Generality Quotes

“This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“In the natural sciences, and particularly in chemistry, generalities must come after the detailed knowledge of each fact and not before it.”
― Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac

“The certainty of mathematics depends on its complete abstract generality.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

“Praying anywhere" can easily become "praying nowhere", just as "praying anytime" can easily become "praying at no time". Everything in general becomes nothing in particular".”
― Peter Kreeft, Prayer: The Great Conversation

“The philosopher seeks a generality beyond the boundaries of science; he attempts to frame a comprehensive and coherent framework of ideas within which the partial results of science may become more intelligible.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“You can never get enough generality. The more general solution the better. The solution to existence is the most general solution of all, the solution least infected by particularity. That is its defining quality. The entire way of thinking mathematically – in terms of simplicity, generality, tautology, elegance, beauty, stability, the eternal, the necessary, coherence, the analytic, the a priori – is totally different from the way a scientist thinks, which is always mired in particularity, inelegance, ugliness, the temporal, the contingent, the ad hoc, the arbitrary, the heuristic, the speculative; in Feynman’s crude guessing game.”
― Thomas Stark, What Is Mathematics?: The Greatest Detective Story Never Told