A Quote by Niklas Luhmann

The work of art is an ostentatiously improbable occurrence.

Niklas Luhmann

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Niklas Luhmann
German - Sociologist
December 8, 1927 - November 6, 1998

It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable.

Ronald Fisher

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

H. L. Mencken

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.... A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.

H. L. Mencken

Mass killings have gone from being an extremely rare occurrence to a common occurrence.

Joyce Beatty

Baseball is more like a novel than a war. It is like an ongoing, hundred-year work of art, peopled with thousands of characters, full of improbable events, anecdotes, folklore and numbers.

Luke Salisbury

But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.

John Dewey

Forgetfulness transforms every occurrence into a non-occurrence.

Plutarch

The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Susan Sontag

Seurat and Signac mixed paintings with the dry and abstract laws of science. This approach, in my opinion, usually strays from the purpose of art in general. Because it means that one cannot expect from an artifact, that is created with mathematical laws, to establish an improbable and irrational relationship between the work and the viewer.

Guity Novin

With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.

Aristotle

However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747

Richard Dawkins

It [knowledge] is clearly related to information, which we can now measure; and an economist especially is tempted to regard knowledge as a kind of capital structure, corresponding to information as an income flow. Knowledge, that is to say, is some kind of improbable structure or stock made up essentially of patterns - that is, improbable arrangements, and the more improbable the arrangements, we might suppose, the more knowledge there is.

Kenneth E. Boulding

What is it about a work of art, even when it is bought and sold in the market, that makes us distinguish it from . . . pure commodities? A work of art is a gift, not a commodity. . . works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies”, a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art.

Lewis Hyde

Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.

Harold Rosenberg

The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece, and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not taboo suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or opposite sex, is basic in the species.

Alfred Kinsey

A Quote by Niklas Luhmann

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