Mechanism Quotes

By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

What believer of faith among us can claim to understand the exact mechanistic structure of a world created by a god/God?

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

Ronald A. Fisher

There is the potential for a particle of matter to be located where we expect it to be or to be located anywhere in the physical world. So it is with our lives – our very next moment can occur along the most probable path or it can occur on a path entirely discontinuous with the expectations that others have for us, but more likely in line with the expectations that we have for ourselves.

I think that the event which, more than anything else, led me to the search for ways of making more powerful radio telescopes, was the recognition, in 1952, that the intense source in the constellation of Cygnus was a distant galaxy—1000 million light years away. This discovery showed that some galaxies were capable of producing radio emission about a million times more intense than that from our own Galaxy or the Andromeda nebula, and the mechanisms responsible were quite unknown. ... [T]he possibilities were so exciting even in 1952 that my colleagues and I set about the task of designing instruments capable of extending the observations to weaker and weaker sources, and of exploring their internal structure.

We have come to understand the phenomena of life only as an assemblage of the lifeless. We take the mechanistic abstractions of our technical calculation to be ultimately concrete and "fundamentally real," while our most intimate experiences are labelled "mere appearance" and something having reality only within the closet of the isolated mind. Suppose however we were to invert this whole scheme, reverse the order in which it assigns abstract and concrete. What is central to our experience, then, need not be peripheral to nature. This sunset now, for example, caught within the network of bare winter branches, seems like a moment of benediction in which the whole of nature collaborates. Why should not these colours and these charging banners of light be as much a part of the universe as the atoms and molecules that make them up? If they were only "in my mind," then I and my mind would no longer be a part of nature. Why should the pulse of life toward beauty and value not be a part of things? Following this path, we do not vainly seek to assemble the living out of configurations of dead stuff, but we descend downwards from more complex to simpler grades of the organic. From humans to trees to rocks; from "higher grade" to "lower grade" organisms. In the universe of energy, any individual thing is a pattern of activity within the flux, and thereby an organism at some level.

William Barrett

Nature has certain mechanism to record all memories of every life being.

Toba Beta

The process of dissociation is an elegant mechanism built into the human psychological system as a form of escape from (sometimes literally) going crazy. The problem with checking out so thoroughly is that it can leave us feeling dead inside, with little or no ability to feel our feelings in our bodies. The process of repair demands a re-association with the body, a commitment to dive into the body and feel today what we couldn’t feel yesterday because it was too dangerous.

Alexandra Katehakis

...all around George, approaching him, crossing his path from every direction, is the male and female raw material which is fed daily into this factory, along the conveyor-belts of the freeways, to be processed, packaged and placed on the market...What do they think they are up to? Well, there is the official answer; preparing themselves for life which means a job and security in which to raise children to prepare themselves for life which means a job and security in which...Here, in their midst, George feels a sort of vertigo. Oh God, what will become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I yell out to them, right now, here, that it's hopeless?But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself almost, he is a representative of hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real.

Christopher Isherwood