Context Quotes

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

When there is no news, we will give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.

Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges the context of human work. Contexts become wrong by being too small - too small, that is, to contain the scientist or the farmer or the farm family or the local ecosystem or the local community - and this is crucial.

Wendell Berry

Leaders set the context and create the conditions in which individuals and organizations thrive.

Bob Anderson

The world is better served by syncretic economists and policymakers who can hold multiple ideas in their heads than by ‘one-handed’ economists who promote one big idea regardless of context.

Dani Rodrik

The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.

Chuck Klosterman

One who has lived through the days of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and the Japanese war lords feels something that a younger generation does not concerning the aberrations that are possible in this world.

Bernard Brodie

Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.

Neil Postman

If the context is lost and merely bits and pieces remain from a scattered existence, only the connection of anchor points may reinstate a distorted mental balance in an upset life story. ("Lost the global story." )

Erik Pevernagie

When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.

John C. Bean

Until you've been washed ashore you can't know how all encompassing the sea has become.

John Maerz

The will to truth is enshrined in the mind. It is undeniable, inescapable, mutable only if one’s humanity itself is rejected, itself muted. Yet the form of this truth, whether it be elaborate, simple, exclusive and regulatory or comprehensive and positive… this is a matter of aesthetics, taste......It is all inherently meaningless, the puzzle just as much as the pieces themselves, ephemeral. Yet more than this it is concrete, eternal, heavy and inescapable, a preponderous amalgam of things small and large, the actuality of which is imminent, the meaning of which is too great to acknowledge, let alone comprehend.So we tell stories. We read stories, write them, consider them and like them, or not. Simply ways, simple ways, to limit the All to that which can be understood.

Jeffrey Panzer

Is everyone who lives in Ignorance like you?" asked Milo."Much worse," he said longingly. "But I don't live here. I'm from a place very far away called Context.

Norton Juster

We are all lumps, and of so various and inform a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others.

Michel de Montaigne

Having contact sheets for all sorts of episodes in your life seemed to me intriguing and desirable. So much of my own history is beclouded by time, but a few sharp rays, in the form of pictures, falling upon a given day would resuscitate whole contexts. And from this archipelago of moments, scenes, episodes, you could see the larger tectonic movements of your life forming and unforming. You would be reminded of who you are. Or at least of who you were.

Thomas Beller

Conformity is a problem for many small groups. Members put a higher priority on cohesion than on coming up with a well-reasoned choice. They pressure dissenters, shield themselves from negative feedback, keep silent when they disagree ...

Craig E. Johnson

The road itself tells us far more than signs do.

Tom Vanderbilt

...you do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ...

John Geddes

Corporate & personal branding both require storytelling to be captivating. Stories provide context, meaning & the opportunity for relationship.

Ryan Lilly

Hippasus’ proof—or at least Nico’s retelling of it—was really so simple that when he finished sketching it out, I wasn’t even aware that we had actually proven anything. Nico paused for a few minutes to let us mull it over.It was Peter who broke the silence, “I’m not sure I understand what we have done.”Nico seemed to be expecting such a response. “Step back and examine the proof; in fact, you should try and do this with every proof you see or have to work out for yourself. ..."He again waited for his words to sink in, and it began to make sense for me. All my mathematics teachers (other than Bauji and Nico) always seemed to evade this part of their responsibility. They had been content to merely write out a proof on the blackboard and carry on, seemingly without concern for what the proof meant and what it told us.“But you should not stop here. Even when you have understood a proof, and I hope you have indeed understood this proof, ask yourself the next question, the obvious one, but as critical: So what? Or, why are we proving this? What is the point? What is the context? How does it relate to us? To answer these questions we have to step back a little. Let me show you—it’s really quite delightful.” Now there was excitement in Nico’s voice.

Gaurav Suri

The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew

Bart D. Ehrman

But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came.That is why history should be taught in school. to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.

Penelope Lively

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

Robert Penn Warren

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take the

Jim Jarmusch

most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.

Solomon E. Asch

When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least say. It's taken for granted that he has no voice and the reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced -- since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea. Though how in the hell one passes judgement on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I'll ever understand.

Ayn Rand

You know, Junie, you're fourteen now. I think you can certainly manage to put together a sandwich. ...The thing is, if my mother had any idea what I had in my backpack, she would have made me that sandwich. If she knew that I'd searched and searched the house until I finally found the little key to the fireproof box buried in the bottom of her underwear drawer, if she knew that I'd unlocked the box and taken my passport out, that I had it with me right that very second in a Ziploc bag in the bottom of my backpack, if she knew why I had it there, if she knew even a bit of all that, she might have made me that PBJ. She wouldn't have said, "You're fourteen now," like she thought I was some kind of responsible adult. No. If she knew about my plan, she would have said, "you're only fourteen." She would have told me that I was crazy to think about going to England with I was only fourteen.

Carol Rifka Brunt

When our mental functioning is whittling away and our mind becomes a lame duck, perception does not form the context anymore and all connections on the social chessboard are conked out. Only patience and endurance may draw us out of the quagmire of numbness and allow us to tear open the cloudy screen that is hiding our points of ‘interest’ and ‘attention’, so long as we focus on the ‘singular moments’ and the ‘appealing details’ in our life. Awareness can help us shape a comprehensive picture for a functional future. ("Lost the global story.")

Erik Pevernagie

You judge people in the context of their time, not in the context of ours.

Dennis Prager

It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).

Lauro Martines

What's writ is what's read, yet the meaning is gone, since context is what gives each quote its own home.

Will Advise

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

Umberto Eco

Community is a context and can either facilitate or inhibit the movement of change for the individual.

Sharon Weil

Life does not change if you only modify the content, your life will change if you will dare to alter the context.

Santosh Kalwar

You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my d

Roland Barthes

...Data itself... was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.

Dan Simmons

Jim Jarmusch

Roland Barthes

Context Quotes

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