Precise Quotes - Page 9

• The incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory. Quantum theoretical laws must be of a statistical kind. To give an example: we know that the radium atom emits alpha-radiation. Quantum theory can give us an indication of the probability that the alpha-particle will leave the nucleus in unit time, but it cannot predict at what precise point in time the emission will occur, for this is uncertain in principle.

  Werner Heisenberg

  Science, Incomplete Knowledge, Law

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• All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things.

  Charles Yu

  Heart, Ideas, People

  Charles Yu (2010). “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel”, p.124, Vintage

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• We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast of the universe; which means endless.

  Anne Rice

  Mean, Thinking, Endless

  Anne Rice (1993). “Lasher”, Alfred A. Knopf Canada

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• The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone.

  Arthur Miller

  Crucible, Devil, Stones

  Arthur Miller (2015). “The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.315, Penguin

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• ...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

  Guy de Maupassant

  Dream, Art, Strange

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• A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Men, Thinking, Vocabulary

  Henry Hazlitt, Hans F. Sennholz (1993). “The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt”, Foundation for Economic Education

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• [It] may be laid down as a general rule that, if the result of a long series of precise observations approximates a simple relation so closely that the remaining difference is undetectable by observation and may be attributed to the errors to which they are liable, then this relation is probably that of nature.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Nature, Science, Simple

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• The mechanist is intimately convinced that a precise knowledge of the chemical constitution, structure, and properties of the various organelles of a cell will solve biological problems. This will come in a few centuries. For the time being, the biologist has to face such concepts as orienting forces or morphogenetic fields. Owing to the scarcity of chemical data and to the complexity of life, and despite the progresses of biochemistry, the biologist is still threatened with vertigo.

  Andre Michel Lwoff

  Knowledge, Science, Cells

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• In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.

  Julia Cameron

  Inspirational, Life, Pain

  Julia Cameron (2012). “The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”, p.82, Souvenir Press

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• He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Simple, Light, Hands

  Vladimir Nabokov (1970). “Mary: A Novel”, Vintage Books

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• Mister Cameron - I have read the unexpurgated Ovid, the love poems of Sappho, the Decameron in the original, and a great many texts in Greek and Latin histories that were not though fit for proper gentlemen to read, much less proper ladies. I know in precise detail what Caligula did to, and with, his sisters, and I can quote it to you in Latin or in my own translation if you wish. I am interested in historical truth, and truth in history is often unpleasant and distasteful to those of fine sensibility. I frankly doubt that you will produce anything to shock me.

  Mercedes Lackey

  Latin, Historical, Greek

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• Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.

  Tana French

  Profound, Mind, Encounters

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• We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

  Ray Bradbury

  Inspirational, Motivational, Friendship

  FaceBook post by Ray Bradbury from Dec 09, 2015

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• The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.

  Garth Stein

  Language, Humans, Stills

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• And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

  Alan Moore

  Daughter, Mother, Children

  "Watchmen". Comic book limited series by Alan Moore, September 1986 – October 1987.

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• I looked him in the eye, "I will always love you." Then plunged the stake into his chest. It wasn't as precise a blow as I would have liked, not with the skilled way he was dodging. I struggled to get the stake in deep enough to his heart, unsure if I could do it from this angle. Then, his struggles stopped. His eyes stared at me, stunned, and his lips parted, almost into a smile, albeit a grisly and pained one. "That's what I was supposed to say..." he gasped out.

  Richelle Mead

  Struggle, Love You, Heart

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• The nerve. Threatening you and not being precise about it.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Nerves, Threatening

  Karen Marie Moning (2016). “The Fever Series 7-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever, Iced, Burned”, p.841, Dell

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• Ah, grief makes us precise!

  Leonard Cohen

  Grief

  Leonard Cohen (2011). “Beautiful Losers”, p.20, Vintage

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• There have been five great kisses since 1642 B.C. when Saul and Delilah Korn's inadvertent discovery swept across Western civilization. (Before then couples hooked thumbs.) And the precise rating of kisses is a terribly difficult thing, often leading to great controversy, because although everyone agrees with the formula of affection times purity times intensity times duration, no one has ever been completely satisfied with how much weight each element should receive. But on any system, there are five that everyone agrees deserve full marks. Well, this one left them all behind.

  William Goldman

  Couple, Kissing, Discovery

  William Goldman (2013). “The Princess Bride”, p.48, A&C Black

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• You can't stand clutter, and you have an obsession with orderliness. The furniture in here is centered exactly on the walls; the files on your desk are arranged in precise corners. If I had to guess, I would say you are probably a control freak, and that is usually symptomatic of a man who feels powerless to control his own life, so he tries to control every facet of his surroundings.

  Judith McNaught

  Wall, Men, Trying

  Judith McNaught (2016). “Someone to Watch Over Me: A Novel”, p.147, Simon and Schuster

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• The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.

  Michel Foucault

  Clothes, Intellectual, Facts

  Michel Foucault (1980). “Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews”, p.207, Cornell University Press

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• It's healthy to ditch class now and then." To be precise, it was healthier for humans if vampires ditched on days when human blood would be spilt.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Blood, Class, Healthy

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• This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.

  Alice Munro

  Travel, Long, Way

  Alice Munro (2015). “A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994”, p.429, Vintage

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• The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.

  Guillermo del Toro

  Kings, Journey, Tourists

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• Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Life, Time, Age

  Marcus Tullius Cicero, William Melmoth (1820). “Essays on old age and friendship”, p.70

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