Constraints Quotes

“When love is roaming in our mind, looping in the deepest fringes of our heart, undreamt spaciousness emerges, repealing the constraints of triviality and letting stifling narrowness fade away. While our mindset is besieged by a revolving burst of emotion, our world is ultimately opening up. (Cape of good hope)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”
― Alexander Hamilton

“The freedom of new thinking unshackles our minds from constraints, conventional wisdom, and established norms and spurs us to challenge existing concepts.("The freedom of new thinking")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell

“Instead of freaking out about these constraints, embrace them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to your advantage.”
― 37Signals, Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Web Application

“Let your eyes see what they see, not what others want you to see. Let your ears hear what they naturally hear, not what others want you to hear. Let your mouth speak your mind freely and not be constrained by other people's approval or disapproval. Let your mind think what it wants to think and not let other people's demands dictate your thoughts. If your senses and your mind are not allowed to do what they want to do naturally, you are denying them their rights. When you cannot think, sense, feel, or act freely, then your body and mind are injured. Break these oppressions, and you will cultivate life.”
― Liezi, Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living

“Why write? Life is a cage of empty words.”
― Miriam Elia, The Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990–1990

“Commands are no constraints.”
― John Milton, Samson Agonistes and Shorter Poems

“Even today, more than eighty years after Oort's bold guess, we still don't have a clue what this dark matter is made of. We know it exists. We know where it is. We have maps of its presence within and around galaxies throughout the universe. We even have stringent constraints on what it is not, but we have no clue what it is. And yes, its presence is overwhelming: for every one kilogram of ordinary matter made out of neutrons and protons and electrons, there are five kilograms of dark matter, made out of who-knows-what.”
― Christophe Galfard, The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond

“Creativity is what happens when a mind encounters an obstacle. It’s the human process of finding a way through, over, around, or beneath. No obstacle, no creativity.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“One who has never lived under constraints doesn’t know what freedom is.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The names of entities that have the power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Our ultimate goal should to be to become adept at overcoming the constraints of daily life. However, to achieve this we will need to learn how to be fully in touch with our sensual side at all times.”
― Lebo Grand, Sensual Lifestyle

“His kiss is deep, fathomless. It is the kiss of one who wants to invade your body will all of their being, to abolish constraints and bring to life desires long repressed. It's a kiss that removes daily existence from the mind, grounding you firmly in the moment and dragging your body with it.”
― Tali Sara, Screaming into Pillows

“He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang.”
― T.C. Boyle, If the River Was Whiskey

“If people's night fears of sorcery - which negatively influences their decision to use mosquito nets - fail to impress the outsider, the brute everyday reality remains; in a number of rural African villages it is still much too common for very real hyenas to snatch people, especially children, out of their own homes as they lie sleeping at night, because of the lack of a good front door.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“It is our courage which defines us, not our constraints”
― Gyan Nagpal

“Il ne s'agit pas de choisit son époque, mais de se choisir en elle.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?

“Sometimes your mind can imprison your body and can put your body under some constraints. There is only one way for your body to be free: To free your mind!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Possibility first, constraints later.”
― Randy Salzman

“If I want to spend my life unpacking my life, why am I always collecting boxes?”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“If you ditch the rulebook, you lose the grace. Even the wacky, avant-garde, convention-defying arts—experimental film, expressionist painting, professional wrestling—draw their power from playing against the limitations of the chosen medium.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“Similarly, the computers used to run the software on the ground for the mission were borrowed from a previous mission. These machines were so out of date that Bowman had to shop on eBay to find replacement parts to get the machines working. As systems have gone obsolete, JPL no longer uses the software, but Bowman told me that the people on her team continue to use software built by JPL in the 1990s, because they are familiar with it. She said, “Instead of upgrading to the next thing we decided that it was working just fine for us and we would stay on the platform.” They have developed so much over such a long period of time with the old software that they don’t want to switch to a newer system. They must adapt to using these outdated systems for the latest scientific work.
Working within these constraints may seem limiting. However, building tools with specific constraints—from outdated technologies and low bitrate radio antennas—can enlighten us. For example, as scientists started to explore what they could learn from the wait times while communicating with deep space probes, they discovered that the time lag was extraordinarily useful information. Wait times, they realized, constitute an essential component for locating a probe in space, calculating its trajectory, and accurately locating a target like Pluto in space. There is no GPS for spacecraft (they aren’t on the globe, after all), so scientists had to find a way to locate the spacecraft in the vast expanse. Before 1960, the location of planets and objects in deep space was established through astronomical observation, placing an object like Pluto against a background of stars to determine its position.15 In 1961, an experiment at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California used radar to more accurately define an “astronomical unit” and help measure distances in space much more accurately.16 NASA used this new data as part of creating the trajectories for missions in the following years. Using the data from radio signals across a wide range of missions over the decades, the Deep Space Network maintained an ongoing database that helped further refine the definition of an astronomical unit—a kind of longitudinal study of space distances that now allows missions like New Horizons to create accurate flight trajectories.
The Deep Space Network continued to find inventive ways of using the time lag of radio waves to locate objects in space, ultimately finding that certain ways of waiting for a downlink signal from the spacecraft were less accurate than others. It turned to using the antennas from multiple locations, such as Goldstone in California and the antennas in Canberra, Australia, or Madrid, Spain, to time how long the signal took to hit these different locations on Earth. The time it takes to receive these signals from the spacecraft works as a way to locate the probes as they are journeying to their destination. Latency—or the different time lag of receiving radio signals on different locations of Earth—is the key way that deep space objects are located as they journey through space. This discovery was made possible during the wait times for communicating with these craft alongside the decades of data gathered from each space mission. Without the constraint of waiting, the notion of using time as a locating feature wouldn’t have been possible.”
― Jason Farman, Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World

“At the slightest opportunity, Gora wanted to forcefully cast aside all constraints and prejudices, to come down to the level the general public, and declare with all his heart: ‘I am yours, and you are mine!”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Gora

“ I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints.”
― Sara Sheridan, The Secret Mandarin

“If I’d just quit making ropes I’d no longer be at the end of one.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It is of our nature to exceed ourselves. Overflowing the mesaure is built into what we are. So, too, is rejoicing in this superabundance for its own sake. Yet too lavish an excess, like too vaulting an ambition, may lead us to overreach ourselves and bring ourselves to nothing. Like Lady Macbeh, one can forget that constraints (the demands of kinship or hospitality, for example) are costitutive of the self, not simply obstacles to its expression.”
― Terry Eagleton, Tragedy

“Having the money to buy something, or pay someone, often robs us of an opportunity to be creative.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Wokeism's impact on free speech becomes pronounced when it leads to the cancellation of individuals expressing opinions, even through the medium of comedy. Comedy, with its ability to dissect societal norms and provoke thought, should be a space where diverse perspectives flourish, free from the constraints of cancel culture. The suppression of comedic expression not only stifles artistic freedom but also hampers the collective ability to navigate complex issues through humor, hindering the open exchange of ideas that is vital for a thriving society.”
― James William Steven Parker

“Culture as infrastructure describes the culture and cultural organizations that allow stakeholders to contest norms’ interpretations and adapt informal constraints in line with the goals of the global community, given the absence of enforcement mechanisms at a global level for formal constraints (i.e. laws and policies).”
― Marvin Cheung, 5 Ideas from Global Diplomacy: System-wide Transformation Methods to Close the Compliance Gap and Advance the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals