Quotes & Sayings About Guesswork

C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance. — Erik Naggum

Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you're going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance. — Jason Fried

Those who are absolutely certain that the rise in temperatures is due solely to carbon dioxide have no scientific justification. It's pure guesswork. — Henrik Svensmark

Because no doctor or scientist of any sort, no one at all, really knows much of anything in the grand scheme of things. All we can do is speculate, chip away at our lonely perception of the truth, spew guesswork out of our learned mouths, and at the end of the day just have a cold beer. — Anonymous

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the
encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden
assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made
in search of personal power ... all mingled with shreds of enlightenment.
And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is "Thou shalt not question!" But
we do anyway. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to
which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the
harnessing of imagination to humankind's deepest sense of creativity. — Brian Herbert

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation
experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way — Paul Theroux

Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork. — Sam Ewing

The one thing I have learned about editing over the years is that you have to edit and publish out of your own tastes, enthusiasms, and concerns, and not out of notions or guesswork about what other people might like to read. — Norman Cousins

Do you know why God invented writers? Because he loves a good story. And he doesn't give a damn about the words. Words are the curain we've hung between him and our true selves. Try not to think about the words. Don't strin for the perfect sentence. There's no such thing. Writing si guesswork. Every sentence is an educated guess, the readers as much as yours. — J.R. Moehringer

As a historian, I found myself all too often treating my historical subjects like fictional characters, malleable entities that could be made to do one thing or another, whose motivations could be speculated upon endlessly, and whose missing actions could be reconstructed and approximated based on assessments of prior and later behaviors. It was one of the hazards with working a fragmentary source base. You had little scraps, like puzzle pieces, and you could put them together as best you could. But no matter how faithful you tried to be to the historical record, there would always be that element of guesswork, of imagination, of (if we're being totally honest) fiction. — Lauren Willig

A love story - your own, or anyone else's - is interior, hidden. It can never be accurately reported, only imagined. It is all dreams and invention. It's guesswork. — Joan Wickersham

Business, to be successful, must be based on science, for demand and supply are matters of mathematics, not guesswork. — Elbert Hubbard

Fiction is not a dream. Nor is it guesswork. It is imagining based on facts, and the facts must be accurate or the work of imagining will not stand up. — Margaret Culkin Banning

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Very often, people embarking on such guesswork make the vulgar assumption that the lower the motives, the more likely they are to be authentic. — Christopher Hitchens

In a way, being an addict is very proactive. A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway. — Chuck Palahniuk

Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork. — G. Willow Wilson

It takes me forever to say my prayers these days, but I don't care, because this time around, I want to make sure God doesn't have to do any guesswork. — Terry McMillan

The computer saves man a lot of guesswork, but so does the bikini. — Evan Esar

If human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was - how much of it was stitched together not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork - they would go quietly mad. — Alastair Reynolds

When a boy ... discovers that he is more given into introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather, it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork. — Yukio Mishima

It was pure guesswork on my part back in 1979 as to whether I would have the stamina to write, pencil, ink, letter, tone, and fill the back of a monthly comic book for 26 years. — Dave Sim

Positively, it is a summons to us to recognize that God the Creator is transcendent, mysterious and inscrutable, beyond the range of any imagining or philosophical guesswork of which we are capable-and hence a summons to us to humble ourselves, to listen — J.I. Packer

However, though belief on faith alone may be comforting, it is wholly arbitrary and thus does nothing to ensure that you are more correct than anyone else. So it cannot properly be described as knowledge, but rather as a mere wish, a desire that something be true or false, or else it is a naive trust in guesswork or hearsay. — Richard Carrier

the number of imaginary sheep in this world remains a matter of guesswork, who is richer or poorer for it? No, sir; I'm not their scorekeeper. Let them count themselves, if they're so crazy mad after mathematics. Let them do their own dirty work. Coming around here, at this time of day, and asking me to count them! — Dorothy Parker

That's the lovely thing about men, there's no guesswork involved when it comes to arousal. — Belinda McBride

No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance. And through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war. — Carl Von Clausewitz

From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork. — J.K. Rowling

they realized that all the published data was wrong - "little better than guesswork" - they had also discovered what knowledge was needed to design wings that would fly. — Kevin Ashton

All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities. — Siegfried Sassoon

heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had — George Orwell

He couldn't believe that you could look up anyone and seek them out, that all you had to do to prove you weren't an orphan was to open a book and point to your parents. It was unfathomable that a permanent link existed to mothers and fathers and lost mates, that they were forever fixed in type. He flipped through the pages. Donaldson, Jimenez, Smith - all it took was a book, a little book could save you a lifetime of uncertainty and guesswork. Suddenly he hated his small, backward homeland, a land of mysteries and ghosts and mistaken identities. He tore a page from the back of the book and wrote across the top: Alive and Well in North Korea. Below this he wrote the names of all the people he'd helped kidnap. Next to Mayumi Nota, the girl from the pier, he placed a star of exception. — Adam Johnson

