1.
The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.
Adam Smith
2.
Nowadays, the process of growth and development almost never seems to manage to create this subtle balance between the importance of the individual parts, and the coherence of the environment as a whole. One or the other always dominates.
Christopher Alexander
3.
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
Al Alvarez
4.
With acknowledgement of residues, we can be more easily prepared to grant the unit of science, the overlapping of disciplines, and the total coherence of all facts.
Kenneth Lee Pike
5.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
Siri Hustvedt
6.
Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment.
Michael Polanyi
7.
It is in many circumstances a troubling thing to belong to the advanced class of a backward nation. One surrenders coherence and begins a difficult process of choice which ends, often, in an eclectic idiosyncrasy.
George W. S. Trow
8.
Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.
Mary Catherine Bateson
9.
When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?
David Hume
10.
In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.
Herbert Read
11.
In my view the structure of the whole atom was that of an individual, with all its parts interconnected, and the emission of a spectral line appeared to me to be the result of the coherence and co-operation of several electric quanta.
Johannes Stark
12.
The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imagined plenitude.
Victor Burgin
13.
we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.
Jose Saramago
14.
People in power tend to find poetry dangerous to them because it is dislocating, they can't catch it, can't control it. They prefer coherence, what's blunt and has clarity.
Elia Suleiman
15.
A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.
Dana Spiotta
16.
Rarely has a collection of essays from a dozen scholars created a whole greater than the sum of its parts, but Capitalism Takes Command conveys with detail, coherence, and sophistication the changes in the American economy in the nineteenth century under the multiple imperatives of capitalism.
Joyce Appleby
17.
You're suddenly seeing the coherence and the interconnectedness of everything, left to right, top to bottom, front to back. It's all connected, and, somehow, it's all in balance. And that's, of course, when you go, 'Yes!'.
Henry Wessel, Jr.
18.
No writer can be fully convicted of imitation except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are copied.
Samuel Johnson
19.
Those heart-hammering nightmares that start to lose coherence even as you're waking up from them, but that still manage to leave their moldering fingerprints all across your day.
Mike Carey
20.
Meditation makes the entire nervous system go into a field of coherence.
Deepak Chopra
21.
I believe that if we do have a commonality of beliefs we should clarify them, we should strengthen their coherence and we should also develop common projects that produce a lived community of relationships.
Murray Bookchin
22.
In such systems, there is unquestioning respect for authority. Faith trumps evidence. But if indeed this is broadly the explanation for how co-operative behaviour has evolved and been maintained in human societies, it could be very bad news. Because although such authoritarian systems seem to be good at preserving social coherence and an orderly society, they are, by the same token, not good at adapting to change.
Robert May, Baron May of Oxford