Selected structure quotes

1. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

2. We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

3. If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

4. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

5. If I see an ending, I can work backward.

6. The closest you will ever come in this life to an orderly universe is a good library.

7. At great expense, we have built a vast system of inter-connecting stupidities.

8. The rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure are to architecture.

9. Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men; on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.

10. Music is organized sound.

11. Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

12. One is not quite certain that creativeness in the arts, literature, and science functions best in an environment of absolute freedom. Chances are that a relatively mild tyranny stimulates creativeness.

13. If you're going to have centralization, why not have it!

14. Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.

15. Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture.

16. The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design.

17. The words of the world want to make sentences.

18. In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.

19. The digestive canal represents a tube passing through the entire organism and communicating with the external world, i.e. as it were the external surface of the body, but turned inwards and thus hidden in the organism.

20. There's a fine line between giving the sense of freedom and being too free.

21. It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.

22. In the humanist ideal, the mainstream is where interesting debate, the generating of new ideas and creativity take place. In rational society this mainstream is considered uncontrollable and is therefore made marginal. The centre ground is occupied instead by structures and courtiers.

23. Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

24. If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.

25. Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

26. Accidental stacks considered harmful.

27. Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

28. We may, I believe, anticipate that the chemist of the future who is interested in the structure of proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides, and other complex substances with high molecular weight will come to rely upon a new structural chemistry, involving precise geometrical relationships among the atoms in the molecules and the rigorous application of the new structural principles, and that great progress will be made, through this technique, in the attack, by chemical methods, on the problems of biology and medicine.

29. I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

30. No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.

31. My ambition has always been to reduce a building's support to a minimum. The more we diminish supporting structures, the more audacious and important the architecture is. That has been my life's work.

32. The error in the art-genre of Opera consists herein: a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means.

33. Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks.

34. God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.

35. The truly awesome intellectuals in our history have not merely made discoveries; they have woven variegated, but firm, tapestries of comprehensive coverage. The tapestries have various fates: Most burn or unravel in the footsteps of time and the fires of later discovery. But their glory lies in their integrity as unified structures of great complexity and broad implication.

36. The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.

37. Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.

38. All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization.

39. This book is an agglomeration of lean-tos and annexes and there is no knowing how big the next addition will be, or where it will be put. At any point, I can call the book finished or unfinished.

40. The map is not the territory ... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map...

41. Vereker's secret, my dear man - the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.

42. First, I tell them what I am going to tell them, then I tell them, then I tell them what I told them.

43. Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.

44. Human reason is by nature architectonic. (B 502)

45. It seems probable to me that God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportions to space, as most conduced to the end for which He formed them; and that these primitive particles, being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them, even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God had made one in the first creation. While the particles continue entire, they may compose bodies of one and the same nature and texture in all ages: but should they wear away or break in pieces, the nature of things depending on them would be changed.

46. Comedy itself is based upon very old principles of which I can readily name seven. They are, in short: the joke, exaggeration, ridicule, ignorance, surprise, the pun, and finally, the comic situation.

47. The big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion.

48. The framework of a symphony must be so strong that it forces you to follow it, regardless of the environment and circumstances.

49. The spirit of a government must be that of the country. The form of a government must come from the makeup of the country. Government is nothing but the balance of the natural elements of a country.

50. Without discipline, there's no life at all.

51. Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; -& they are the life, the soul of reading; - take them out of this book for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them.

52. That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.

53. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. (2)

54. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.) (5)

55. 225. What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.

56. Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

57. Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

58. It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.

59. A constitution should be framed so as not to impede the action of government, nor force the government to its violation.

60. I think the Net is scaling very well. Because of the way it was designed, I don't think it will come to its knees and crash. I see it as very organic in the way it's capable of living and reproducing itself.

61. Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over. In the whole pattern of civilization there have been two tendencies, one toward straight lines and rectangular patterns and one toward circular lines. There are reasons, mechanical and psychological, for both tendencies. Things made with straight lines fit well together and save space. And we can move easily - physically or mentally - around things made with round lines. But we are in a straitjacket, having to accept one or the other, when often some intermediate form would be better.

62. It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.

63. L'acte poetique consiste a voir soudain qu'une idee se fractionne en un nombre de motifs egaux par valeur et a les grouper; ils riment.

64. Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

65. Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.

66. It is clearly necessary to invent organizational structures appropriate to the present multicultural age. But such efforts are doomed to failure if they do not grow out of something deeper, out of generally held values.

67. It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.

68. 'The fact of the existence of two theories [causal and acausal] that contradict each other in Jung ... corresponds psychologically to the vascillation between 3 and 4.

69. Page Two ...

70. Page Four ...

71. If you understand this refrain, you're gonna' understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts:

72. In Mozart's music, all intensity are crystallized in the clearest, the most beautifully balanced and proportioned, and altogether flawless musical forms. ~ Phil Goulding