Counting Quotes - Page 5

• For the most part, it is true, ordinary men and women regard mathematics with energetic distaste, counting its concepts as rhapsodic as cauliflower. This is a mistake-there is no other word. Where else can the restless human mind find means to tie the infinite in a finite bow?

  David Berlinski

  Mistake, Mean, Men

  David Berlinski (2000). “The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World”, Houghton Mifflin

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• What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.

  Jean Dubuffet

  Numbers, Effort, Trying

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• Counting your blessings is a better cure for insomnia than counting sheep - you can fall asleep before you get through half of them.

  Densey Clyne

  Wisdom, Fall, Blessing

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• One foot in front of the other, counting tiles on the floor so I don't have to focus the blur of painted smiles, fake faces.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Feet, Fake, Focus

  Ellen Hopkins (2008). “Impulse”, p.9, Simon and Schuster

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• Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.

  Ernst Mach

  Math, May, Problem

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• In counting gifts, to one thousand, more, I discover that slapping a sloppy brush of thanksgiving over everything in my life leaves me deeply thankful for very few things in my life.

  Ann Voskamp

  Brushes, Leaving Me, Thousand

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• He's my client, and he's counting on me. I'll take him, warts and all.

  John Grisham

  Clients, Warts

  Twitter post from Jul 16, 2016

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• Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Exercise, Soul, Doe

  Letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712.

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• There have been many authorities who have asserted that the basis of science lies in counting or measuring, i.e. in the use of mathematics. Neither counting nor measuring can however be the most fundamental processes in our study of the material universe-before you can do either to any purpose you must first select what you propose to count or measure, which presupposes a classification.

  Roy Crowson

  Lying, Purpose, Use

  Roy Albert Crowson (1970). “Classification and Biology”, p.2, Transaction Publishers

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• When young Galileo, then a student at Pisa, noticed one day during divine service a chandelier swinging backwards and forwards, and convinced himself, by counting his pulse, that the duration of the oscillations was independent of the arc through which it moved, who could know that this discovery would eventually put it in our power, by means of the pendulum, to attain an accuracy in the measurement of time till then deemed impossible, and would enable the storm-tossed seaman in the most distant oceans to determine in what degree of longitude he was sailing?

  Hermann von Helmholtz

  Time, Ocean, Mean

  Hermann von Helmholtz, David Cahan (1995). “Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays”, p.93, University of Chicago Press

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• I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through.

  Mary Karr

  Moving, Hands, Numbers

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• Chanting is no more holy than listening to the murmur of a stream, counting prayer beads no more sacred than simply breathing. . . . If you wish to attain oneness with the Tao, don't get caught up in spiritual superficialities.

  Laozi

  Spiritual, Prayer, Breathing

  Laozi, Brian Browne Walker (1992). “Hua Hu Ching: Teachings of Lao Tzu”

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• Montalbano and Valente seemed not to have heard him, looking as if their minds were elsewhere. But in fact they were paying very close attention, like cats that, keeping their eyes closed as if asleep, are actually counting the stars.

  Andrea Camilleri

  Stars, Cat, Eye

  Andrea Camilleri (2010). “The Snack Thief”, p.125, Pan Macmillan

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• To exist in this vast universe for a speck of time is the great gift of life. Our tiny sliver of time is our gift of life. It is our only life. The universe will go on, indifferent to our brief existence, but while we are here we touch not just part of that vastness, but also the lives around us. Life is the gift each of us has been given. Each life is our own and no one else's. It is precious beyond all counting. It is the greatest value we can have. Cherish it for what it truly is..... Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it.

  Terry Goodkind

  Goes On, Vastness, Tiny

  Terry Goodkind (2011). “Confessor”, p.583, Macmillan

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• The only things worth counting on are people you can count on.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  People

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• I scarcely remember counting upon happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.

  John Keats

  Rights, Looks, Sparrows

  John Keats (2015). “John Keats - The Man Behind The Lyrics: Life, letters, and literary remains: Complete Letters and Two Extensive Biographies of one of the most beloved English Romantic poets”, p.584, e-artnow

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• One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.

  Bobbie Ann Mason

  Cat, One Day, Absent

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• Statistics is the branch of scientific method which deals with the data obtained by counting or measuring the properties of populations of natural phenomena.

  Maurice Kendall

  Data, Population, Branches

  Maurice George Kendall, Alan Stuart (1977). “The Advanced Theory of Statistics: Distribution theory”, Hafner Press

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• How many push ups do you do? I don't know. I only starts counting when it starts hurting

  Muhammad Ali

  Motivational, Hurt, Push Ups

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• We've found that frogs are counting the number of chemicals in the water. If you expose them to two chemicals, there's a slight delay in metamorphosis; if you expose them to ten, there's even more of a delay. No single compound will do this.

  Tyrone Hayes

  Two, Numbers, Water

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• Builders insist that success may never come without a compelling personal commitment to something you care about and would be willing to do with or without counting on wealth, fame, power, or public acceptance as an outcome.

  Jerry I. Porras

  Success, Commitment, Acceptance

  Jerry I. Porras, Stewart Emery, Mark Thompson (2006). “Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters”, p.21, Pearson Education

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• Parliamentary government is simply a mild and disguised form of compulsion. We agree to try strength by counting heads instead of breaking heads, but the principle is exactly the same... The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority.

  James Fitzjames Stephen

  Government, Giving, Trying

  James Fitzjames Stephen (1991). “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: And Three Brief Essays”, p.70, University of Chicago Press

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• A friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade-tree I know.

  James Russell Lowell

  Funny, Friendship, Meaningful

  James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton (1904). “Letters”

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• People say, 'The government couldn't carry out the September 11th attack, it's too big, they'd get caught!' They DID get caught! They're just counting on you to be dumb and to go along with it.

  Alex Jones

  Government, People, Dumb

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• It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

  Don DeLillo

  Epic, Cities, People

  Don DeLillo (2010). “Point Omega”, p.36, Pan Macmillan

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