Precise Quotes - Page 6

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Lionel Trilling

Literature, Possibility, Difficulty

1950 The Liberal Imagination, preface.

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Your life experience is unfolding in the precise response to the vibrations that radiate as a result of your thoughts, whether you know it is or not.

Esther Hicks

Lost Love, Vibrations, Life Experience

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Disappointment is a good sign of basic intelligence. It cannot be compared to anything else: it is so sharp, precise, obvious, and direct. If we can open, then we suddenly begin to see that our expectations are irrelevant compared with the reality of the situations we are facing.

Chogyam Trungpa

Disappointment, Reality, Expectations

Chogyam Trungpa (2010). “The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa: Volume Three: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism; The Myth of Freedom; The Heart of the Bud dha; Selected Writings”, p.24, Shambhala Publications

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He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.

Oscar Wilde

Silence, Moments, Psychological

Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.184, Oxford University Press on Demand

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War is a positive, precise and specific evil, of gigantic proportions ...making within the sphere of its influence all true grandeur impossible.

Charles Sumner

War, Evil, Spheres

Charles Sumner (1871). “Addresses on War”, p.14

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Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Life, Time, Age

Marcus Tullius Cicero, William Melmoth (1820). “Essays on old age and friendship”, p.70

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In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

John B. S. Haldane

Atheism, Facts, Emotion

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The subject should be observed more for shape and color than for drawing... precise drawing is dry and hampers the impression of the whole, it destroys all sensations.

Camille Pissarro

Color, Drawing, Dry

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Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly and by another name is called duration. Relative, apparent, and common time is any sensible and external measure (precise or imprecise) of duration by means of motion; such as a measure-for example, an hour, a day, a month, a year-is commonly used instead of true time.

Isaac Newton

Time, Mean, Science

Sir Isaac Newton (2014). “Newton: Philosophical Writings”, p.84, Cambridge University Press

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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

Paul Valery

Men, Ideas, Doing Nothing

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The end of the eighteenth and the commencement of the nineteenth century are remarkable for the small amount of scientific movement going on in this country, especially in its more exact departments. Mathematics were at the last gasp, and astronomy nearly so; I mean in those members of its frame which depend upon precise measurement and systematic calculation. The chilling torpor of routine had begun to spread itself over all those branches of Science which wanted the excitement of experimental research.

John Herschel

Country, Mean, Science

"Memoir of Francis Baily".

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The incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory. Quantum theoretical laws must be of a statistical kind. To give an example: we know that the radium atom emits alpha-radiation. Quantum theory can give us an indication of the probability that the alpha-particle will leave the nucleus in unit time, but it cannot predict at what precise point in time the emission will occur, for this is uncertain in principle.

Werner Heisenberg

Science, Incomplete Knowledge, Law

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To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.

Alfred North Whitehead

Science, Discovery, Two

"The Organization of Thought" (1917)

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There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

Lord Kelvin

Science, Discovery, Measurement

"Is Scientific Genius Extinct?" by Ross Pomeroy, bigthink.com.

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For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined; one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination; but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.

Henri Poincare

Science, Ideas, Long

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For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

Miguel de Cervantes

Mother, Past, Hatred

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Even if we don't have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific.

Paul Davies

Ideas, Religion, Atheism

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Considering the great importance to the public liberty of the freedom of the press, and the difficulty of submitting it to very precise rules, the laws have thought it less mischievous to give greater scope to its freedom than to the restraint of it.

Thomas Jefferson

Law, Giving, Liberty

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The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise.

Gabor Mate

Hurt, Pain, Emotional

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Man is a creature adapted for life under circumstances which are very narrowly limited. A few degrees of temperature more or less, a slight variation in the composition of air, the precise suitability of food, makes all the difference between health and sickness; between life and death.

Robert Stawell Ball

Nature, Men, Air

Sir Robert Stawell Ball (2016). “The Story of the Heavens”, p.125, Sai ePublications via PublishDrive

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A baseball field must be the most beautiful thing in the world. It's so honest and precise. And we play on it. Every star gets humbled. Every mediocre player has a great moment.

Jim Lefebvre

Beautiful, Sports, Baseball

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The only valid reason to use clichés is in the speech of a character. Cliches are indications of sloppy writing. The writer does not respect the scene he is trying to dramatize enough to fashion it through precise prose and imaginative imagery. From the book Dare to be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction by

Leonard Bishop

Fashion, Powerful, Book

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[It] may be laid down as a general rule that, if the result of a long series of precise observations approximates a simple relation so closely that the remaining difference is undetectable by observation and may be attributed to the errors to which they are liable, then this relation is probably that of nature.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Nature, Science, Simple

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The mechanist is intimately convinced that a precise knowledge of the chemical constitution, structure, and properties of the various organelles of a cell will solve biological problems. This will come in a few centuries. For the time being, the biologist has to face such concepts as orienting forces or morphogenetic fields. Owing to the scarcity of chemical data and to the complexity of life, and despite the progresses of biochemistry, the biologist is still threatened with vertigo.

Andre Michel Lwoff

Knowledge, Science, Cells

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On the question of the world as a whole, science founders. For scientific knowledge the world lies in fragments, the more so the more precise our scientific knowledge becomes.

Karl Jaspers

Lying, Knowledge, Science

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