Fractions Quotes - Page 8

• Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

  William Zinsser

  Believe, Writing, Want

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• There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Eye, Expression

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• I have a way to photograph. You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second. It's very instinctive. What you do is a fraction of a second, it's there and it's not there. But in this fraction of a second comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love - all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there.

  Sebastiao Salgado

  Photography, Hate, Past

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• You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government. You get that alternative and you'll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again... my asset values will disappear, my apartments will be worth a fraction of what they were, my ministers' jobs will be in peril, their security will be at risk and their women will become maids in other people's countries, foreign workers.

  Lee Kuan Yew

  Country, Jobs, Together Again

  Straits Times, April 5, 2007.

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• Your novels show only the tiniest fraction of detective work, the brilliant crime, the tantalizing clues, the dramatic chase, the final battle atop a lofty peak with ocean waves crashing down below, and then… justice served! If they wrote about the real world, four-fifths of the story would consist of the hero sitting in a library for months and following false leads.

  Stefan Petrucha

  Real, Hero, Ocean

  Stefan Petrucha (2012). “Ripper”, Penguin

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• If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and in two minutes he gets eaten by another fish - that's tragic. But it's only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of dynamic process, a molecular dance, and a separate entity out of it.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Spiritual, Writing, Two

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• We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

  Joan Didion

  Want, Facts, Smallest

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Aug 07, 2011

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• Maybe he sees it on my face, that fraction of a second when I let my guard down, because in that moment his expression softens and his eyes go bright as flame and even though I barely see him move, suddenly he has closed the space between us and he’s wrapping his warm hands over my shoulders—fingers so warm and strong I almost cry out—and saying, “Lena. I like you, okay? That’s it. That’s all. I like you.” His voice is so low and hypnotic it reminds me of a song. I think of predators dropping silently from trees: I think of enormous cats with glowing amber eyes, just like his.

  Lauren Oliver

  Song, I Like You, Strong

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• If the material consumption of a fraction of humanity is already harming the planet, is there an alternative path that enables all of humanity to live more lightly upon the Earth while experiencing a higher quality of life?

  Duane Elgin

  Humanity, Quality, Alternatives

  Duane Elgin (2010). “Voluntary Simplicity Second Revised Edition: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich”, p.3, Harper Collins

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• A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.

  Vaclav Smil

  Civilization, Income, Analogies

  Vaclav Smil (2012). “Energy: A Beginner's Guide”, p.80, Oneworld Publications

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• All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across.

  Julian Simon

  Thinking, Topics, Opinion

  Julian Lincoln Simon (1998). “The Ultimate Resource 2”, p.55, Princeton University Press

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• Love is insistent on its own continuation. Every fraction of a second, someone somewhere falls in love, a former enemy becomes a friend, and a newborn baby is born into the world.

  Marianne Williamson

  Inspirational, Baby, Falling In Love

  FaceBook post by Marianne Williamson from May 04, 2013

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• Rigging is like Zen meditation. You must bend over the boat until your back is breaking, until your brain is filled with numbers and fractions of numbers, until you can accurately measure an oarlock's pitch without bothering to use the pitch meter. Only then will you see the way of eternal rigging happiness.

  Brad Alan Lewis

  Numbers, Meditation, Brain

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• Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Education, Children, Hands

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• When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next. ... Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants] and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction.

  Richard Heinberg

  Environmental, Energy, Levels

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• Aesthetic racism is almost always a sign of inexperience. Those who have not made their way far enough into the world of amorous delights judge women only by what can be seen. But those who really know women understand that the eye reveals only a minute fraction of what a woman can offer us. When God bade mankind be fruitful and multiply, Doctor, He was thinking of the ugly as well as of the beautiful. I am convinced I might add, that the aesthetic criterion does not come from God but from the devil. In paradise no distinction was made between ugliness and beauty.

  Milan Kundera

  Beautiful, Eye, Thinking

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• In 1966 Rolf Edberg wrote "This is mankind's home", "in the narrow borderland between the deathly heat beneath our feet and the coldness of space above us". He describes the fragility of our existence in poetic terms: "the atmospheric layer is so thin that it cannot be represented on any globe with even the finest brushstroke. At its thickest, it is only a few fractions of a millionth of the Earth's radius. This thin layer is what makes the difference between our planet and the sterile landscape of the moon." After reading that, one does feel the need to take better care of this fragile layer.

  Margot Wallstrom

  Reading, Home, Moon

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• The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche. I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.

  Alexander Shulgin

  Memories, White, Availability

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• He leaned a fraction closer. “My lovers have always been warrior women. Strength intrigues me.” She refused to let him play with her like this, even if her body disagreed. Vehemently. “Do knives intrigue you, too? Because touch me and I will cut you up. I don’t care if you throw me off the nearest balcony.

  Nalini Singh

  Warrior, Cutting, Knives

  Nalini Singh (2009). “Angels' Blood”, p.47, Penguin

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• The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

  George Santayana

  Mistake, Self, Cynical

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• A fragment is not a fraction but a whole piece

  Lyn Hejinian

  Pieces, Fragments, Whole

  Lyn Hejinian (2013). “My Life and My Life in the Nineties”, p.70, Wesleyan University Press

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• We believe human begins have existed for only a small fraction of cosmic history, because human race has been improving so rapidly in knowledge and technology that if people had been around for millions of years, the human race would be much further along in it's mastery.

  Stephen Hawking

  Believe, Technology, Race

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• Understand well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.

  Ada Lovelace

  Want, May, Comprehension

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• A world where Congressmen spend 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% is a world where that tiny, tiny fraction has enormous power. And it's that inequality in political power that enables this corrupted system to happen.

  Lawrence Lessig

  Political, World, Tiny

  "'Your Representative Doesn't Give a Shit About You': Larry Lessig's Plan to Fix Democracy". Interview with Hamilton Nolan, gawker.com. October 13, 2015.

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• We are beginning to realize that even the most fortunate people are living far below capacity, and that most human beings develop not more than a small fraction of their potential mental and spiritual efficiency. The human race, in fact, is surrounded by a large area of unrealized possibilities, a challenge to the spirit of exploration.

  Julian Huxley

  Spiritual, Race, People

  Julian Huxley (1957). “New Bottles for New Wine: Essays”

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