Quotes & Sayings About Parsimony

While society cannot provide employment for its members, the production/work/income nexus has to be abandoned as a justification for our present parsimony to the unemployed. An assumption cannot be used to justify making second-class citizens of those who are unfortunate enough to constitute living proof of the inaccuracy of that assumption. — Bob Hawke

A parsimony of words prodigal of sense. — Benjamin Disraeli

The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque. — Philip K. Dick

Parsimony is enough to make the master of the golden mines as poor as he that has nothing; for a man may be brought to a morsel of bread by parsimony as well as profusion. — Henry Home, Lord Kames

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. — Edmund Burke

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward. — Theodor Adorno

Well I don't feel sectarian against sparseness, although I sometimes get a little chippy about this. I resent the way that a certain notion of parsimony has become the norm for skilful literary writing. — China Mieville

It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine. — Richard Dawkins

The principle of parsimony is valid esthetically in that the artist must not go beyond what is needed for his purpose. — Rudolf Arnheim

There is nothing worse than being ashamed of parsimony or poverty. — Livy

The want of parsimony, in time of peace, imposes the necessity of contracting debt in time of war. When — Adam Smith

What in the rising man was industry and economy, becomes in the rich man parsimony and avarice. — Sarah Josepha Hale

I was near-delirious. Gazing up at the pillared skyline, I knew that I was surveying a tremendous work of man. Buying myself a drink in the smaller warrens below, in all their ethnic variety (and willingness to keep odd and late hours, and provide plentiful ice cubes, and free matchbooks in contrast to English parsimony in these matters), I felt the same thing in a different way. The balance between the macro and the micro, the heroic scale and the human scale, has never since ceased to fascinate and charm me. Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think - made me think for many years - that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it. — Christopher Hitchens

Nothing perhaps has so retarded the reception of the higher conclusions of Geology among men in general, as ... [the] instinctive parsimony of the human mind in matters where time is concerned. — Charles Lapworth

My father died when I was two years old. But my mother was quite capable. She raised three children with his war pension which was peanuts. Yet we did not want for anything. We grew up with a certain parsimony, which is a nice thing. Then if life gives you more good, otherwise you get used to. I'm still thrifty. — Giulio Andreotti

Capitals are increased by parsimony, and diminished by prodigalityand misconduct. By what a frugal man annually saves he not onlyaffords maintenance to an additional number of productive hands?but?he establishes as it were a perpetual fund for the maintenance of an equal number in all times to come. — Adam Smith

With parsimony a little is sufficient; without it nothing is sufficient; but frugality makes a poor man rich. — Seneca The Younger