors which we, as a species,
are not taking into consideration. First is the survival tactic of
pathogens, which requires additional hosts to infect. We do not have
the luxury of that option, at least not yet. If we are successful at continuing
our dangerous behavior, then we will also succeed in marching
straight toward our own demise. In the process, we can also drag
many other species down with us, a dreadful syndrome that is already
underway. This is evident by the threat of extinction that hangs, like
the sword of Damocles, over an alarming number of the Earth's
species.
There is a second consideration: infected host organisms fight
back. As humans become an increasing menace, can the Earth try to
defend itself? When a disease organism infects a human, the human
body elevates its own temperature in order to defend itself. This rise
in temperature not only inhibits the growth of the infecting pathogen,
but also greatly enhances the disease fighting capability within the
body. Global warming may be the Earth's way of inducing a global
"fever" as a reaction to human pollution of ~ Joseph C. Jenkins

Imagine you are tied to a chair with your hands tightly bound behind you, preventing you from covering your ears. Before you is a giant chalkboard. A woman enters the room. Her fingernails are long, hard, and ready for attack. You follow her with your eyes as she saunters to the chalkboard and raises her hand to make a claw. She looks at you with a blank stare as she digs her fingernails into the chalkboard and drags downward. As the harsh sound hits your ears, you squeeze your eyes shut in an instinctive yet vain effort to shut out the noise, but the absence of sight only magnifies the vile sound. Your ears have become hypersensitive, and you feel an unpleasant chill shoot through your body down to the toes of your feet. Finally, the sound stops as she removes her nails from the board, and a wave of relief passes over you. But the reprieve is short-lived. Again, the nails dig into the board and screech all the way down. The process repeats itself several times, and each time she stops dragging, you think it has ended for good, but soon she starts all over again. You frantically call out to her and ask her why she is doing this. You wonder what you have done to earn this perpetual torture. But she only looks back at your with a blank, almost quizzical stare, and that is when you realize that she is unaware of the pain she is causing. You feel the hopelessness pass over you. You squirm to free yourself from the chair, but it's no use. This is your life now, listening to this t ~ Rachel Cinelli

One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die. ~ Andy Goldsworthy

It seems to us that there are four great collective sociological assumptions in the modern world. By this we mean not only the Western world, but all the world that shares a modern technology and is structured into nations…. That man's aim in life is happiness, that man is naturally good, that history develops in endless progress, and that everything is matter.
The other great psychological reflection of social reality is the myth. The myth expresses the deep inclinations of a society. Without it, the masses would not cling to a certain civilization, or its process of development and crisis. It is a vigorous impulse, strongly colored, irrational, and charged with all of man's power to believe… In our society the two great fundamentals myths on which all other myths rest are Science and History. And based on them are the collective myths that are man's principal orientations: the myth of Work, the myth of Happiness (which is not the same thing as presupposition of happiness), the myth of the Nation, the myth of Youth, the myth of Hero.
Propaganda is forced to build on those presuppositions and to express these myths, for without them nobody would listen to it. And in so building it must always go in the same direction as society; it can only reinforce society. A propaganda that stresses virtue over happiness and presents man's future as one dominated by austerity and contemplation would have no audience at all. A propaganda that questions progress or work would arou ~ Jacques Ellul

But failure and success are labels placed upon people's lives the way a child values winning a game whether or not they have to bend the rules in order to do it. But life is not a game and the rules cannot be bent without repercussions that prove damaging later on. We must play the game for all we are worth, and we must play it fairly. We play and lose and play again, over and over. We lose and we pick up and start again a little wiser. We learn the game a little better in the playing, learn lessons for the next game. And should we lose today it is only a step towards the winning of the larger game. We move our piece on the board one step at a time, but it is all part of some larger process. ~ James Rozoff

There's something about losing friends, particularly young people, where it's not something that you get over. I don't believe there's a healing process. ~ Chris Cornell

I still get excited just attending a final four, because the process is so long, so arduous, so challenging, that when it finally arrives, the adrenaline can't help but take over. I love the sense of accomplishment and camaraderie that the indoor game can engender. ~ Karch Kiraly

What is it, really, that we could lose if we handed ourselves over to the discernment of faith? Would we really lose anything except the illusion of control? This question suggests that there may be an idolatrous project underlying resistance to spiritual discernment: the desire for a decision-making process that we can predict and control.
But the obedience of faith offers no certainties, not even that of being certain of our our fidelity. We cannot know if the decision we make here and now are correct. We only know that they are the best we are able to make, and that in the future we might both regret them and need to change them. The reason has nothing to do with our sinfulness and everything to do with the fact that faith has to do with the Living God, who always moves ahead of us in surprising and sometimes shocking ways. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb. 10:31). ~ Luke Timothy Johnson

