A Quote by Alvin Toffler

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

Alvin Toffler

Quote Topics

Society Ability Definition Definitions Need New Real Sanity Soon Tell Unreal

Quote Author

Alvin Toffler
American - Author
October 4, 1928 - June 27, 2016

Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all.

Muhammad Yunus

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

Max Beckmann

Sanity and enlightenment...I've been reading a new book Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries, and it contains a commentary on Genjo Koan by Shunryu Suzuki, the author who wrote Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. He doesn't mention sanity at all but I think that one possible definition of enlightenment would be a kind of profound sanity, where being insane is no longer an option.

Brad Warner

One might talk about the sanity of the atom the sanity of space the sanity of the electron the sanity of water- For it is all alive and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves. The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.

D. H. Lawrence

What I thought was unreal now, for me, seems in some ways to be more real than what I think to be real, which seems now to be unreal

Fred Alan Wolf

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

Susan Sontag

The makers of dictionaries are dependent upon specialists for their definitions. A specialist's definition may be true or it may be erroneous. But its truth cannot be increased or its error diminished by its acceptance by the lexicographer. Each definition must stand on its own merits.

Benjamin Tucker

I'm not comfortable with categories, and I distrust most definitions. The word 'definition' is based on the word 'finite,' which would seem to indicate that once we've defined something, we don't need to think about it anymore.

Artie Shaw

Enlightenment is simply sanity~ the sanity in which I see my real situation in the living fabric of all that exists.

Frederick Franck

We want to do something and a definition is a means of doing it. If we want certain results then we must use certain meanings or definitions. But no definition has any authority apart from a purpose, or to bar us from other purposes.

I. A. Richards

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

Tana French

Here's a philosophical rule of thumb: always start with the negative definitions. Negative definitions are always easier to understand. So, here's a negative definition. We must not conceive difference in terms of the differences we find between things that already exist. Difference is not empirical differences.

Leonard Lawlor

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Dreams are real. This is unreal. This world is unreal. Everybody has it backwards. This is the dream. This is an insubstantial pageant. Nothing here lasts - that is how you know it's the dream.

Frederick Lenz

There are several kinds of truths, and it is customary to place in the first order mathematical truths, which are, however, only truths of definition. These definitions rest upon simple, but abstract, suppositions, and all truths in this category are only constructed, but abstract, consequences of these definitions ... Physical truths, to the contrary, are in no way arbitrary, and do not depend on us.