The real centers we see when we look at a situation in its wholeness control the real behavior of the thing, the life which develops there, and the feelings people have.

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• Centers are above all, labile, they are foci of wholeness, they are not things, but regions, qualities, focal points of centeredness.quote0.825
  Key definition capturing the non-atomic, relational nature of centers as fields rather than objects.
• The real character of the world, its flesh, is governed by the centers in the geometry.claim0.822
  Strong statement that all qualitative aspects of places and situations are produced by the spatial system of centers.
• Life comes from the wholeness, from the system of centers.quote0.814
  Summarizes the central thesis of the chapter.
• A real center starts many diameters outside its skin or boundary; the structure beyond contributes to the centeredness.claim0.811
  Key property of authentic centers; they are not isolated objects but embedded in a larger field.
• Centers themselves have life.claim0.811
  One of the four key ideas, asserting that individual centers possess a degree of life.
• A thing which has the field of centers always does make a person near it feel more whole.claim0.810
• The wholeness and field of centers are not merely cognitive artifacts but are linked to the functional behavior of the natural world and are at the foundation of physics and biology.claim0.809
  Counters the skeptical cognitive interpretation by asserting the objective reality of centers in nature.
• Centers within a whole intensify each other, resulting in a profound and lively whole.claim0.807
  Alexander's core mechanism explaining how the Fifteen Properties function to create living wholes.