#pattern

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. ↗

— Alfred North Whitehead

#art #enjoyment #experience #imposing #our

Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. (38) ↗

— Michael Shermer

#patterns #perception #providence #design

Thus Milton refines the question down to a matter of faith," said Coleridge, bringing the lecture to a close, "and a kind of faith more independent, autonomous - more truly strong, as a matter of fact - than the Puritans really sought. Faith, he tells us, is not an exotic bloom to be laboriously maintained by the exclusion of most aspects of the day to day world, nor a useful delusion to be supported by sophistries and half-truths like a child's belief in Father Christmas - not, in short, a prudently unregarded adherence to a constructed creed; but rather must be, if anything, a clear-eyed recognition of the patterns and tendencies, to be found in every piece of the world's fabric, which are the lineaments of God. This is why religion can only be advice and clarification, and cannot carry any spurs of enforcement - for only belief and behavior that is independently arrived at, and then chosen, can be praised or blamed. This being the case, it can be seen as a criminal abridgement of a person's rights willfully to keep him in ignorance of any facts - no piece can be judged inadmissible, for the more stones, both bright and dark, that are added to the mosaic, the clearer is our picture of God. ↗

— Tim Powers

#clarification #faith #father-christmas #god #john-milton

Man has one name, and many more than two natures. But the essential two are these: that he shall strive to impose order on chaos, and that he shall strive to take advantage of chaos… A third element of man’s nature is this: that he shall not understand what he is doing. ↗

— John Brunner

#human-nature #order #pattern #understanding #nature

While history never repeats itself, political patterns do. ↗

— Eric Alterman

#itself #never #patterns #political #repeats

Music rhythms are mathematical patterns. When you hear a song and your body starts moving with it, your body is doing math. The kids in their parents' garage practicing to be a band may not realize it, but they're also practicing math. ↗

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#band #body #doing #garage #hear

Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another. ↗

— Gregory Bateson

#aptly #combined #description #enrichment #illustrate

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity. ↗

— Gregory Bateson

#explain #impossible #invoking #pattern #principle

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong. ↗

— Gregory Bateson

#energy #explain #explanations #genesis #i

The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. ↗

— Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#free #interpretation #less #make #more