Generalities Quotes - Page 2

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

  Claude C. Hopkins

  Ducks, Water, Understanding

  "Scientific Advertising".

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• 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”

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• Politicians... talk in generalities and lies, and I think they've caused all our grief. They're so awful, they're really funny. I hate thinking this because my dad loved politics.

  Paul Lynde

  Dad, Lying, Hate

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• That plenty should produce either covetousness or prodigality is a perversion of providence; and yet the generality of men are the worse for their riches.

  William Penn

  Men, Riches, Should

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• We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

  Albert Einstein

  Life, Order, Profound

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.24, Open Road Media

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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

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• A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it's considered to be some deep philosophy. However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Philosophy, Special, Way

  "The Character of Physical Law". Richard P. Feynman's Messenger Lectures at Cornell University (November 1964), later quoted in his book "The Character of Physical Law" (Chapter 1 "The Law of Gravitation", p. 13), www.youtube.com. 1965.

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• I think there is a blossom about me of something more distinguished than the generality of mankind.

  James Boswell

  Thinking, Mankind, Distinguished

  'Boswell's London Journal' (ed. F. A. Pottle, 1950) 20 January 1763

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• All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring if those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad.

  Angela Carter

  Artist, Self, Mad

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• It is good sense applied with diligence to what was at first a mere accident, and which by great application grew to be called, by the generality of mankind, a particular genius.

  Samuel Johnson

  Genius, Firsts, Diligence

  Samuel Johnson (1836). “Johnsoniana; or supplement to Boswell; being Anecdotes and sayings of Dr. Johnson, etc”, p.197

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• The generality of men are so bound within the sphere of their circumstances that they have not even the courage to get out of them through their ideas, and if we see a few whom, in a way, speculation over great things makes incapable of mean ones, we find still more with whom the practice of small things takes away the feeling for great ones.

  Luc de Clapiers

  Mean, Men, Practice

  "Reflections and Maxims". Book by Luc de Clapiers, 1746.

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• With the latitude of unbounded scurrility, it is easy enough to attain the character of a wit, especially when it is considered how wonderfully pleasant it is to the generality of the public to see the folly of their acquaintance exposed by a third person.

  Henry Fielding

  Character, Easy, Enough

  Henry Fielding (1782). “The Beauties of Fielding: Carefully Selected ... To which is Added Some Account of His Life”, p.199

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• It is very rare, indeed, for men to be wrong in their feelings concerning public misconduct; as rare to be right in their speculations upon the cause of it. I have constantly observed that the generality of people are fifty years, at least, behind in their politics.

  Edmund Burke

  Men, Years, People

  Edmund Burke (1756). “The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke ...: A vindication of natural society. An essay on the sublime and beautiful. Political miscellanies”, p.311

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• To lead means to direct and to exact, and no man dares do either - he might be unpopular. What authority we are given now is a trinity: the grin, the generality, and God (the Word).

  Marya Mannes

  Mean, Men, Might

  Marya Mannes (1958). “More in Anger”

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• People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx.

  David Stove

  Religious, Powerful, Plato

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• I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Nearwicked, I always think in a wordworth's of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A.G., whom the generality admoyers in this that is and that this is to come.

  James Joyce

  Thinking, Poetry, Favourite

  James Joyce (2016). “The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more”, p.1363, e-artnow

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• An experimental science is supposed to perform experiments that find generalities. It's not just supposed to tally up a long list of individual cases and their unique life histories. That's butterfly collecting.

  Richard Lewontin

  Butterfly, Unique, Long

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• Look, some people talk about their personal lives a lot; I try not to, unless it's more of a generality.

  Kate Bosworth

  People, Trying, Looks

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• All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Effectiveness, Color, Individuality

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• Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such the autonomous movement of non-life.

  Guy Debord

  Reality, Expression, Forever

  Guy Debord (1994). “The Society of the Spectacle”, Zone Books (NY)

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