“You have experienced nothing that was not both lawful and obscure, and thus conforming perfectly to the human machine. Are we not organized fantasy? And is not our living system functioning incoherency, disorder in action? Do not events, desires, ideas interchange within us in the most necessary and incomprehensible ways?”

— Paul Valéry

Eryximachus to Phaedrus, p. 43
L'Âme et la danse (1921)

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Paul Valéry 89

French poet, essayist, and philosopher 1871–1945

Robert Rosen (1934–1998) American theoretical biologist

R. Rosen Life, p. 248, quoted in: Carl F Gethmann (2011) Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft. p. 139

“Bitterness is the outcome of a wrong mental movement - the attempt to force external events to conform to internal fantasy. The cure is to see fantasy as fantasy, which will reveal it as neither necessary nor rewarding.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

Treasury of Positive Answers

“Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you live it.”

Robert Greene The 33 Strategies of War

Source: The 33 Strategies of War

“The social system is, thus, a very complex entity. As an organization of human interests, activities and commitments, it must be viewed as a system and in functional perspective. This is the key to its lines of organization, its modes of differentiation, and its integration. Such a system may be considered as both structure and process, in different aspects and for different scientific purposes. Structurally, we have suggested that there is a double basis for systematizing differentiation and variation : that internal to the primary social system itself and that involved in its relations to its primary environments, as analyzed with reference to the general system of action. Processually, the categories of analysis must follow from and integrate with those of structure. I suggest that, given the central position language as definitive of human society, the more differentiated and specialized symbolic media of interchange constitute the master scheme for the systematic analysis of social system processes.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Talcott Parsons (1968) "Systems Analysis: Social Systems" in: David L. Sills ed. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. p. 472

“I do not believe that the desires of young boys cause catastrophic events. The actions of humans do.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

“The functional order maintained within living systems seems to defy the Second Law; nonequilibrium thermodynamics describes how such systems come to terms with entropy.”

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) physical chemist

Part 1; Cited in: Evgenii Rudnyi (2013) " Thermodynamics of evolution http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2013/04/thermodynamics-of-evolution.html" on blog.rudnyi.ru, April 20, 2013. ·
Thermodynamics of Evolution (1972)