Precise Quotes - Page 8

• Precisely constructed models for linguistic structure can play an important role, both negative and positive, in the process of discovery itself. By pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deep understanding of the linguistic data. More positively, a formalized theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed.

  Noam Chomsky

  Discovery, Data, Deep Understanding

  Noam Chomsky (2002). “Syntactic Structures”, p.5, Walter de Gruyter

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• I think for most people, the audience probably couldn't tell the difference, but I know they [shots of visual effects] can be better. And the people working know they can be more precise. I'm still doing another round of sound mixing and color timing, pretty technical stuff. I think the movie [Life of Pi] is really presentable, nothing was left out that would take you out of the movie. I just need to perfect the job and I still have two weeks to go [to deliver final cut to Fox].

  Ang Lee

  Jobs, Thinking, Two

  "Ang Lee Talks LIFE OF PI, the Difficulty of Getting the Project Off the Ground, 3D as a New Artistic Form, Deleted Scenes and More". Interview with Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, collider.com. October 3, 2012.

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• Clear and precise ideas are the most dangerous, for one does not dare to change them.

  Andre Gide

  Ideas, Doe, Dare

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• My timing is so precise, a heckler would have to make an appointment just to get a word in.

  Phyllis Diller

  Hecklers, Timing, Appointments

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Ignorant, May, Shameless

  Jorge Luis Borges (1999). “Everything and Nothing”, p.98, New Directions Publishing

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• It's fine, precise, detailed work, the infinitely small motor management of diamond cutters and safecrackers that we do in our heads.

  Stanley Elkin

  Management, Fine, Diamond

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• Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to "critique" as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Art, Issues, Water

  Source: therumpus.net

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• He's one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won't, possibly can't, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.

  Michael Cunningham

  Art, Jobs, Thinking

  Michael Cunningham (2010). “By Nightfall: A Novel”, p.12, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined; one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination; but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, Ideas, Long

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• For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Mother, Past, Hatred

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• Even if we don't have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific.

  Paul Davies

  Ideas, Religion, Atheism

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• Considering the great importance to the public liberty of the freedom of the press, and the difficulty of submitting it to very precise rules, the laws have thought it less mischievous to give greater scope to its freedom than to the restraint of it.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Law, Giving, Liberty

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• The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise.

  Gabor Mate

  Hurt, Pain, Emotional

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• Man is a creature adapted for life under circumstances which are very narrowly limited. A few degrees of temperature more or less, a slight variation in the composition of air, the precise suitability of food, makes all the difference between health and sickness; between life and death.

  Robert Stawell Ball

  Nature, Men, Air

  Sir Robert Stawell Ball (2016). “The Story of the Heavens”, p.125, Sai ePublications via PublishDrive

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• A baseball field must be the most beautiful thing in the world. It's so honest and precise. And we play on it. Every star gets humbled. Every mediocre player has a great moment.

  Jim Lefebvre

  Beautiful, Sports, Baseball

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• The only valid reason to use clichés is in the speech of a character. Cliches are indications of sloppy writing. The writer does not respect the scene he is trying to dramatize enough to fashion it through precise prose and imaginative imagery. From the book Dare to be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction by

  Leonard Bishop

  Fashion, Powerful, Book

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• There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

  Lord Kelvin

  Science, Discovery, Measurement

  "Is Scientific Genius Extinct?" by Ross Pomeroy, bigthink.com.

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• To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Science, Discovery, Two

  "The Organization of Thought" (1917)

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• Emotions weren’t created to just lie around. You should experience things to the full. I’ve got a sense of the clock ticking. We have to feel all those things to the maximum. Like, I don’t eat a lot but I really love eating. And I like being precise and particular. There is a certain respect in that. If you can do your day depending on how you feel, and enjoy things as well.

  Bjork

  Lying, How You Feel, Emotion

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• A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.

  Milan Kundera

  Religious, Sight, Essence

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• ...In little more than a single century from 1820 to 19450, no less than fifty-nine million human animals were killed in inter-group clashes of one sort or another.... We describe these killings as men behaving "like animals," but if we could find a wild animal that showed signs of acting this way, it would be more precise to describe it as behaving like men.

  Desmond Morris

  Animal, Men, Acting

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• Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being

  H. G. Wells

  Perfection, Mind, Quality

  H. G. Wells (2016). “A Modern Utopia”, p.31, H. G. Wells

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• I find the treatment of royalty distinctly peculiar. The royal family lives in palaces heavily screened from prying eyes by fences, grounds, gates, guards, all designed to ensure the family absolute privacy. And every newspaper in London carried headlines announcing PRINCESS ANNE HAS OVARIAN CYST REMOVED. I mean you're a young girl reared in heavily guarded seclusion and every beer drinker in every pub knows the precise state of your ovaries.

  Helene Hanff

  Girl, Princess, Eye

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• The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.

  Haruki Murakami

  Fighting, Victory And Defeat, Imagination

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• Clockwork could not run counter to its nature. The seconds, minutes, and hours moved only forward. Patient, precise, and unstoppable. Memory was an indulgence, an illusion that broke like a wave upon the juggernaut of time. The past remained the past.

  Matthew J. Kirby

  Running, Memories, Past

  Matthew J. Kirby (2012). “The Clockwork Three”, p.155, Scholastic Inc.

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