Generalities Quotes - Page 2

Extra features were once considered desirable. We now recognize that 'free' features are rarely free. Any increase in generality that does not contribute to reliability, modularity, maintainability, and robustness should be suspected.

Boris Beizer

Doe, Reliability, Increase

Boris Beizer (1990). “Software Testing Techniques”, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company

12 Copy quote

Show source
Platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck.

Claude C. Hopkins

Ducks, Water, Understanding

"Scientific Advertising".

26 Copy quote

Show source
No generality has any weight whatever. It is like saying "how do you do?" When you have no intention of inquiring about ones health. But specific claims when made in print are taken at their value

Claude C. Hopkins

Taken, Writing, Inquiring

Claude C. Hopkins (2016). “Scientific Advertising”, p.23, Laurus - Lexecon Kft.

8 Copy quote

Show source
Such exaggerations have been so common that the public takes them with a grain of salt and partly excuses them as being due to the advertiser's license of self-assertiveness. Nevertheless, the fact remains that superlative generalities are weak arguments and far less convincing than a statement of facts. Much advertising copy would be improved immensely by doing away with brag and substituting actual facts about the merits of the article.

Daniel Starch

Self, Facts, Merit

6 Copy quote
Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

Eric Temple Bell

Art, Inspiration, Past

Eric Temple Bell (1938). “The queen of the sciences”

7 Copy quote

Show source
The generality of men are so accustomed to judge of things by their senses that, because the air is indivisible, they ascribe but little to it, and think it but one remove from nothing.

Robert Boyle

Science, Men, Thinking

25 Copy quote
I have the vagary of taking a lively interest in mathematical subjects only where I may anticipate ingenious association of ideas and results recommending themselves by elegance or generality.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Science, Ideas, May

4 Copy quote
You can't wish for more wishes or for vague generalities like happiness that are impossible to grant. Your wish has to be something specific enough that I can use my wand to make it happen. Oh, and recently there's been a ban on inserting yourself into the Twilight series. The Cullens are tired of different teenage girls pinging into their story every time they turn around.

Janette Rallison

Girl, Teenage, Twilight

4 Copy quote
If you're doing a large, complicated character with radio controls, it might take a number of people several months to make it and if you're talking about a quick little hand puppet, it could be made in 2 days, so there's enormous range there, and no real easy generalities.

Jim Henson

Real, Character, Numbers

6 Copy quote
Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality.

Thomas Cech

Biology, Breakthrough, Phenomenon

"Funding above and beyond scientific research". Interview with Holger Breithaupt, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. September 15, 2001.

13 Copy quote

Show source
As for methods I have sought to give them all the rigour that one requires in geometry, so as never to have recourse to the reasons drawn from the generality of algebra.

Augustin-Louis Cauchy

Science, Giving, Reason

47 Copy quote
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

Knowledge, Science, Facts

22 Copy quote
As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

Jacques Derrida

Language, Scene

Jacques Derrida (1995). “Points . .: Interviews, 1974-1994”, p.200, Stanford University Press

19 Copy quote

Show source
It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.

Lionel Trilling

Science, Class, Names

Lionel Trilling, Leon Wieseltier (2009). “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays”, p.425, Northwestern University Press

7 Copy quote

Show source
Generalities don't count and won't help you in football.

Knute Rockne

Soccer, Football, Helping

5 Copy quote
This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts, and helicopter pilots are brooding introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to.

Harry Reasoner

Airplane, Ironic, Different

64 Copy quote
In this art form, in any art form, generalities are useless.

Zubin Mehta

Art, Useless, Crafts

14 Copy quote
The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Treasure, Safe, Virtuous Woman

17 Copy quote
I'm not interested in details that might get someone into trouble. I'm more interested in generalities rather than the particulars, as a journalist would be. Names, dates and times don't interest me at all. I'm interested in feelings and emotions. Most people are game, once they realize that you're on the level as far as that's concerned and you're not about exposing them, then they feel quite free to talk about it. Police officers and social workers are no exception.

Irvine Welsh

Games, Names, People

Interview With Veronica Bond, gapersblock.com. October 15, 2008.

5 Copy quote

Show source
The great majority of people are “wandering generalities” rather than “meaningful specifics”. The fact is that you can't bit a target that you can't see. If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else. You have to have goals.

Zig Ziglar

Leadership, Meaningful, Somewhere Else

17 Copy quote
Developing Christlike attributes in our lives is not an easy task, especially when we move away from generalities and abstractions and begin to deal with real life. The test comes in practicing what we proclaim. The reality check comes when Christlike attributes need to become visible in our lives—as husband or wife, as father or mother, as son or daughter, in our friendships, in our employment, in our business, and in our recreation. We can recognize our growth, as can those around us, as we gradually increase our capacity to 'act in all holiness before [Him]' (D&C 43:9).

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Daughter, Mother, Husband

4 Copy quote
...the source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept of seemingly generality is, in essence, the same as a small and concrete special case.

Paul Halmos

Science, Essence, Special

33 Copy quote
Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though different traditions may emphasize different aspects, it is only the interplay of these antithetic forces and the struggle for their synthesis that constitute the life, usefulness, and supreme value of mathematical science.

Richard Courant

Struggle, Expression, Perfection

Richard Courant, Herbert Robbins, Ian Stewart (1996). “What is Mathematics?: An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods”, p.23, Oxford University Press, USA

7 Copy quote

Show source
For there is a great difference in delivery of the mathematics , which are the most abstracted of knowledges, and policy , which is the most immersed. And howsoever contention hath been moved , touching a uniformity of method in multiformity of matter, yet we see how that opinion, besides the weakness of it, hath been of ill desert towards learning, as that which taketh the way to reduce learning to certain empty and barren generalities; being but the very husks and shells of sciences, all the kernel being forced out and expulsed with the torture and press of the method.

Francis Bacon

Learning, Knowledge, Science

"Collected Works of Francis Bacon".

7 Copy quote

Show source
Euclid avoids it [the treatment of the infinite]; in modern mathematics it is systematically introduced, for only then is generality obtained.

Arthur Cayley

Infinite, Modern, Euclid

6 Copy quote