I remembered Nahadoth's lips on my throat and fought to suppress a shudder, only half succeeding. Death as a consequence of lying with a god wasn't something I had considered, but it did not surprise me. A mortal man's strength had its limits. He spent himself and slept. He could be a good lover, but even his best skills were only guesswork - for every caress that sent a woman's head into the clouds, he might try ten that brought her back to earth. — N.K. Jemisin

I urge you to engrave this on the template of your memories: there are thousands of diseases in this world, but Medical Science only has an empirical cure for twenty-six of them. The rest is ... guesswork. — Erich Segal

We know that we are going to die, in fact it is the only thing we know of what is in store for us. All the rest is mere guesswork, and most of the time we guess wrong. Like children in the trackless forest we grope our way through our lives in blissful ignorance of what is going to happen to us from one day to another, what hardships we may have to face, what more or less thrilling adventures we may encounter before the great adventure, the most thrilling of all, the Adventure of Death. — Axel Munthe

In order to predict effectively, we need to use science. And the reason that we need to use science is because then we can reproduce what we're doing; it's not just wisdom or guesswork. And if we can predict, then we can engineer the future. — Bruce Bueno De Mesquita

Intuition is not clairvoyance. It's not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary, that 90 percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously - but no less rigorously - than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person. — Peter Watts

The Moon and Mars were the two most likely candidates for life in the solar system; what exists beyond our solar system is mere guesswork. — Walter Lang

My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter - so was my father - and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files and rulers. It all dealt with conciseness and precision. It eliminated guesswork. One has to know his tools, so he doesn't work against himself. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Mathematicians use intuition, conjecture and guesswork all the time except when they are in the classroom. — Joseph Warren

But is all this true?" said Brutha.
Didactylos shrugged. "Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork."
"You mean you don't KNOW it's true?" said Brutha.
"I THINK it might be," said Didactylos. "I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about. — Terry Pratchett

The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork. — Bill James

But God!Who could live like this , anyway, with the kind of guesswork that was enough to make a person crazy, just sailing along, taking bumps here and there, no course navigated whatsoever, with any big wave capable of just tipping and sinking you entirely. IT was madness, stipidity, and- (then I saw him) — Sarah Dessen

To do this, you need to leave guesswork behind and get "outside the building" in order to learn what the high-value customer problems are, what about your product solves these problems, and who specifically are your customer and user (for example, Who has the power to make or influence the buying decision and who will use the product on a daily basis?). — Steven Gary Blank

Short a bear market, go long in a bull market, either play, you do it on a hunch, harbor a whole lot of hope, then sit back and try not to bite your nails. Because no one knows anything for sure. Foresight is a hunch. Everyone is making it up as best they can, and life's winners are those who smile at the truth of it and can cut a wake through a Sargasso of ego, guesswork, bullshit and chance. — Simon Pont

Carol, a swing-shift cocktail waitress in the Bird of Paradise's show lounge had gotten home (guesswork, here) around 2:15 - 2:30, poured herself a glass of milk, and had opened the back door of the kitchen for reasons unknown. (Fingerprints were later found on the outside knob that, while smudged, didn't belong to either girl.)
She had opened the door, and died. Suddenly, quietly, without disturbing her sleeping roommate only a few feet away. — Jeff Rice

What will happen in the future is mere guesswork - essentially, make-believe. If you are going to spend a lot of time and energy in a make-believe world, I suggest spending time considering the great possibilities rather than worrying about the bad ones. — Charles F. Glassman

We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork. — Terry Pratchett

The brain has a good error rate. But, the point is, you can function with that error rate. Animals do a lot of guesswork. — Usama Fayyad

History is personal, Gwen understands that now. All you are seeing is what's before you, the rest is guesswork. — Alice Hoffman

I think, when it comes to psychiatry, that a lot of people are overmedicated. I think when it comes to ECT a lot of people go through too much. I think there's a lot of guesswork in psychiatry. — Andy Behrman

A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks. — Gian-Carlo Rota

YAGNI forces you to wait until you know what the problem really is and how it should be accommodated by the design. It eliminates guesswork, and ensures that the design will be correct. — Anonymous

The spirit of Christianity proclaims the brotherhood of the race and the meaning of that strong word has not been left to guesswork, but made tremendously definite - the Christian must forgive his brother man all crimes he can imagine and commit, and all insults he can conceive and utter - forgive these injuries how many times? - seventy times seven - another way of saying there shall be no limit to this forgiveness. That is the spirit and the law of Christianity. — Mark Twain