The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.
I've always felt very sympathetic from the first days of writing about women that, whatever the woman, whether she is trying to be a woman in the conventional sense or breaking the boundaries, those struggles are quite difficult.
In India, 'cold weather' is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.
I wish I could attribute the absence of any conventional Arab offensive in the last 20 years to a change of political climate or a willingness to abide by past accords. But unfortunately it is more likely that the Egyptians or Syrians concluded that the next time their tanks headed to Tel Aviv, there was nothing stopping the counterassaults from ending up in downtown Cairo or Damascus.
Look, whenever I hear or read I’m beautiful, I simply don’t understand it … I’m certainly not beautiful in any conventional way. I didn't make my career on beauty.
You have this all the way through this cabinet so that I think there are a lot of other things to worry about [Donald] Trump. But in conventional political terms, this is a cabinet that I think is going to have a very hard time delivering to the base that Trump courted in this election.
One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.
Sonically, musicians always go above and beyond in our efforts to disrupt radio. It's always about being different. Our radio is never conventional anyway.
Never accept ultimatums, conventional wisdom, or absolutes.
I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you
We're stuck. We're stuck between the East and the West. Between the past and the future. On the one hand there are the secular modernists, so proud of the regime they constructed, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the army and half of the state on their side. On the other hand there are the conventional traditionalist, so infatuated with the Ottoman past, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the general public and the remaining half of the state on their side.
The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.
I've been a writer and a parent since adolescence, it feels like, and I'm still making both gigs up as I go along. I did both in different forms of isolation - too young by conventional standards, too far off-grid culturally and geographically. So my experience is probably too specific to be useful. None of us do this stuff the same way. We just try to endure and press on, I guess.
It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true
Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.
Conventional Indian cinema is about people falling in love. They sing, they dance.
Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.
Better a loving single-parent family than a 'conventional' family where the parents hate each other and the father is a demagogue.