Quotes & Sayings About Deviation

If Christians see Mormonism as a dramatic deviation from a millennia-old, biblically-based faith, Jews see Christianity in the same light. — Meir Soloveichik

The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later. — Aristotle.

Rudeness instantly establishes a set of norms, a set of regulatory orders, authority, and power. To be rude is to go against an established accepted concept or ordered regulation. Thus rudeness could be in kind, a deviation from the norm. Rudeness can also be in kind an instantiation outside a set foundation. A deviation from a norm holds the same set foundation as the norm, their disagreement merely a manner of degrees. — Dew Platt

The monasteries of Bohemia demand more of their brotherhood than some are prepared to give. The daily routine of back-breaking idleness proves too much for certain novices. The self-inflicted orgies that are the inevitable punishment for the slightest deviation into the bourgeois way of life are more than their frail flesh can stand. Many discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots, and greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope — Quentin Crisp

To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. ("The Medusa") — Thomas Ligotti

In our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Never has man reached his destination by persistence in deviation from the straight path. — Mahatma Gandhi

The average artist, if he chooses, could render an exact drawing of what he sees. Artistic work not only allows but demands some deviation from form and line. Just how far this may go depends on the viewpoint of each painter. — Edgar Alwin Payne

Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has ever seen. — Vladimir Nabokov

Christ choosing solitude for private prayer, doth not only hint to us the danger of distraction and deviation of thoughts in prayer, but how necessary it is for us to choose the most convenient places we can for private prayer. Our own fickleness and Satan's restlessness call upon us to get into such places where we may freely pour out our soul into the bosom of God [Mark 1.35]. — Thomas Brooks

In the financial world, risk translates to uncertainty. It's measured by "standard deviation from the norm" -- in other words, it's measured by how much the returns swing up and down. Says King, "Most individuals measure risk as their chance of loss, but we measure risk by the variability of returns. — Kathy Kristof

I never considered Miles Davis a perfectionist; I always considered him as an excellence-ist, where deviation is actually kind of cool. — Charlie Trotter

The investigations also proved that there were many cases of spontaneous deviation, i.e. cases where there had been no stimulation of the semi-circular canal apparatus. — Robert Barany

If some people deviate or step out of the path Jesus has laid, others will have to take up the baton and continue the race — Sunday Adelaja

Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel. When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand. So it is, Perowne tries to convince himself, with clipping an aneurysm: absorbing variation on an unchanging theme. — Ian McEwan

Oh for women at sea to obviate the eternal crosscat-harpings,' he said to himself, 'to do away with the grumlinfuttocks, and to inject a little civilization, even of an equivocal nature, even at the risk of moral deviation. — Patrick O'Brian

Every deviation from the rules of charity and brotherly love, of gentleness and forbearance, of meekness and patience, which our Lord prescribes to his disciples, however it may appear to be founded on an attachment to Him and zeal for His service, is in truth a departure from the religion of Him, "the Son of Man," who "came not to destroy men's lives, but to save them. — Richard Mant

You don't want to stir things up by questioning the specialists.And it's terribly difficult to end something that's already been established.You interfere and you're out of a job.No, worse yet, you might be sent to a forced labor camp for ideological deviation.Even if everyone were against it, no one would say it out loud.That's why nothing changes. — Koushun Takami

Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening. — Andy Warhol

Is deviation from the locally approved norms always and everywhere to be taken as disease? — Bernard Wolfe

The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases. From the love of splendour, from the indulgences of luxury, and from his fondness for amusement he has familiarised himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have been intended for his associates.
The wolf, disarmed of ferocity, is now pillowed in the lady's lap. The cat, the little tiger of our island, whose natural home is the forest, is equally domesticated and caressed. The cow, the hog, the sheep, and the horse, are all, for a variety of purposes, brought under his care and dominion. — Edward Jenner

To what gulfs A single deviation from the track Of human duties leads even those who claim The homage of mankind as their born due, And find it, till they forfeit it themselves! — Lord Byron

Private and public life are subject to the same rules-truth and manliness are two qualities that will carry you through this world much better than policy or tact of expediency or other words that were devised to conceal a deviation from a straight line. — Robert E.Lee

A deviation from propriety scarcely ever escapes punishment. — Regina Maria Roche

Any deviation from the ordinary course of life in this quiet town was enough to stop all progress in it. — Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