Their journey wasn't complete. If their
relationship had been a poker tournament, unquestionably, they'd not been dealt the best cards. When faced with the same odds, as Tony and Claire, many players would have folded and walked away. They hadn't - they'd continued to play. In the process they'd grown and changed. At one time, they were opponents, strategizing against one another, now they were teammates, yet their tournament wasn't over. It was too early to declare the winner. They both knew there were more cards to be revealed. ~ Aleatha Romig

There are some men who, living with the one object of enriching themselves, no matter by what means, and being perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day towards this end, affect nevertheless - even to themselves - a high tone of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of the world. Some of the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this earth, or rather - for walking implies, at least, an erect position and the bearing of a man - that ever crawled and crept through life by its dirtiest and narrowest ways, will gravely jot down in diaries the events of every day, and keep a regular debtor and creditor account with Heaven, which shall always show a floating balance in their own favour. Whether this is a gratuitous (the only gratuitous) part of the falsehood and trickery of such men's lives, or whether they really hope to cheat Heaven itself, and lay up treasure in the next world by the same process which has enabled them to lay up treasure in this - not to question how it is, so it is. And, doubtless, such book-keeping (like certain autobiographies which have enlightened the world) cannot fail to prove serviceable, in the one respect of sparing the recording Angel some time and labour. ~ Charles Dickens

That which you have received, you should be grateful for it. And the most beautiful phenomenon is that when you are grateful, existence starts pouring more and more over you. It becomes a circle: the more you get, the more you become grateful; the more you become grateful, the more you get ... And there is no end to it, it is an infinite process. ~ Rajneesh

We weren't trying to strike it rich with Firefox. It's open source and it's free. We weren't trying to take over the world; we had kind of modest goals, and it was OK if it failed. We were a lot freer to make risky decisions. If you can afford to do things that way, it's just so much better. You're not thinking about venture capitalists or marketing or sales. Just product and users, all day every day. ~ Blake Ross

The liberal ideals of the Enlightenment could be realized only in very partial and limited ways in the emerging capitalist order: "Democracy with its mono of equality of all citizens before the law and Liberalism with its right of man over his own person both were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy," Rocker correctly observed. Those who are compelled to rent themselves to owners of capital in order to survive are deprived of one of the most fundamental rights: the right to productive, creative and fulfilling work under one's own control, in solidarity with others. And under the ideological constraints of capitalist democracy, the prime necessity is to satisfy the needs of those in a position to make investment decisions; if their demands are not satisfied, there will be no production, no work, no social services, no means for survival. All necessarily subordinate themselves and their interests to the overriding need to serve the interests of the owners and managers of the society, who, furthermore, with their control over resources, are easily able to shape the ideological system (the media, schools, universities and so on) in their interests, to determine the basic conditions within which the political process will function, its parameters and basic agenda, and to call upon the resources of state violence, when need be, to suppress any challenge to entrenched power. The point was formulated succinctly in the early days of the liberal democratic revolutions by Joh ~ Noam Chomsky

People "at the top" are eager to attribute their position to their own intellect, savvy, and hard work. The reality is much more complicated. Personal connections, family environment, and what appears to be plain luck determine how successful a person is. We are the product of three things- genetics, environment, and our personal choices- but two of these three factors we have no power over. We are not nearly as responsible for our success as our popular views of God and reality lead us to think. ~ Timothy Keller

So you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the
beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you're doing,
then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you're not only
beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why? Because the process of your
bodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system which is continuous with the
shining of the sun, just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all the
waves in it are activities of the whole East River, and that's continuous with the Atlantic
Ocean, and that's all one energy system and finally the Atlantic ocean gets around to being
the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, etc., and so all the waters of the Earth are a
continuous energy system. It isn't just that the East River is part of it. You can't draw any
line and say 'Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,' as if you can
in the parts of an automobile, where you can say 'This is definitely part of the generator,here, and over here is a spark plug.' There's not that kind of isolation between the elements
of nature. ~ Alan W. Watts

