#constructs

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs. ↗

— Robert Anton Wilson

#constructs #contain #mind #reality #size

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self. ↗

— Agnes Repplier

#fabric #his #leisure #lives #man

The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character. ↗

— Paul Ricoeur

#character #constructing #constructs #her #his

I think that cognitive scientists would support the view that our visual system does not directly represent what is out there in the world and that our brain constructs a lot of the imagery that we believe we are seeing. ↗

— Galen Rowell

#brain #cognitive #constructs #directly #does

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#air #begins #constructs #fiction #givens

Even by common wisdom, there seem to be both people and objects in my dream that are outside myself, but clearly they were created in myself and are part of me, they are mental constructs in my own brain. ↗

— Ray Kurzweil

#brain #clearly #common #constructs #created

While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#foreign #freedom #freedom-of-choice #freedom-of-thought #home

Character and emotionality don't always have to be relegated to quieter, more simple constructs. ↗

— Kathryn Bigelow

#character #constructs #more #quieter #relegated

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore. These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up. ↗

— N.K. Jemisin

#constructs #making-stuff-up #myth #personal-history #family

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality. ↗

— Abdolkarim Soroush

#coin #concepts #constructs #equating #explain