Generality Quotes

1. "All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring if those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad."
Author: Angela Carter

2. "As for methods I have sought to give them all the rigour that one requires in geometry, so as never to have recourse to the reasons drawn from the generality of algebra."
Author: Augustin Louis Cauchy

3. "Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them."
Author: Augustus Hare

4. "If anything is to exist at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a principle nor a generality, much less an ‘ideal' or a ‘value', but an utterly concrete fact."
Author: C.S. Lewis

5. "Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing."
Author: Charles Sanders Peirce

6. "The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality."
Author: David Hilbert

7. "The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstructions in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought so far to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind. And though these researches may appear painful and fatiguing. It is with some minds as with some bodies, which being endowed with vigorous and florid health, require severe exercise, and reap a pleasure from what, to the generality of mankind, may seem burdensome and laborious. Obscurity, indeed, is painful to the mind as well as to the eye; but to bring light from obscurity, by whatever labour, must needs be delightful and rejoicing."
Author: David Hume

8. "This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance."
Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter

9. "Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness."
Author: E. T. Bell

10. "Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle."
Author: Edward Witten

11. "I wish I could be honest and true, but truth as I see it is not something abstract, a pious generality---It is justice at work, righteous, demanding, disciplined, sincere and unswerving; otherwise, it is not, it cannot be truth at all."
Author: F. Sionil José

12. "For parlor use, the vague generality is a life saver."
Author: George Ade

13. "He's feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. [...] Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know."
Author: Ian McEwan

14. "As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene."
Author: Jacques Derrida

15. "Far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate such pleasures. They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for me. I should infinitely prefer a book."
Author: Jane Austen

16. "Look, some people talk about their personal lives a lot; I try not to, unless it's more of a generality."
Author: Kate Bosworth

17. "Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is "purely descriptive."
Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein

18. "And more even than the painter, the writer, in order to achieve volume and substance, in order to attain to generality and, so far as literature can, to reality, needs to have seen many churches in order to paint one church and for the portrayal of a single sentiment requires many individuals. For if art is long and life is short, we may on the other hand say that, if inspiration is short, the sentiments which it has to portray are not of much longer duration. It is our passions which draw the outline of our books, the ensuing intervals of repose which write them."
Author: Marcel Proust

19. "Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality."
Author: Richard Courant

20. "My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" -- while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over."
Author: Stephen Jay Gould

21. "Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality."
Author: Thomas R. Cech

22. "The generality have considered that disease is but a confused and disordered effort in Nature, thrown down from her proper state, and defending herself in vain."
Author: Thomas Sydenham

23. "It is a novel constructed like a poem, where each character is only exceptional because if the hyperbolic manner in which he represents generality."
Author: Victor Hugo

24. "I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness."
Author: Wilfred Owen

25. "Don't become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific."
Author: Zig Ziglar

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