There's not much room for deviation, yet if you manage to crack it, there then you can express things that actually do sound unique and genuinely original. — Rob Brown

Manage by exception.Only require reporting when there is a deviation from the plan. — Brian Tracy

Accustom your children constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end — Samuel Johnson

They are just a strange whim, kink of nature, deviation that doesn't seem to exist but is encountered every day. — Igor Eliseev

If your broker or investment advisor is not familiar with the concept of standard deviation of returns, get a new one. — William J. Bernstein

Separate yourself from the lies and illusions which are not you. — Bryant McGill

State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day. — Noam Chomsky

Liberation movements - operating surreptitiously and conspiratorially - thrive on discipline and suspicion, and punish deviation or dissent. — Bill Keller

Most people would call me incompetent, clumsy, flawed..."

"A pearl is a flaw. A diamond is an accident of nature. In all of creation, there's nothing more precious than the unexpected deviation. — Todd Mitchell

Heretics were most often bitterly persecuted for the their least deviation from accepted belief. It was precisely their obstinacy about trifles that irritated the righteous to madness. — Lev Shestov

Plants were bound for good or ill to their places. They expressed not only beauty but also the thoughts of God's world, with an intent of their own and without deviation. Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason, the woods were the places where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings. — Carl Jung

I saw the error I was making. I had been thinking of the disaster as a horrible mistake, as an unscripted deviation from the happy story of the life I had been promised. But now I began to understand that my ordeal in the Andes was not an interruption of my true destiny, or a perversion of what my life was supposed to be. It simply was my life, and the future that lay ahead was the only future available to me. To hide from this fact, or to live in bitterness and anger, would only keep me from living any genuine life at all. — Nando Parrado

Communist regimes were not some unfortunate aberration, some historical deviation from a socialist ideal. They were the ultimate expression, unconstrained by democratic and electoral pressures, of what socialism is all about ... In short, the state [is] everything and the individual nothing. — Margaret Thatcher

As a young gay African, I have been conditioned from an early age to consider my sexuality a dangerous deviation from my true heritage as a Somali by close kin and friends. As a young gay African coming of age in London, there was another whiplash of cultural confusion that one had to recover from again and again: that accepting your sexual identity doesn't necessarily mean that the wider LGBT community, with its own preconceived notions of what constitutes a "valid" queer identity, will embrace you any more welcomingly than your own prejudiced kinsfolk do. — Diriye Osman

What hits us really hard is that we didn't fully realize the subtly scandalous deviation from the path that our dreams had laid out so long ago. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

125.00% Mean 149.17% Standard Deviation 43.47% — Simon Quellen Field

Now quantitatively we rank things on something called alpha over standard deviation, which is the return independent of the market divided by volatility. Usually, to get a high ranking, you need some buying pressure. — Louis Navellier

Invention is nothing more than a fine deviation from, or enlargement on a fine model ... — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

It is difficult to deviate from an old line of thought 'just a little'. The radical departure is easier than the subtle deviation." Ludwig Wittgenstein. — Paul Byall

No art can be grafted with success on another art. For though they all profess the same origin, and to proceed from the same stock, yet each has its own peculiar modes both of imitating nature and of deviating from it ... The deviation, more especially, will not bear transplantation to another soil. — Joshua Reynolds

Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions and objectives in short, all the technical laws and customs which he encounters in office or factory. — Jacques Ellul

Misliking the Harrow as I do, I would find no small joy in thwarting him. Have I not admitted that I, too, am prone to greed? But here I personify the united will of the Insequent. Any deviation from that resolve will breach the sacred prohibition which enables the Insequent to endure and prosper. Answering you, I will bring down my own destruction and accomplish only sorrow. — Stephen R. Donaldson

The slightest deviation from the line of clear conviction - the least turning to left or right in order to cocker a prejudice or please an audience or flatter a class, showed a want of delicacy - a preference of present popularity to permanent self-respect - which he could never have indulged in himself, and with difficulty tolerated in others. He had nothing but contempt for philosophical politicians with a turn for swimming with the stream, and philosophical divines with the same turn. — Matthew Arnold

