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Walter Ong Quotes

Total quotes: 14
“Discourse about a subject requires distance or 'objectivity' as well as proximity: the known has to be set off somehow from the knower.”
— Walter Ong, Hopkins Self and God
Tagged: Knowing Knowing, Knowledge Approaches, Proximity
“We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying? Because a picture is worth a thousand words only under special conditions—which commonly include a context of words in which the picture is set.”
— Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: Photography, Walter Ong
“America is a nation whose genius seems to be adaptability and change.”
— Walter Ong, American Catholic Crossroads
Tagged: Change, The United States, Adaptability, America as a Place of Change
“Homo sapiens has been in existence for between 30,000 and 50,000 years. The earliest script dates from only 6000 years ago.”
— Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: History Of Communication, History Of Writing, When Did Writing Emerge?, Emergence of Writing In History
“The term 'catholic' (katholikos, a Greek word adopted by the Latin Church) does not mean universal (that is, 'inclusive,' 'encompassing,' and hence by implication to some degree bounding) but rather, in its Greek etymology, kata + holos, through-the-whole, outgoing, expansive.”
— Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture
Tagged: Italian Pagan Catholicism, Etymology, Word Origins, Catholic
“It is quite true that today a great deal of art grows out of exhibitionist impulses. Certainly some of the worst does. Maybe some of the best. It may even be possible that all art involves a certain exhibitionism at least of some vague sublimated kind.”
— Walter Ong, SLU.EDU
Tagged: Art, Exhibitionism, Liberal Arts, Reality Hunger
“Openness does not mean lack of organization, lack of principle, or lack of all resistance. For the human being, at least, it means quite the contrary: the strengthening of organization, principles, and resistance where needed, so that interaction with the outside can be strong and real. Indeed, paradoxically again, openness means strengthening closure itself.”
— Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture
Tagged: Openness, Organization
“Total explicitness is impossible. The effort of formal logic to make thought entirely explicit, while an admirable and in many ways indispensable and fantastically productive effort, is ultimately doomed to failure and entails deep psychological strain because of its unreality. Thought can only be made more and more explicit, never totally so. ”
— Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture
Tagged: Logic Against Logic, Against Objectivity, Open Closure
“For models come and go. Not that the old ones turn out necessarily to be untrue. They may remain entirely true while they become quite unfruitful. Models provide analogies which are of their very nature limited, and, as this dialogue which makes human society what it is moves on, the models once found serviceable because relevant in a special to current preoccupations are abandoned for others more relevant to new problems, new insights, and new solutions.”
— Walter Ong, American Catholic Crossroads
Tagged: Truth as Movement, Never Ending Story, The Evolution of Knowledge
“Real time has no divisions at all, but is uninterruptedly continuous: at midnight yesterday did not click over into today. No one can find the exact point of midnight, and if it is not exact, how can it be midnight? And we have no experience of today as being next to yesterday, as it is represented on a calendar. Reduced to space, time seems more under control—but only seems to be, for real, indivisible time carries us to real death. (This is not to deny that spatial reductionism is immeasurably useful and technologically necessary, but only to say that its accomplishments are intellectually limited, and can be deceiving.)”
— Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
Tagged: Time, Illusionary Time
“A liberal education today must include reflection on the significance of writing and print, situating these media and all their works in their historically patterned sequences. When we speak of a sequence of media, we do not mean that new media of communications annihilate their antecedents. When men learned to write, they continued to talk. When they learned letterpress printing, they continued both to talk and write: Since they have invented radio and television, they have continued to talk and write and print. But the advent of newer media alters the meaning and relevance of the older. Media overlap, or, as Marshall McLuhan has put it, move through one another as do galaxies of stars, each maintaining its own basic integrity but also bearing the marks of the encounter ever after.”
— Walter Ong, Rhetoric,Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture
Tagged: Communications, Liberal Education, Pattern Recognition As An Academic Discipline
“If in the evolution of consciousness we include the growth of consciousness out of the unconscious, it is evidently impossible completely, or even significantly, to plan what the next stage of consciousness will be. Consciously developed plans may affect the next stage of consciousness but they themselves will not define it. What will define the new stages will be their relationship not simply to our conscious planning but, more basically, their relationship to the unconscious organization underlying our conscious planning. We had better do our conscious planning humbly, paying attention not only to what we think we can make ourselves to be but to what we really are. Out of what we are, and our relationship to what we are, comes the future. Discovering what we are and acknowledging what we are has never been easy for human beings. It is always an ongoing project.”
— Walter Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness
Tagged: Consciousness, Epistemology, Evolution, Unreason
“To be present to himself, man must find the presence of another or others. Man's life-world is the opposite of solipsist: it is a world not of presence but of presences. In presences we mature. Each individual I finds himself by dealing with a thou, and another thou, and another. The presence of other persons fills man's consciousness, as objects cannot. Situated among objects, a person may indeed find them interesting, but he responds only other persons, other presences, who are not objects. In a whole universe filled with countless objects and occupied only by one other man alone, it would be to the man alone that I could present myself, establish a relationship of presence.”
— Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word
Tagged: Presences, Relationalism
“Hypervisualism tends to neglect this truth and even sets out to reduce sound itself, and for that matter all the other senses, to vision through devices such as charts and wave measurements, mathematical or oscillographic, forgetting that none of these make any noise and that hence, however informative and desirable and useful and indispensable and beautiful and true they may be—and they are all of these—they are not directly sound at all but visual constructs having to do with sound. We generate our certainties not in a solipsistic universe of isolated 'observation' but in a total context which includes verbalization and in which we hope others will believe what we say. The scientist is no exception to this rule, only a special instance of its operation.”
— Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture
Tagged: Hypervisualism, Reductionism
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