So many people now call themselves 'students of the University of life' as if experience theorized with lack of knowledge led to any wisdom or even less, such as the capacity to think and process information outside personal validation models. It's very easy to explain what you see. It's what humanity has done throughout history. However, real education ends in the last book you finished. And you can evaluate yourself by the amount of books you were able to read, understand and appreciate. Anything below that can only lead one to be certified in stupidity. And that's what the 'students of life' really are; fragile egos trying to justify their stupidity with arrogance, crystalizing their state of ignorance in time with pride. Because, even though humanity has confused itself with its own mechanics, the transitory fact remains, that knowledge, in any shape or form, comes from books. And more than 99% of all the books ever produced in human history are now, thanks to internet, available for free, in the public domain, and wherever a computer and electricity are present. This truth also extensively contributes to the fact, that humans are now, for the first time ever, deliberately choosing to remain ignorant. And that's what the "students of life" are; proud manifestos of ignorance. They don't know that, if you read enough to be smart, you're too smart to explain what you read, and too busy to share it. So what can we then say about the ones who obsess over their physical appeara ~ Robin Sacredfire

Privacy is not a static construct. It is not an inherent property of any particular information or setting. It is a process by which people seek to have control over a social situation by managing impressions, information flows, and context. ~ Danah Boyd

During my jury selection process, we went through over 360 jurors. It took six months, all New York residents. Of the 360 jurors, over half of them had been mugged one time. Quite a number of them, maybe 30 40, 50, had been mugged twice. ~ Bernhard Goetz

Jesus has prayed over us that our faith in Him will not fail but rather be strengthened by the process we go through. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

The Senate is turning into a political quagmire." She folded her legs beneath her on the sofa and began unbraiding her hair, a lengthy process she had always found calming. "And it's our own fault. After Palpatine, nobody wanted to hand over that much power again, so we don't have an executive, only a chancellor with no real authority. Mon Mothma got things done through sheer charisma, but almost every chancellor since her has been ... " Han ~ Claudia Gray

The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness. This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In the situation of the radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world - the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history, has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them. ~ Hannah Arendt

I've learned that for hoarders, every cleanup is a grieving process. We are asking them to say goodbye to items that are heavy with memories - some wonderful, some painful. But all are important and deserve respect. A hoarder finds safety in the hoard, in the stacks and piles, and he or she will grieve over the loss of those items when they are gone. The week after the house cleaning is usually the worst. Instead of being happy and enjoying the new space, hoarders go through a difficult process. They miss their possessions, which were their closest friends for years. ~ Matt Paxton

The reformation of Christianity was a terrifying process, but it was not, as it has so often been presented, a collision between Protestant reform and Catholic intransigence. Rather, the Christian Reformation was an argument over the future of the faith - a violent, bloody argument that engulfed Europe in devastation and war for more than a century. ~ Reza Aslan

In our modern society the image and mythic process has been taken over by corporations that directly control advertising and, indirectly, the entertainment industry. Powerful erotic images are used for the sole purpose of selling consumer products; the side effects of this commercialization have a profound impact on the sexual imagination and identity of vast numbers of people. ~ Robert Lawlor

Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God. Close your eyes and breathe your way beneath your troubles, the way a diver slips to that depth of stillness that is always waiting beneath the churning of the waves. Now, consider two things you love doing, such as running, drawing, singing, bird-watching, gardening, or reading. Meditate on what it is in each of these that makes you feel alive. Hold what they have in common before you, and breathing slowly, feel the spot of grace these dear things mirror within you. ~ Mark Nepo

What if an EO isn't a product of just any trauma? What if their bodies are reacting to the greatest physical and psychological trauma possible? Death. Think about it, the kind of transformation we're talking about wouldn't be possible with a physiological reaction alone, or a psychological reaction alone. It would require a huge influx of adrenaline, of fear, awareness. We talk about the power of will, we talk about mind over matter, but it's not one over the other, it's both at once. The mind and the body both respond to imminent death, and in those cases where both are strong enough - and both would have to be strong, I'm talking about genetic predisposition and will to survive - I think you might have a recipe for an EO. ~ Victoria Schwab

The key experiential approach I now use to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness and gain access to the unconscious and superconscious psyche is Holotropic Breathwork, which I have developed jointly with Christina over the last fifteen years. This seemingly simple process, combining breathing, evocative music and other forms of sound, body work, and artistic expression, has an extraordinary potential for opening the way for exploring the entire spectrum of the inner world. ~ Stanislav Grof

