Grasp

Famous quotes containing the word grasp:

    “What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.”
    —Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)

    “What, then, is the basic difference between today’s computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to see but not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern—a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.”
    —Rudolf Arnheim (b. 1904)

    “To touch God a little with our mind is a great blessing, to grasp him is impossible.”
    —St. Augustine (354–430)