“It is important to realize that the exercise of any skill depends on the ability to create an abstract system of some kind out of the totality of the world around us. For instance, the carpenter is not interested in wood as a biological or chemical entity. He is sensitive to many of its grosser physical properties but not to many subtler ones. The wood of a carpenter is not the real — that is, the complete substance — but merely wood as a material on which the carpenter can exercise his skill.”

—  Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, The Skills of the Economist, 1958, p. 9

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is important to realize that the exercise of any skill depends on the ability to create an abstract system of some k…" by Kenneth E. Boulding?
Kenneth E. Boulding photo
Kenneth E. Boulding 163
British-American economist 1910–1993

Related quotes

Woody Allen photo

“I was walking through the woods, thinking about Christ. If He was a carpenter, I wondered what He charged for bookshelves.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Love and Death (1975)

Ossip Zadkine photo

“At heart, I have always been a carpenter, who, instead of making a table or a door, was led to carve images in wood.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

as quoted in 'Wooden Sculptures' http://www.zadkine.paris.fr/en/collections/collections-sculptures/wooden-sculptures, Musée Zadkine
Musée Zadkine: it was through wood that Zadkine came to sculpture, after being initiated in the techniques of carving by a maternal uncle.
undated quotes

“The ability to work with systems of general equilibrium is perhaps one of the most important skills of the economist — a skill which he shares with many other scientists, but in which he has perhaps a certain comparative advantage.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, The Skills of the Economist, 1958, p. 15

Jonathan Swift photo

“They say a carpenter's known by his chips.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Polite Conversation (1738), Dialogue 2

W.E.B. Du Bois photo

“I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.”

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) American sociologist, historian, activist and writer

The Talented Tenth http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=174, published as the second chapter of The Negro Problem, a collection of articles by African Americans (New York: James Pott and Company, 1903)

Sam Rayburn photo

“A jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”

Sam Rayburn (1882–1961) lawmaker from Bonham, Texas

Said during filmed conversation with reporters (c. 1953); reported in "Speak, Mister Speaker" (1978), p. 138.

Johannes Tauler photo

“It is something like fire working on wood; the heat draws out all the moisture, the greenness and the heaviness. It grows warm, begins to glow, becomes more like the fire itself. As the wood slowly takes on the likeness of fire, the dissimilarity between the two grows less until finally, in a rapid movement, the fire takes from the wood its own substance; the wood becomes fire and loses at the same time its separateness and inequality, since it has become fire. No longer merely like fire, it has become one substance with the fire. Likeness is lost in union.”

Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) German theologian

Sermons, From Our Daily Bread

“Any attempt to reduce the complex properties of biological organisms or of nervous systems or of human brains to simple physical and chemical systems is foolish.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 20

“Any instructions?” Carpenter said.
“Yeah,” Shane said. “Shoot anybody who looks at Agnes funny. And anybody else you don’t like. I’m getting tired of this shi*.”
“Somebody needs a hug,” Carpenter said.
“Humor,” Shane said. “Har.”

Jennifer Crusie (1949) American writer

Source: Agnes and the Hitman

“Dour, anxious Hesiod writes about the daily round of farming and the effects if the seasons on rural life but also speaks in his Works and Days about the value of festal competitions with "potter against potter, carpenter against carpenter… poet against poet."”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

Related topics