A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by progress. They became traveling salesmen of metaphors.
Dialectic Quotes (21 Quotes)
Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly.
Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .
I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.
Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder.
The link between peace and stability on the one hand, and social and economic growth on the other, is dialectic. Peace, poverty, and backwardness cannot mix in one region.
The Image is not outside him, but within his being better still, it is his very being, the form of the divine Name which he himself brought with him in coming into being. And the circle of the dialectic of love closes on this fundamental experience 'Love is closer to the lover than is his jugular vein.' So excessive is this nearness that it acts at first as a veil. That is why the inexperienced novice, though dominated by the Image which invests his whole inner being, goes looking for it outside of himself, in a desperate search from form to form of the sensible world, until he returns to the sanctuary of his soul and perceives that the real Beloved is deep within his own being and, from that moment on, he seeks the Beloved only through the Beloved ... the active subject within him remains the inner image of unreal Beauty, a vestige of the transcendent or celestial counterpart of his being....
The ancient Greek philosophers were all natural-born dialecticians and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic intellect among them, had even already analysed the most essential forms of dialectical thought.
The Catholic imagination is metaphorical or sacramental. It sees God as present in the world. The Protestant imagination, the dialectical imagination, wants to preserve God from the possibility of idolatry by identifying with His creatures. Catholicism has no problem with that.
When you're coming into something that is reasonably successful, the question always is, 'What are you going to do to make it more successful' ... For me, it's just a question to find a way in which I can present material that I believe is relevant, and that there's a dialectic that begins to be created with the Seattle community. I mean, those are lofty ideas, but I think in presenting plays, there needs to be a combination of the plays that think and some understanding that theater should also be a place of pleasure and entertainment.
Knowledge has three degreesopinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense of the second, dialectic of the third, intuition.
Dialectical materialism is not of course an eternal and immutable philosophy. To think otherwise is to contradict the spirit of the dialectic. Further development of scientific thought will undoubtedly create a more profound doctrine into which dialectical materialism will enter merely as structural material.
Dialectical thought is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion.
Sometimes, though not often in meetings of the Inklings, it would happen that no one had anything to read to us. On these occasions the fun would be riotous, with Jack at the top of his form and enjoying every minute 'no sound delights me more', he once said, 'than male laughter'. At the Inklings his talk was an outpouring of wit, nonsense, whimsy, dialectical swordplay, and pungent judgement such as I have rarely heard equalled no mere show put on for the occasion, either, since it was often quite as brilliant when he and I were alone together.... In his Preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, Jack gave a lively and moving account of what this circle meant to him. (Clive Staples
Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
The dialectic is neither fiction or mysticism, but a science of the forms of our thinking insofar as it is not limited to the daily problems of life but attempts to arrive at an understanding of more complicated and drawn-out processes. The dialectic and formal logic bear a relationship similar to that between higher and lower mathematics.
Dialectics gives expression to a law which is felt in all grades of consciousness and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of dialectic. We are aware that everything finite, instead of being inflexible, is rather changeable and transient and this is exactly what we mean by the dialectic of the finite, by which the finite, as implicitly other than it is, is forced to surrender its own immediate or natural being, and turn suddenly into its opposite.
The dialectic is not a magic master key for all questions. It does not replace concrete scientific analysis. But it directs this analysis along the correct road, securing it against sterile wanderings in the desert of subjectivism and scholasticism.
Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it.