Janet Fitch Quotes

Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it's a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.

I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?

To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point.

The deductive method is the mode of using knowledge, and the inductive method the mode of acquiring it.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

The writing is the springboard for your intuitive stuff and then you see, maybe a colour of what you want to achieve. Then you bring in the technique you've learnt. But when you're on film, you're not always in control of that. That's what makes me believe in a kind of collective unconscious, a sort of experience you draw on.

There is no question that creative intelligence comes not through learning things you find in books or histories that have already been written, but by focusing on and giving value to experience as it happens.

The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.

Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.

What is the intersection between technology, art and science? Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we're surrounded by things we can't see.

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination.

I have been a strong proponent of helping people understand that during the last decade or so, as it lies at the very bottom of how we know anything. Let me give a couple examples to get that point across.

I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.

When we accept small wonders, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

There is no single truth, but each of the scholarly disciplines has methods which lead one ever closer to the truth.

gravity, n. I imagine you saved my life. And then I wonder if I'm just imagining it.