Tabula Rasa Quotes

The mind of a baby is a tabula rasa; society writes information on his mind. ~ Debasish Mridha

Tabula rasa... time to hacer borrón y cuenta nueva, wipe the board clean," the singer chants.
Wipe the board clean? I feel like my board is too clean, perpetually wiped bare. What I want is the opposite: a messy scrawl, constellations of indelible things that can't ever be washed away. ~ Gayle Forman

It is self-evident that the tabula rasa of modernization favors the optimum use of earth-moving equipment inasmuch as a totally flat datum is regarded as the most economic matrix upon which to predicate the rationalization of construction. ~ Kenneth Frampton

Begin at the beginning. Know nothing. Tabula rasa. At the same time, part of me wanted to distinguish myself. To let her sense the bond we shared straightaway. Maybe subtly hint at some of my secret intelligence. A secret handshake. A nod. I now completely understood how criminal masterminds could so easily get caught before the big reveal - the temptation to boast about the execution was huge. ~ Olivia Sudjic

The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives. ~ Will Durant

If the clinician, as observer, wishes to see things as they really are, he must make a tabula rasa of his mind and proceed without any preconceived notions whatever. ~ Jean-Martin Charcot

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate. ~ Stanislav Grof

This word "Absurd" has had an unhappy history and I confess that now it rather annoys me. When I analyzed the feeling of the Absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus, I was looking for a method and not a doctrine. I was practicing methodical doubt. I was trying to make a "tabula rasa," on the basis of which it would then be possible to construct something. If we assume that nothing has any meaning, then we must conclude that the world is absurd. But does nothing have any meaning? I have never believed we could remain at this point. ~ Albert Camus

I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create. ~ Frank Herbert

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa. ~ Richard Powers

She was a tabula rasa when it came to appropriate behavior. To say Lucy was difficult is like saying lightening is hazardous. It's a statement of fact that will always be a given. ~ Patricia Cornwell

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

Soccer's appeal lay in its opposition to the other popular sports. For children of the sixties, there was something abhorrent about enrolling kids in American football, a game where violence wasn't just incidental but inherent. They didn't want to teach the acceptability of violence, let alone subject their precious children to the risk of physical maiming. Baseball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters. Basketball, before Larry Bird's prime, still had the taint of the ghetto.
But soccer represented something very different. It was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values. Quickly, soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr. Benjamin Spock. ~ Franklin Foer

Sources do not speak for themselves, graciously yielding up facts to the patient researcher, who approaches the evidence with his or her mind a tabula rasa cleared of personal views and preferences. Historians select material from archives and libraries with their minds freighted with preconceptions of various kinds, including hypotheses they wish to test, questions they want to answer, ideas about topics and issues they want to explore and understand. ~ Paul Readman

If someone arrives, fully functional yet a tabula rasa, how does their environment influence, educate, even mold them? And if that is a nurture question, then where does that character's nature fit in? How does that manifest? ~ Greg Rucka

The planet Mars
crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms
has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin. ~ David Grinspoon

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. ~ Steven Pinker

Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason. ~ Murray Rothbard

I have a theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves. ~ Seymour Hersh

Try to say that: "I don't know anything". We used to call it "tabula rasa" in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don't need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner's mind. We need to say with the blind man, "I want to see". ~ Richard Rohr

My alcoholism is in no way any sort of excuse for any of my past behaviors. Just because I quit drinking, my life was not suddenly transformed into a tabula rasa-if I have wronged someone, drunk or not, then the responsibility for this lies squarely with me. And I must do my best to set things square with that person. ...
....And just because I am sober now does not mean anyone else should care. I do not deserve a cookie for finally trying to act like a decent human being. ~ D. Randall Blythe

A certain bygone philosophy-which certainly must have quite forgotten all about the real child-used to speak of the child's nature as a tabula rasa, or 'blank page,' upon which experience and training might write what they pleased. As a matter of fact, the child's nature at birth, like that of a calf or a chick, is pretty well scribbled over by the experience of its ancestors. It is far from being blank, for as soon as the little organism comes into the world, it begins to do certain things and do them with much zeal and determination, as every one knows who knows real children. ~ Edward O. Sisson

What we need,' Henry says, 'is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let's call her Tabula Rasa. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

She would never know she was still alive because of me. ~ Rita Dinis

Aging is not an option, but how we age is completely within our choices. Lifestyle ~ Sharon Lee Rasa

To paraphrase a Latino saying (which is possibly ultimately from the Arabic traditiom), MI rasa is supposed raza." So Living in Spanglish is not a racial Istanbul text. ~ Ed Morales

The essence of all experience is Rasa – Bliss. ~ Prana Gogia

I love all kind of sky because as a part of the universe, it is unlimited and also untouchable but everybody could see the same sky from different place, everybody also could feel the same feeling as I am, which I could mention it as "rasa" ~ "feeling ~ Diadjeng Laraswati Hanindyani/De Laras

Rasa has two primary meanings: 'feeling' and 'meaning'. As 'feeling' it is one of the traditional Javanese five senses - seeing, hearing, talking, smelling and feeling, and it includes within itself three aspects of "feeling" that our view of the 5 senses separates: taste of tongue, touch on the body, and emotional 'feeling' within the 'heart' like sadness and happiness. The taste of a banana is its rasa; a hunch is a rasa; a pain is a rasa; and so is the passion. As 'meaning', rasa is applied to words in a letter, in a poem, or even in common speech to indicate the between-the-lines type of indirection and allusive suggestion that is so important in Javanese communication and social intercourse. And it is given the same application to behavioral acts generally: to indicate the implicit import, the connotative 'feeling' of dance movements, polite gestures, and so forth. But int his second, semantic sense, it also means 'ultimate significance' - the deepest meaning at which one arrives by dint of mystical effort and whose clarification resolves all the ambiguities of mundane existence(...)
(The interpretation of cultures) ~ Geertz Clifford

Radha Krishna
Krishna,
Svayam Bhagavan,
Avatar of Vishnu,
play your flute for me
beneath this parasol of stars,
diadems bejeweling your eternal crown,
and I will dance for you a joyous dance.

Svayam Bhagavan,
Avatar of Vishnu,
visit your consort, Radha,
mantled in the black of night,
the cow-herd girl who has stolen your heart,
and now the gopi has become the guru
and awaits her lover with open arms.

Svayam Bhagavan,
Avatar of Vishnu,
stay the night,
and learn the love of Radha,shakti,
her wifely love, the svakaya-rasa,
her spiritual love, the parakiya-rasa,
for immortality is a curse without both of these.

Svayam Bhagavan,
Avatar of Vishnu,
return to heaven now
for the cock has crowed
and yet you linger, lazy in Radha's bed.
Even endless love must seek and end
to repeat the joy of new beginnings.
Return, Krishna, I beseech you,
for my feet are weary of the dance
and I have fields to plow and rice to plant. ~ Beryl Dov

This grossness, physical love, which is actually the biological cooling system, is very essential. The prana feeds the tattvas and the tattvas create the rasa. Rasa means juices. The juices circulate and in that circulation the glandular system works and involves itself. And there's a place to bring it all to harmony. ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi