Precise Quotes - Page 7

• The best doctors found a middle position where they were neither overwhelmed by their feelings nor estranged from them. That was the most difficult position of all, and the precise balance - neither too detached nor too caring - was something few learned.

  Michael Crichton

  Caring, Doctors, Feelings

  Michael Crichton (2012). “Travels”, p.25, Vintage

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• Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Geometry, Poetry Is, Subjects

  Letter to Louise Colet, 14 August 1853

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• If I go to Germany, I learn something in addition. The German television is very precise and respectable. One has never stress. In Italy it is more dynamic. But I amuse myself madly in both countries.

  Michelle Hunziker

  Country, Stress, Germany

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• You're in a terrible spot. It's too late for you to retreat but too soon to act. All you can do is witness. You're in the miserable position of an infant who cannot return to the mother's womb, but neither can he run around and act. All an infant can do is witness and listen to the stupendous tales of action being told to him. You are at that precise point now. You cannot go back to the womb of your old world, but you cannot act with power either. For you there is only witnessing acts of power and listening to tales of power.

  Carlos Castaneda

  Mother, Running, Listening

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• Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Extinction, Way, Blind

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• Lettering is a precise art and strictly subject to tradition. The 'New Art ' notion that you can make letters whatever shapes you like,is as foolish as the notion, if anyone has such a notion, that you can make houses any shapes you like. You can't, unless you live all by yourself on a desert island.

  Stanley Morison

  Art, Islands, House

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• I do not worry or even think of spelling, grammar, paragraphing, or punctuation (except periods) at this point. . .In the early throes of an idea there is for me only grammar of the mind, which is a flow of thought, as natural and precise as the flow of a river to the sea.

  Mary O'Neill

  Thinking, Sea, Ideas

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• Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition

  Robert C. Solomon

  Perfection, Kitsch, Execution

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• When it comes to being a techie, I'm always precise about the things that I want to know. I love understanding how things work.

  Michiel Huisman

  Understanding, Want, Techie

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When individual enterprise is free and unhampered, profit-and-loss calculations set precise limits to a businessman's temptations to expand his services... a government valuable they may be, have no market price and, therefore, cannot be subjected to profit-and-loss accounting.

  Hans F. Sennholz

  Loss, Government, Temptation

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• I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".

  David Christian

  May, Way, Pieces

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• Photography has clarity in the same way that language has. A word is precise, but its meaning can change based on the words around it: think tank, tank top.

  Jason Fulford

  Photography, Thinking, Tanks

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• I am interested in marginality, in immaturity, in naïveté, in illusion, in fictions, in transitions, in the fact that at a certain moment in life there is no limit. I would like my photography to pose a question rather than make a precise statement.

  Lise Sarfati

  Photography, Immaturity, Transition

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• How can we appraise a proposal if the terms hurled at our ears can mean anything or nothing, and change their significance with the inflection of the voice? Welfare state, national socialism, radical, liberal, conservative, reactionary and a regiment of others ... these terms in today's usage, are generally compounds of confusion and prejudice. If our attitudes are muddled, our language is often to blame. A good tonic for clearer thinking is a dose of precise, legal definition.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Attitude, Mean, Thinking

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• If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, - under all these screens I have diffuculty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life.  But do your work and I shall know you.  Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.  A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity.  If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Party, Men, Games

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2017). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.144, Broadview Press

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• If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?

  Marshall McLuhan

  Art, Technology, Psychics

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• Every design is a rigorous attempt to capture a concrete moment of a transitory image in all its nuances. The extent to which this transitory quality is captured, is reflected in the designs: the more precise they are, the more vulnerable.

  Alvaro Siza Vieira

  Design, Quality, Nuance

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• Intellectual honesty consists in stating the precise conditions under which one will give up one's belief.

  Imre Lakatos

  Giving Up, Honesty, Intellectual

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• Your rewards, all the years of your life, will be in precise proportion to your service. You are here to serve others, just as they serve you.

  Earl Nightingale

  Years, Rewards, Proportion

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• Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms.

  Louis de Bernieres

  Love Is, Kind, Symptoms

  Louis de Bernieres (2012). “Corelli's Mandolin: A Novel”, p.399, Vintage

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• Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.

  John Szarkowski

  Photography, Purpose, Facts

  "The lure of the street" by Geoff Dyer, www.theguardian.com. May 30, 2008.

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• You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)

  Michael Ondaatje

  Night, New Orleans, Hands

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “Coming Through Slaughter”, p.45, A&C Black

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• By choosing a precise intersection between subject and time, he may transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and the real into the surreal.

  Constantine Manos

  Real, Ordinary, May

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• History may be accurate. But archaeology is precise.

  Doug Scott

  May, Archaeology, Accurate

  "Organized hunts for Civil War relics raise dust between participants, historians" by Brigid Schulte, www.sfgate.com. April 30, 2006.

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• I want to travel on a train that smells like snowflakes. I want to sip in cafes that smell like comets. Under the pressure of my step, I want the streets to emit the precise odor of a diamond necklace. I want the newspapers I read to smell like the violins left in pawnshops by weeping hobos on Christmas Eve. I want to carry luggage that reeks of the neurons in Einstein's brain. I want a city's gases to smell like the golden belly hairs of the gods. And when I gaze at a televised picture of the moon, I want to detect, from a distance of 239,000 miles, the aroma of fresh mozzarella.

  Tom Robbins

  Distance, Moon, Hair

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