To the extent that scarcity of land is natural, and absentee landlord claims are not enforced by the state, economic rent on land is a form of scarcity rent that will prevail under any system. But to the extent that the scarcity is artificial, resulting from government or absentee landlord restrictions on access to vacant land, or landlord rent on those actually occupying and using land, the mutualist contention is that such rent is a deviation from normal exchange-value caused by unequal exchange. Patents, likewise, are such a deviation, being nothing but a monopoly imposed by the state. Such examples, therefore, have no bearing whatsoever on the validity of the labor theory of value. — Anonymous

There is no love in Puritanism. It turns out that these monsters that won't allow any deviation from that rigid orthodoxy are obsessed with frigging, fucking, wanking, twatty sex. Don't do it, they screamed, while that's exactly what they did. My mother's cunt was all bent out of shape to prove it ... All those Puritan preachers were vindictive, vengeful men spouting hateful thoughts and threats, and it's disheartening that they're still taught in the schools with reverence. They were shits. And they spouted shit. And a goodly portion of the world is still spouting shit. — Larry Kramer

This time I am a force.
A deviation of human nature.
I am living, breathing proof that nature is officially screwed, afraid of what it's done, what it's become.
And I'm stronger. I'm angrier.
I'm ready to do something I'll definitely regret and this time I don't care. I'm done being nice. I'm done being nervous. I'm not afraid of anything anymore.
Mass chaos is in my future.
And I'm leaving my gloves behind. — Tahereh Mafi

Injustice, being the opposite of justice, is the putting a thing in a place not its own; it is to misplace a thing; it is to misuse or to wrong; it is to exceed or fall short of the mean or limit; it is to suffer loss; it is deviation from the right course; it is disbelief of what is true, or lying about what is true knowing it to be true. -Islam and Secularism page 78 — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

I trust everything, under God, to habit, upon which, in all ages, the lawgiver, as well as the schoolmaster, has mainly placed his reliance,
habit, which makes everything easy, and casts all difficulties upon the deviation from the wonted course. — Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham And Vaux

Sorry, the points are already deducted. And taking into account his schedule, and then the standard deviation from the average man's schedule, I figure ninety percent of his time would go elsewhere. I'd never get uninterrupted coitus." "Penis math," Amy said. "Impressive." She looked at Mallory. "See, this is why a guy shouldn't date an accountant. — Jill Shalvis

If one is of the masculine gender, a poodle is the insignia of one's deviation. — Mart Crowley

It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces ... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past ... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition. — James P. Carse

I think it perfectly just, that he who, from the love of experiment, quits an approved for an uncertain practice, should suffer the full penalty of Egyptian law against medical innovation; as I would consign to the pillory, the wretch, who out of regard to his character, that is, to his fees, should follow the routine, when, from constant experience he is sure that his patient will die under it, provided any, not inhuman, deviation would give his patient a chance. — Thomas Beddoes

The pornographers are not a deviation from the norm. Their presence in the mainstream shouldn't be surprising, because they represent mainstream values: The logic of domination and subordination that is central to patriarchy, hyper-patriotic nationalism, white supremacy, and a predatory corporate capitalism. — Robert Jensen

The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can't fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar. — Groucho Marx

If I didn't have to worry about money, I would be doing the same thing I'm doing now. Additionally, I would maintain other creative outlets
glassblowing and woodworking. I would operate a salon-format venue geared towards deviation; a destabilization of the audience/rock star dynamic. — Jean Smith

The educator should do anything but advise the child to do what everybody does. He should rather rejoice when he sees in the child tendencies to deviation. — Ellen Key

One of the most robust sex differences in personality research is the finding that women are higher in Agreeableness than men are. The difference is over half a standard deviation, which means that although there is plenty of overlap between the sexes, the average man scores lower than 70 per cent of women. Women have an advantage on theory of mind tasks too. Moreover, there is evidence that the difference is deep in our biology. When women are given testosterone experimentally, it reduces empathetic behaviour.19 — Daniel Nettle

Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think. — Isaac Asimov

Deviation from the word of God is sentimentality and says 'you're right' to this one, and 'you're right' to that one, and the guy in the middle is an ass-hole. — Milton Rokeach

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold. — Aristotle.

