Rigour Quotes - Page 2

• We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.

  Ben Okri

  Ignorance, Simple, Parent

  "The Famished Road". Book by Ben Okri, 1991.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Pop music is not just a clumsy mass fanaticism, connected to a deceitful enchantment totally lacking in moral rigour.

  Paul Morley

  Enchantment, Moral, Deceitful

  12 Copy quote

• Her virtues, graced with external gifts, Do breed love's settled passions in my heart; And like as rigour of tempestuous gusts Provokes the mightiest hulk against the tide, So am I driven by breath of her renown Either to suffer shipwreck or arrive Where I may have fruition of her love.

  William Shakespeare

  Passion, Heart, Suffering

  William Shakespeare (1823). “The plays of William Shakspeare, pr. from the text of the corrected copies left by G. Steevens and E. Malone, with a selection of notes from the most eminent commentors by A. Chalmers”, p.343

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every writer must reconcile, as best he may, the conflicting claims of consistency and variety, of rigour in detail and elegance in the whole. The present author humbly confesses that, to him, geometry is nothing at all, if not a branch of art.

  Julian Coolidge

  Art, Science, Consistency

  Julian Lowell Coolidge (2004). “A Treatise on Algebraic Plane Curves”, p.10, Courier Corporation

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.

  Mark Blaug

  Games, Sick, Understanding

  11 Copy quote

• How do we get a pantomime cow on set. Jeez, the rigours of satire.

  Mel Smith

  Cows, Satire, Pantomime

  20 Copy quote

• One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.

  Francis Galton

  Law, Land, Civilization

  "Hereditary Talent and Character". MacMillan's Magazine, 12, 1865.

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• The cuisine, it is all about putting generosity before rigour and pleasure before lucidity.

  Pierre Gagnaire

  Generosity, Cuisine, Pleasure

  21 Copy quote

• It really is worth the trouble to invent a new symbol if we can thus remove not a few logical difficulties and ensure the rigour of the proofs. But many mathematicians seem to have so little feeling for logical purity and accuracy that they will use a word to mean three or four different things, sooner than make the frightful decision to invent a new word.

  Gottlob Frege

  Mean, Science, Decision

  Gottlob Frege (1952). “Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege”

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.

  Antonin Artaud

  Order, Theatre, Passionate

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.122, Grove Press

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am sure that hon. members will realize that I am not drawing on my imagination when I state that last fall there were children going to school in Saskatchewan with only sacking wrapped around their feet. We have gone into homes and found mothers and children lying on piles of bedding in the corner; they did not have the proper bedding equipment or the proper clothing to meet the rigours of a very cold winter.

  Tommy Douglas

  Mother, Children, Lying

  Tommy Douglas' maiden speech at the House of Commons in Ottawa, Ontario, February 11, 1936.

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• A philosophy can and must be worked out with the greatest rigour and discipline in the details, but can ultimately be founded on nothing but faith: and this is the reason, I suspect, why the novelties in philosophy are only in elaboration, and never in fundamentals.

  T. S. Eliot

  Faith, Philosophy, Discipline

  4 Copy quote

• Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.

  Theodor Adorno

  Simple, Vacuums, Purity

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.101, Verso

  4 Copy quote

  Show source