Analogies Quotes - Page 2

• All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Truth, Learning, Knowledge

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.57, Courier Corporation

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• All penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we're likely to get for the futility of racism.

  Russell Brand

  Thinking, Racism, Perfect

  Russell Brand (2008). “My Booky Wook”, p.48, Hachette UK

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• I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Writing, Names, Errors

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• Don’t just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it’s good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles. Which is, rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.

  Elon Musk

  Thinking, Principles, Fundamentals

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• A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Hard Work, Science, Frustration

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• I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

  Elon Musk

  Thinking, People, Important

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• Good mathematicians see analogies. Great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.

  Stefan Banach

  Mathematician

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• As the Church is the aggregate of believers, there is an intimate analogy between the experience of the individual believer, and of the Church as a whole.

  Charles Hodge

  Church, Individual, Intimate

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• To criticize mathematics for its abstraction is to miss the point entirely. Abstraction is what makes mathematics work. If you concentrate too closely on too limited an application of a mathematical idea, you rob the mathematician of his most important tools: analogy, generality, and simplicity. Mathematics is the ultimate in technology transfer.

  Ian Stewart

  Technology, Ideas, Simplicity

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• A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories.

  Stefan Banach

  Proof, Theory, Mathematician

  "Banach Spaces and Their Applications in Analysis: Proceedings of the International Conference at Miami University, May 22-27, 2006, in Honor of Nigel Kalton's 60th Birthday" by Beata Randrianantoanina, Narcisse Randrianantoanina, Walter de Gruyter, (p. 5), 2007.

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• It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Motivational, Summer, Softball

  "The Green Fields of the Mind," Yale Alumni Magazine, Nov. 1977

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• To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government - the realisation of the will of the people.

  John Drinkwater

  Mean, Government, People

  John Drinkwater (1922). “The Lyric: An Essay”

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• Growth comes through analogy; through seeing how things connect, rather than only seeing how they might be different.

  Albert Einstein

  Growth, Different, Might

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• The analogy I use is that 'World of Warcraft' is like going to the mall: you see a ton of people there, but you don't really want to interact with them; you just want to know you're part of the human race. And if you get in trouble, you'll know someone else is there.

  John Romero

  Race, People, Use

  "The future of games is freedom". Interview with Alexander Gambotto-Burke, www.theguardian.com. July 19, 2006.

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• It makes no sense to seek a single best way to represent knowledge-because each particular form of expression also brings its particular limitations. For example, logic-based systems are very precise, but they make it hard to do reasoning with analogies. Similarly, statistical systems are useful for making predictions, but do not serve well to represent the reasons why those predictions are sometimes correct.

  Marvin Minsky

  Knowledge, Expression, Example

  "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind". Book by Marvin Minsky, 2006.

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• We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

  Alan Watts

  Journey, Heaven, Musical

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• So is not mathematical analysis then not just a vain game of the mind? To the physicist it can only give a convenient language; but isn't that a mediocre service, which after all we could have done without; and, it is not even to be feared that this artificial language be a veil, interposed between reality and the physicist's eye? Far from that, without this language most of the initimate analogies of things would forever have remained unknown to us; and we would never have had knowledge of the internal harmony of the world, which is, as we shall see, the only true objective reality.

  Henri Poincare

  Eye, Science, Reality

  "Statistical Mechanics of Disordered Systems: A Mathematical Perspective". Book by Anton Bovier, p. 3, 2006.

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• Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don't look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact, that is what we mean by understanding.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Motivation, Mean, Science

  Gian-Carlo Rota (2009). “Indiscrete Thoughts”, p.214, Springer Science & Business Media

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• The analogy I like is this imagine being able to see the world but you are deaf, and then suddenly someone gives you the ability to hear things as well - you get an extra dimension of perception.

  Albert Einstein

  Giving, Perception, World

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• The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence of memory.

  Giacomo Casanova

  Memories, Order, Mind

  Giacomo Casanova (2013). “The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt: Complete”, p.28, Simon and Schuster

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• Divine life is in touch with the whole universe on the analogy of the soul's contact with the body.

  Muhammad Iqbal

  Soul, Body, Life Is

  Jamila Khatoon, Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1963). “The place of God, man, and universe in the philosophic system of Iqbal”

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• It may be said, almost without qualification, that true wisdom consists in the ready and accurate perception of analogies. Without the former quality, knowledge of the past is unobstructive: without the latter it is deceptive.

  Richard Whately

  Inspirational, Past, Perception

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• That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he or she stole, and from whom? With the artist it is not how much he or she took from whom, but what the artist did with it.

  Lukas Foss

  Artist, Thieves, Doe

  "About The Creative Process". "The Yale Review", Volume 94, Issue 3, (pp. 117-118), July 2006.

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• The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form - the one of the particles, the other of the waves - are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.

  Werner Heisenberg

  Two, Wave, Form

  Werner Heisenberg (2013). “The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory”, p.15, Courier Corporation

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• The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Real, Mean

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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