Intentionality Quotes

“Never believe that villains are hurting people by accident. They want to get better at their craft of breaking jaws just as you want to get better at art or music.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“When talking about my relationship with God, or any other area of my life, I want to choose to GROW. Incidentally, my waistline is contradictory to this. It grows when I ignore it and only decreases when I am intentional!”
― Rachelle Triay, GROW: A COACH APPROACH TO CHRISTIAN GROWTH

“If I think behind me, I might break.
If I think forward, I lose now.
Forever will be a day like this
Strung perfectly on the necklace of days.”
― Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems

“Speed is useless without direction. So is intellect.”
― Daniel Wieser

“in a highly organized system, the causation is more pronounced and intentional. The elements seem to have been more precisely selected. Things escalate decisively; everything is to purpose.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Philosophers have long regarded intentionality as a puzzling phenomenon, for it is hard to see how it can arise in a purely physical world. After all, mental states presumably depend ultimately on the brain, and thus on neurons and their interconnections, but neurons do not seem to be ‘about’ anything, nor to have representational content. So how can intentionality fit into the world that modern science describes?

In the 1980s, the philosopher Ruth Millikan suggested an ingenious solution to this puzzle by drawing on Darwinism. To illustrate her basic idea, consider the honey bee’s waggle-dance. This is the complex figure-of-eight dance that honey bees use to signal to their hive mates the location of a food source. Since the bee’s dance has been shaped by natural selection for a particular purpose—correctly indicating where the food is—this allows us to discern a kind of proto-intentionality in the waggle-dance. We can sensibly say that a particular dance routine means that the food is located 30 metres away in the direction of the sun, in the sense that the biological function of the dance is to induce its hive mates to fly to this location. The bee’s waggle-dance is thus capable of misrepresentation—for the food may not actually be in this location, for example if the bee has accidentally performed the wrong routine. In short, Millikan’s idea is that representational content may be rendered scientifically respectable by reducing it to biological function, a notion which plays a bona fide role in evolutionary biology. This bold attempt to naturalize intentionality is controversial, but it illustrates how a biological perspective can help illuminate an old philosophical issue.”
― Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Biology: A Very Short Introduction

“Unconscious neural activity cannot be made conscious no matter how hard one tries. Part of ourselves is always hidden to us.”
― David Amerland, Intentional: How To Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully

“Effective ministry requires both intentionality and flexibility - being intentional about your goals while remaining flexible in your approach.”
― Justin Ho Guo Shun, The Art and Science of Practical Theology in Ministry: A Holistic Approach

“For anyone who says we’re culturally and technologically advanced beings not held in thrall by our environment consider how we start each year afresh simply because the rotation of the Earth around the sun takes precisely 365 days and we run our lives by the hour because the planet takes 24 hours to complete a rotation around its central axis.”
― David Amerland, Intentional: How To Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully

“This year is about being intentional with every goal that I set for myself.”
― LaTesha Monique

“Representation is a process of informational triangulation. Its aim is the specification of distal stimuli. It achieves that aim by corralling the output of multiple information channels integrated at their point of confluence. The integration process, in short, disambiguates individual information channels via the mutual constraints each channel provides others. The specificity won thereby falls on a continuum from the highly unspecific (simple transducers, little integrative depth) to the highly specific (subtle transducers, manifold integration).”
― Dan Lloyd, Simple Minds

“An act of unconscious discrimination that is the result of social conditioning is still intentional if not conscious.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Prayer is anything but the misled human being attempting self-sooth themselves against the pain that engulfs them. Rather, they are the people who are determined to engulf the pain.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“There are very few choices in the life of Childfree people that can’t be undone or changed. Take your best shot at a plan that is yours, and you will learn more about yourself and what you truly enjoy as you execute that plan.”
― Jay Zigmont, The Childfree Guide to Life and Money: Make Your Finances Simple So Your Life Without Kids Can Be Amazing

“The history that you are writing today will become the both the legacy of your yesterday as well as the template of your tomorrow. Therefore, think before you pick up the pen.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Now, communicating is a system. A single message might move across six different formats before it sticks. One piece of content might be in written form. Another might happen in a panel discussion. That discussion might be cut into short-form videos and posted on a variety of channels. At my company, we have found that communication works best when you think through it as a system of sticky moments that are designed with intention.”
― Nancy Duarte

“Unplugging from digital distractions is an act of radical self-care and rebellion.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“When you step away from the screen, you open the door to the richness of real life.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“Instead of letting technology control me, I began to ask: ‘What is the purpose of this tool, and how does it serve my well-being?”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“In a world dominated by screens, stepping offline is a subversive act of self-care and rebellion.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“We are built to act first and reason later. Our minds construct rational stories to justify emotional truths that our bodies have already accepted.”
― David Amerland, Intentional: How To Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully

“Another way to say it is that everybody is dying and going to die of something. And if you're not spending your life on the stuff you believe, then what are you even doing? What is the point of the whole thing?

It's a tough question, because most people haven't picked anything worthwhile.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“The most radical act is sometimes to refuse to be hurried.”
― Lawrence Nault

“Attention, happily placed, mediates all strife.”
― Maria Popova, Traversal

“If it matters to your heart, it belongs on your calendar.”
― Heather Brown, The Sunday Reset: The Ultimate Guide to Reclaim Your Week, Restore Your Health, and Make Time for What Matters Most

“Over time, we stop recognizing how disturbing or mind-numbing the content truly is because our brains have adapted to treat it as ordinary rather than alarming. We take it in day after day (after all, everyone else does) without realizing that even as it promises to satiate our growing need for entertainment and thrill, it doesn't. Instead, it leaves our souls weaker, hungrier, angrier, more anxious, more tired, and further from the fullness we were created to experience.”
― Jenny Phillips, Good on Purpose: Living Fully in a Digitally Distracted World

“When a thousand invisible, calculated hands are reaching for your mind—your minutes and hours, your desires, your peace—you must reach even more deliberately for the things that truly nourish the soul.”
― Jenny Phillips, Good on Purpose: Living Fully in a Digitally Distracted World

“If we do not clearly envision what we want our lives to look like, we will never arrive there. We have to choose a good life on purpose.”
― Jenny Phillips, Good on Purpose: Living Fully in a Digitally Distracted World

“It is our ordinary, precious days all bundled together that determine the very design of our life.”
― Jenny Phillips, Good on Purpose: Living Fully in a Digitally Distracted World

“Technology is like the ocean. We cannot wish the ocean away. It's a part of our world. It holds immense power, dark and dangerous depths, incredible beauty, resources that sustain life, and currents that can pull us under or help us move quickly to where we want to go. We need not fear the ocean; instead, we can choose to respect it and learn to avoid its dangers while harnessing its powers and appreciating its beauties. We learn to swim. We learn where the riptides and dangerous currents are so we can avoid them, and we locate the helpful currents so we can take advantage of them. We build ships to navigate the waters and carry heavy loads.”
― Jenny Phillips, Good on Purpose: Living Fully in a Digitally Distracted World