Precision In Thought Quotes & Sayings

I'd thought of her with unblinking eyes, moving always, across the pages of opened books with rapid precision, but as she stood in front of me, her eyes looked slow and watery. I capsized into them. — Amber Dermont

Meditation is a way of developing clarity, which allows us to see the precision of daily life situations as well as our thought process so that we can relate with both of them fully and completely. — Chogyam Trungpa

How odd it is that sewing is thought to be 'women's work' when surgeons, sailors, and cowboys sew too. Yet how many female thoracic surgeons are there? And if precision motor activities are thought to be performed better by women, why wouldn't they make better surgeons too? — Gretel Ehrlich

His features had the fine precision of sculpture. His hair was black and straight, swept back. The suntan of his skin intensified the startling color of his eyes: they were a pure, clear blue. His face was open, its rapid changes of expression reflecting whatever he felt, as if he had nothing to hide. The blue eyes were still and changeless, never giving a hint of what he thought. — Ayn Rand

At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper.

At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts.

The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional. — Ken Liu

Brains operate ... not by logic but by pattern recognition. This process is not precise, as is logic and mathematics. Instead, it trades off specificity and precision, if necessary, to increase its range. It is likely, for example, that early human thought proceeded by metaphor, which, even with the late acquisition of precise means such as logic and mathematical thought, continues to be a major source of imagination and creativity in adult life. — Gerald Edelman

To draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought. — Henri Matisse

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.
(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4) — David McCullough

Of course," said Guan Yifan. "The great universe isn't going to fail to collapse because it misses five kilograms." He had another thought that he did not voice: Perhaps the great universe really would fail to collapse because it lacked a single atom's mass. The precision of Nature can sometimes exceed the imagination. For instance, life itself required the precise collaboration of various universal constants within a billion-billionth of a certain range. — Liu Cixin

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life. — Caroline Goyder

But was chance necessary? Hubbard, too, thought about the parallels between the Mandelbrot set and the biological encoding of information, but he bristled at any suggestion that such processes might depend on probability. "There is no randomness in the Mandelbrot set," Hubbard said. "There is no randomness in anything that I do. Neither do I think that the possibility of randomness has any direct relevance to biology. In biology randomness is death, chaos is death. Everything is highly structured. When you clone plants, the order in which the branches come out is exactly the same. The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex. — James Gleick

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place. — Steven Millhauser

Since we built such sophisticated business machines, people tended to think of IBM as a model of order and logic - a totally streamlined organization in which we developed plans rationally and carried them out with utter precision. I never thought for a minute that was really the case. — Thomas J. Watson

[There is less precision in the Chinese than I have thought it well to introduce into my translation, and the commentaries on the passage are by no means explicit. But, having regard to the context, we can hardly doubt that Sun Tzu is holding up I Chih and Lu Ya as illustrious — Sun Tzu

The day the library was shut down, he thought, some maiden librarian had moved down the room, pushing each chair against its table. Carefully, with a plodding precision that was the cachet of herself. — Richard Matheson

My friend, who loved above all things precision and concentration of thought, resented anything which distracted his attention from the matter in hand. And yet, without a harshness which was foreign to his nature, it was impossible to refuse to listen to the story of the young and beautiful woman — Arthur Conan Doyle

The important thing is not to shout at this point, Vimes told himself. Do not ... what do they call it ... go postal? Treat this as a learning exercise. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. THEN go postal. But with precision. — Terry Pratchett

While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless ... ; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this' ... Knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic. — Bertrand Russell

I've always thought of God as the only first-rate artist. There's so much that's miraculous about us - the way three tiny bones in our ears can process sound waves, for instance; and around us his perfect hand has painted the greatest masterpiece, the ecology of nature with its balance and precision, the way it can juxtapose competing forces into something harmonious. Stop and look sometime at the beauty of a weeping willow - I can go on and on — James Calvin Schaap

Tocqueville saw that the life of constant action and decision which was entailed by the democratic and businesslike character of American life put a premium upon rough and ready habits of mind, quick decision, and the prompt seizure of opportunities - and that all this activity was not propitious for deliberation, elaboration, or precision in thought. — Richard Hofstadter

Now it seems obvious, of course, that even a strong person has weak spots and that I had hit Cassie's full force, with all the precision of a jeweler fragmenting a stone along a flaw. She must have thought, sometimes, of her namesake, the votary branded with her god's most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed. — Tana French

Metz's Perfection chronicles with lapidary precision one woman's climb back to happiness after not just a spouse's death, but also the shocking recognition that her life before that death was not what she had thought it was. The journey is a painful one, but Ms. Metz is much the stronger for having survived to recount it. — Julie Powell

If you don't have a plan, you will fail, and you can quote me." You need a definite plan, it should be written down, and it should dictate, with military precision, the moves that you will be taking. Napoleon Hill said, "First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. — Napoleon Hill

I do not like wearing clothes," I said, with quite delicate precision. "They chafe. They are uncomfortable around my genitals." And then, remembering all I had learned from Cosmopolitan magazine, I leaned in toward them and added what I thought would be the clincher. "They may seriously hinder my chances of achieving a tantric full-body orgasm. — Matt Haig

A mission without action is equally ineffective and futile as action without mission. Use the "power of precision," and remember language shapes thought and thought shapes action. — Archibald Marwizi

Humankind is an instinctive creature that is capable of feelings and rational thoughts, which accounts for why such a rich diversity exists amongst human nature. A person's unique personality is simply a crystallization of particular aspects of human nature. Freedom of thought and expression ensures that no person replicates another person's exact persona. Every person is a creature of predicable needs and impulses, infused with the poetry of multifaceted feelings, and ruled by a scientifically calculated instrument capable of precision of thought. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Mere numbers cannot bring out ... the intimate essence of the experiment. This conviction comes naturally when one watches a subject at work ... What things can happen! What reflections, what remarks, what feelings, or, on the other hand, what blind automatism, what absence of ideas! ... The experimenter judges what may be going on in [the subject's] mind, and certainly feels difficulty in expressing all the oscillations of a thought in a simple, brutal number, which can have only a deceptive precision. How, in fact, could it sum up what would need several pages of description! — Alfred Binet