I wanted no interruption in the regularity of feeding, the steadiness of growth, the even succession of days. I wanted no interruption, wanted no oil, no deviation. — E.B. White

The traditional version of history bequeathed to us by the authorities of the Roman Church is that Christianity developed from the teachings of a Jewish Messiah and that Gnosticism was a later deviation. What would happen, we wondered, if the picture were reversed and Gnosticism viewed as the authentic Christianity, just as the Gnostics themselves claimed? Could it be that orthodox Christianity was a later deviation from Gnosticism and that Gnosticism was a synthesis of Judaism and the Pagan Mystery religion? — Tim Freke

The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms. Not — Bill Bryson

In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated. — George Orwell

liter. The correlation value, r, will be the same for either set of units. Note however that the slope of the regression line won't be the same since And the standard deviation parts of the equation still have units baked into them. Correlation Takeaways We did a lot of looking at equations in this section. What are the key takeaways? The — Scott Hartshorn

For all live births, the mean pregnancy length is 38.6 weeks, the standard deviation is 2.7 weeks, which means we should expect deviations of 2-3 weeks to be common. — Allen B. Downey

Reviewing the record of American intervention in Indochina in the Pentagon Papers, one cannot fail to be struck by the continuity of basic assumptions from one administration to the next. Never has there been the slightest deviation from the principle that a noncommunist regime must be imposed and defended, regardless of popular sentiment. — Noam Chomsky

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka.
And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not alcohol and a duck at all. — Boris Pasternak

These coupling certainly do not fit with the mainstream idea that genes, or at least organisms, are hell-bent on reproducing themselves. They do fit, however, with the idea of a social role for sex, and they fit with the idea that sexual reproduction is a spandrel, a by-product of some other phenomenon. If Roughgarden is on to something, she believes it could have cultural as well as scientific implications. The orthodoxy of biology has corroded our culture like battery acid, she says, In general, we play out the roles prescribed for us by that culture - aggressive male and coy female - because deviation from its "norm" results in emotional and physical violence, bigotry, personal guilt, and criminalized behaviors. If biology has been getting it wrong though, the new orthodoxy could trigger an infusion of tolerance; perhaps the anomalous prevalence of sexual reproduction will end up having deeper repercussions outside of science than within it. — Michael Brooks

The value for which P=0.05, or 1 in 20, is 1.96 or nearly 2; it is convenient to take this point as a limit in judging whether a deviation ought to be considered significant or not. Deviations exceeding twice the standard deviation are thus formally regarded as significant. Using this criterion we should be led to follow up a false indication only once in 22 trials, even if the statistics were the only guide available. Small effects will still escape notice if the data are insufficiently numerous to bring them out, but no lowering of the standard of significance would meet this difficulty. — Ronald A. Fisher

No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern. — Cesare Pavese

A compass is narrow-minded-it always points to the magnetic north ... We must discipline ourselves, personally, to fight any deviation from the course Jesus set for us. We cannot be tolerant of any other course. — Billy Graham

If you follow all of the rules, you'll miss all of the fun. — Katharine Hepburn

some call their mistake a discovery;to others, their mistake is a misfortune and to most people a mistake is a deviation from the acceptable. A mistake is a mistake depending on what we think it is. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that's holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It's gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it's trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren't doing it in the streets." He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. "Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule - meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean. — Daniel Suarez

The pathologized images have moved the soul in several ways: we are afraid; we feel vulnerable and in danger; our very physical sustance and sanity appear to be menaced; we want to prevent or rectify. Especially this last seizes us. We feel protective, impelled to correct, straighten, repair. For we have confused something sick with something wrong. [ ... ]
affliction reaches us partly through the guilt it brings. Guilt belongs to the experiences of deviation, the the sense of being off, failing, 'missing the mark'. [ ... ]
However the true missing of the mark is taking the guilt literally, where failings becomes faults to be set right. This places the guilt on the shoulders of the ego who 'should not' have failed. Then pathologizing reinforces the ego's style and guilt serves a secondary gain, increasing the ego's sense of importance: ego becomes superego, drivenly busy with repairing wrongs. A guilty ego is no less egocentric than a proud one. — James Hillman

Conclusions
I. A curve has been found representing the frequency distribution of standard deviations of samples drawn from a normal population.
II. A curve has been found representing the frequency distribution of values of the means of such samples, when these values are measured from the mean of the population in terms of the standard deviation of the sample ...
III. Tables are given by which it can be judged whether a series of experiments, however short, have given a result which conforms to any required standard of accuracy or whether it is necessary to continue the investigation. — William Sealy Gosset