Flow is the process of achieving happiness through control over one's inner life. The optimal state of inner experience is order in consciousness. This happens when we focus our attention (psychic energy) on realistic goals and when our skills match the challenges we face. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This is what consent culture means. It means expecting more - demanding more. It means treating one another as complex human beings with agency and desire, not just once, but continually. It means adjusting our ideas of dating and sexuality beyond the process of prying a grudging "yes" out of another human being. Ideally you want them to say it again, and again, and mean it every time. Not just because it's hotter that way, although it absolutely is; consent doesn't have to be sexy to be centrally important. But because when you get down to it, sexuality should not be about arguing over what you can get away with and still call consensual. ~ Laurie Penny

Understand: people judge you by appearances, the image you project through your
actions, words, and style. If you do not take control of this process, then people will see
and define you the way they want to, often to your detriment. You might think that
being consistent with this image will make others respect and trust you, but in fact it is
the opposite - over time you seem predictable and weak. Consistency is an illusion
anyway - each passing day brings changes within you. You must not be afraid to
express these evolutions. The powerful learn early in life that they have the freedom to
mold their image, fitting the needs and moods of the moment. In this way, they keep
others off balance and maintain an air of mystery. You must follow this path and find
great pleasure in reinventing yourself, as if you were the author writing your own
drama ~ 50 Cent

She'd already accepted that she loved him, hadn't she? And it had been easy, a simple process of steps and study. Her mind was amde up, her goals set. Damn it, she'd been pleased by the whole business.
So what was this shaky, dizzy, painful sensation, this clutch of panic that made her want to turn her mount sharply around and ride as far away as possible?
She'd been wrong, Keeyley realized as she pressed an unsteady hand to her jumpy heart.She'd only been falling in love up to now.How foolish of her to be lulled by the smooth slide of it.This was the moment, she understood that now. This was the moment the bottom dropped away and sent her crashing.
Now the wind was knocked out of her, that same shock of sensation that came from losing your seat over a jump and findng yourself flipping through space until the ground reached up and smacked into you. Jolting bones and head and heart.
Love was an outrageous shock to the system, she thought. It was a wonder anyone survived it.
She was a Grant, Keeley reminded herself and straightened in the saddle. She knew how to take a tumble, jsut as she knew how to pick herself back up and focus mind and energy on the goal. She wouldn't just survive this knock to the heart.She'd thrive on it.And when she was done with Brian Donnelly, he wouldn't know what had hit him. ~ Nora Roberts

I've been known to write 10 pages a day for 10 days running before I take a breath. I am not a disciplined writer. I'm one of those people who laughingly call themselves inspirational writers, which basically means someone who has no control over their own creative process. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde

Over time, the grueling job of a mother requires one to learn everything from patience to clinical psychology.

When you are "in the fire," it is sometimes hard to recognize the value of what you are learning. But the da-to-day refining process--the problem solving, crisis resolution, mental stretching, mess clean-ups, sleep deprivation, and loving more than you thought possible truly makes you into a smart, aware, beautiful refined individual.

The great secret is appreciating the refined person you are becoming through your trials. ~ Linda Eyre

Focused on your image in the mirror a few moments longer, and say to yourself, "Whatever my defects or imperfections, I accept myself unreservedly and completely." Stay focused, breathe deeply, and say this over and over again for a minute or two without rushing the process. Allow yourself to experience fully the meaning of your words. ~ Nathaniel Branden

Butterflies are beautiful, but the process of emerging from the chrysalis and spreading your wings can hurt like fucking hell. But still, you will survive the transformation (over and over again) and you will fly. Remember this when it hurts the most. This is the metamorphosis, the going down to liquid, and the rising again. It's no joke – but damn, it's one hell of a journey. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

Here's a simple example. The wooly mammoth inhabited the northern parts of Eurasia and North America, and was adapted to the cold by bearing a thick coat of hair (entire frozen specimens have been found buried in the tundra).3 It probably descended from mammoth ancestors that had little hair - like modern elephants. Mutations in the ancestral species led to some individual mammoths-like some modern humans - being hairier than others. When the climate became cold, or the species spread into more northerly regions, the hirsute individuals were better able to tolerate their frigid surroundings, and left more offspring than their balder counterparts. This enriched the population in genes for hairiness. In the next generation, the average mammoth would be a bit hairier than before. Let this process continue over some thousands of generations, and your smooth mammoth gets replaced by a shaggy one. ~ Jerry A. Coyne

I'm a big believer in being an entrepreneur. It's easy for me to say because I work for myself and I am someone who likes that process. You have control over your destiny. ~ Robert Greene