Concept Clarity Quotes

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

Approach your business partners with concepts that they can get their heads around, and try to respond to their needs.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching.

The difference between a tool and a machine is not capable of very precise distinction; nor is it necessary, in a popular explanation of those terms, to limit very strictly their acceptation.

one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.

Now, the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments. And that is, when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use.

When I was a student and rushing to finish a project, my gut instinct was usually to keep adding all kinds of features. It's a way of papering over the fact that you haven't quite nailed your concept yet.

Magnetic lines of force convey a far better and purer idea than the phrase magnetic current or magnetic flood: it avoids the assumption of a current or of two currents and also of fluids or a fluid, yet conveys a full and useful pictorial idea to the mind.

Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.

For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined; one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination; but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.

You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.

The songs that work best are broad lyrically and have one strong concept in the metaphor.

For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon and then explaining it to others.

When an idea is not robust enough to stand expression in simple terms, it is a sign that it should be rejected.

'Career' is not a musical term.

Political confusion starts with terminology confusion.

It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.

I concluded that I might take as a general rule the principle that all things which we very clearly and obviously conceive are true: only observing, however, that there is some difficulty in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive.

Emphasis on technique is justified only so far as it will simplify and clarify the statement of the photographer's concept.

It is not intuitive ease I am after, but rather a point of view which is sufficiently definite to clear up some difficulties, and to be criticized in rational terms. (Bohr's complementarity cannot be so criticized, I fear; it can only be accepted or denounced - perhaps as being ad hoc, or as being irrational, or as being hopelessly vague.)

I want to block some common misunderstandings about 'understanding': In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word 'understanding.'

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

The evolution of knowledge is toward simplicity, not complexity.

I think people have problems sometimes when things are too general. In fact, they are not really general at all.