In the name of equal rights, women are being stripped of the protections of the family and given no place except the perverse competition of a sexual market in which increasingly shock, deviation, and aggressiveness command a premium ... — R.J. Rushdoony

Technology serves life. It does not destroy it. These lessons are rooted in the very foundations of Sectilius culture and law, without deviation, under threat of penalty of strictest nature. — Jennifer Foehner Wells

God is the ruler over every person and every institution, not just the believer and the church. And since the Bible is his revelation, it carries the same authority over every person and every institution. Therefore, every human government must submit and operate under the Bible, and any deviation from it constitutes sinful rebellion against divine authority. — Vincent Cheung

What's recommended is that if you have a good experience, don't get too excited. And if you have a bad experience, don't mistake it for a serious deviation or a sidetrack that you have to find your way back from. If you have a bad experience, just continue practicing as you were. In other words, whatever happens, just keep looking at your mind. — Thrangu Rinpoche

Kepler's laws, although not rigidly true, are sufficiently near to the truth to have led to the discovery of the law of attraction of the bodies of the solar system. The deviation from complete accuracy is due to the facts, that the planets are not of inappreciable mass, that, in consequence, they disturb each other's orbits about the Sun, and, by their action on the Sun itself, cause the periodic time of each to be shorter than if the Sun were a fixed body, in the subduplicate ratio of the mass of the Sun to the sum of the masses of the Sun and Planet; these errors are appreciable although very small, since the mass of the largest of the planets, Jupiter, is less than 1/1000th of the Sun's mass. — Isaac Newton

Gardening as far as Gardening is Art, or entitled to that appellation, is a deviation from nature; for if the true taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art, or any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then be no longer a Garden. — Joshua Reynolds

The test of observance of Christ's teachings is our consciousness of our failure to attain an ideal perfection. The degree to which we draw near this perfection cannot be seen; all we can see is the extent of our deviation. LEO TOLSTOY The — Philip Yancey

Tom laughed at the phrase "sexual deviation." Where was the sex? Where was the deviation? He looked at Freddie and said low and bitterly: "Freddie Miles, you're a victim of your own dirty mind. — Patricia Highsmith

Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts should have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual possessor. Nevertheless, this difficulty, though appearing to our imagination insuperably great, cannot be considered real if we admit the following propositions, namely, - that gradations in the perfection of any organ or instinct, which we may consider, either do now exist or could have existed, each good of its kind, - that all organs and instincts are, in ever so slight a degree, variable, - and, lastly, that there is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of each profitable deviation of structure or instinct. The truth of these propositions cannot, I think, be disputed. — Charles Darwin

Deviation from Nature is deviation from happiness. — Samuel Johnson

This writing malarkey should come with a health warning: MAY CAUSE INCESSANT DEVIATION FROM ORIGINAL INTENTION, AND DROWSINESS. — Glen Duncan

Man is the being, among whom only a small minority of the elite ones, find the Greatness of Glorious God, from the study of things and therefrom acquire perfect faith. But the same tool has become the means of deviation for the rest of them. — Muhammad Atta-ullah Faizani

People didn't want to hear the truth. They had their ideas and any deviation made them uncomfortable. — Tarryn Fisher

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress. — Theodor Adorno

Never deviate from the right way and you will improve. — Israelmore Ayivor

Transgression affirms the very rules it intends to flout. Nothing supports the norm like deviation. — Hanif Kureishi

In fact, the average programming manager would prefer that a project be estimated at twelve months and take twelve than that the same project be estimated at six months and take nine. This is an area where some psychological study could be rewarding, but there are indications from other situations that it is not the mean length of estimated time that annoys people but, rather, the standard deviation in the actual time taken. Thus, most people would prefer to wait a fixed ten minutes for the bus each morning than to wait one minute on four days and twenty-six minutes once a week-. Even though the average wait is six minutes in the second case, the derangement caused by one long and unexpected delay more than compensates for this disadvantage. If — Gerald M. Weinberg

He could see himself selling himself as a compelling mutation, a young god, proud to the point of sexy arrogance of his anatomical deviation: ninety percent thriving muscled man-flesh and ten percent glorious blindingly white angel wing.
Baby, these feathers are going to tickle you halfway to heaven, and this man-part is going to take you the rest of the way. — Michael Cunningham