Equations Quotes - Page 18

I hate to play the I-live-in-the-country card, but it really takes all of the 'pack the kids into the car and run from here to there' out of the equation.

Ree Drummond

Running, Country, Hate

5 Copy quote
I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.

Nicole Krauss

Writing, Thinking, Choices

4 Copy quote
You've got to honor your relationship with your audience - that they sit down because they want to be entertained. And that doesn't mean you can't provoke them and antagonize them and challenge them in the course of the entertainment as long as you keep the entertainment part of the equation alive.

David E. Kelley

Mean, Long, Challenges

8 Copy quote
Neither the true nor the false roots are always real; sometimes they are imaginary; that is, while we can always imagine as many roots for each equation as I have assigned, yet there is not always a definite quantity corresponding to each root we have imagined.

Rene Descartes

Real, Roots, Ontology

17 Copy quote
How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasturenothing but years of effort can extract it. You can't hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can't shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon.

Stephen Leacock

Fall, Struggle, Math

14 Copy quote
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.

John Banville

Math, Null, Mixtures

7 Copy quote
The worldly relations of men and women often form an equation that cancels out without warning when some insignificant factor has been added to either side.

William McFee

Men, Sides, Warning

William McFee (1916). “Casuals of the Sea: The Voyage of a Soul”

4 Copy quote

Show source
If the people would but analyze the human equation of a prison they might better account for the crimes that are visited upon them in cities, towns, and hamlets, ofttimes by men who graduated with an education and equipment for just that sort of retributive service from some penal institution.

Eugene V. Debs

Men, Cities, People

7 Copy quote
In order to solve this differential equation you look at it until a solution occurs to you.

George Polya

Math, Order, Looks

73 Copy quote
Television in the 1960s & 70s had just as much dross and the programmes were a lot more tediously patronising than they are now. Memory truncates occasional gems into a glittering skein of brilliance. More television, more channels means more good television and, of course, more bad. The same equation applies to publishing, film and, I expect, sumo wrestling.

A. A. Gill

Memories, Mean, Wrestling

14 Copy quote
You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Men, Hollywood, Half

F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.828, e-artnow

4 Copy quote

Show source
Louis B. Mayer is one of those with a claim to posessing the equation... he began to buy up nickelodeon arcades in the years before the First World War in and around Boston. He had noticed that people liked going into the dark to see the light... the appeal of the movies is beyond the sensible, rational or the hard-working. Going into the dark, afte centuries of progress in which mankind has staggered toward artificial light, smacks of delicious perversity.

Edward Jay Epstein

War, Hard Work, Dark

7 Copy quote
In 1972 Charlie Chaplin was allowed back to America to receive an honorary Oscar, 'for the incalculable he had on making motion pictures the art form of this century'. That's what the Academy was always for - to blur the equation enough so that profit and fame could be called art.

Edward Jay Epstein

Art, America, Hollywood

4 Copy quote
In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

Alan Lightman

Science, Cosmos, World

Alan Lightman (2011). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.29, Vintage

5 Copy quote

Show source
The Deer Hunter is securely on my list of American movie events, by which I mean those films that aspired to the whole equation, to be show business and art at the same time.

Edward Jay Epstein

Art, Mean, Hollywood

4 Copy quote
You have to be in movies that make money to be offered work. Basically that's the equation. There's no real way around that. That said, you don't ever make decisions solely for that reason.

Alessandro Nivola

Real, Decision, Way

4 Copy quote
Having begun my life in science searching for the equation beyond time, I now believe that the deepest secret of the universe is that its essence rests in how it unfolds moment by moment in time.

Lee Smolin

Believe, Essence, Secret

Lee Smolin (2013). “Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

51 Copy quote

Show source
I now want to tell three stories about advances in twentieth-century physics. A curious fact emerges in these tales: time and again physicists have been guided by their sense of beauty not only in developing new theories but even in judging the validity of physical theories once they are developed. Simplicity is part of what I mean by beauty, but it is a simplicity of ideas, not simplicity of a mechanical sort that can be measured by counting equations or symbols.

Steven Weinberg

Beauty, Art, Mean

36 Copy quote
Cancer is really hard to go through and it's really hard to watch someone you love go through, and I know because I have been on both sides of the equation.

Cynthia Nixon

Cancer, Someone You Love, Sides

18 Copy quote
People are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let's all give each other a pass, shall we?

David Rakoff

Forgiveness, People, Giving

David Rakoff (2010). “Half Empty”, p.217, Anchor

13 Copy quote

Show source
The two sides of the equation are the same. We have a tautology. The definition is meaningless.

Norman Macbeth

Two Sides, Definitions, Tautology

5 Copy quote
I was appalled to find that the mathematical notation on which I had been raised failed to fill the needs of the courses I was assigned, and I began work on extensions to notation that might serve. In particular, I adopted the matrix algebra used in my thesis work, the systematic use of matrices and higher-dimensional arrays (almost) learned in a course in Tensor Analysis rashly taken in my third year at Queen's, and (eventually) the notion of Operators in the sense introduced by Heaviside in his treatment of Maxwell's equations.

Kenneth E. Iverson

Queens, Taken, Years

"Kenneth E. Iverson with Donald B. McIntyre". Autobiographical sketch from an unfinished work, keiapl.info. (ca. 2004).

6 Copy quote

Show source
In the abstract world of American economists, equations run both ways; they believe that by changing the sign of a variable from plus to minus or from minus to plus or the price and quantity of x or y, the direction of historical movement can be reversed.

Robert Gilpin

Running, Believe, Historical

Robert Gilpin (2016). “The Political Economy of International Relations”, p.336, Princeton University Press

7 Copy quote

Show source
If you want to catch more fish, more often, take luck out of your fishing equation and replace it with knowledge of fish, their habitat and behavior, and you will make your own luck.

Tony Bishop

Rivers, Lakes, Sea

4 Copy quote
Evidence in support of general relativity came quickly. Astronomers had long known that Mercury’s orbital motion around the sun deviated slightly from what Newton’s mathematics predicted. In 1915, Einstein used his new equations to recalculate Mercury’s trajectory and was able to explain the discrepancy, a realization he later described to his colleague Adrian Fokker as so thrilling that for some hours it gave him heart palpitations.

Brian Greene

Heart, Long, Support

Brian Greene (2011). “The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos”, p.16, Vintage

7 Copy quote

Show source