Approximation Quotes

1. "The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating."
Author: Alison Bechdel

2. "It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can't give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality."
Author: Ann Druyan

3. "Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks; and a person wishing to see a city or country goes to the place in order to do so."
Author: Athanasius

4. "...reality is a system, completely ordered and fully intelligible, with which thought in its advance is more and more identifying itself. We may look at the growth of knowledge … as an attempt by our mind to return to union with things as they are in their ordered wholeness…. and if we take this view, our notion of truth is marked out for us. Truth is the approximation of thought to reality … Its measure is the distance thought has travelled … toward that intelligible system … The degree of truth of a particular proposition is to be judged in the first instance by its coherence with experience as a whole, ultimately by its coherence with that further whole, all comprehensive and fully articulated, in which thought can come to rest."
Author: Brand Blanshard

5. "I neither believe nor disbelieve in anything. That which can be imagined is as much an approximation to truth as that which can be proved by mathematics."
Author: Charles Chaplin

6. "Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

7. "Then he clambered into the boat. Oh, and the beauty of the subjection of his loins, white and dimly luminous as he climbed over the side of the boat, his back rounded and soft -ah this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it and it was fatal. The terrible hopelessness of fate, and of beauty, such beauty!He was not like a man to her, he was an incarnation, a great phase of life. She saw him press the water out of his face, and look at the bandage on his hand. And she knew it was all no good, and she would never go beyond him, he was the final approximation of life to her."
Author: D.H. Lawrence

8. "I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others."
Author: Edward Tufte

9. "According to the anthropic principle proponents, if the universal constants (e.g. gravitation, the strong force, etc.) were just a nose-hair off, the universe as we know it would not exist; stars wouldn't form and there would be no life and no us. That supposedly makes our universe truly special. To demonstrate just how ridiculous this fine-tuning argument is, consider the fact that no measurement in physics is perfect. All of them are approximations and have margins of error. That means the universal constants, that make our universe what it is, have some wiggle room. Within that wiggle room are an infinite quantity of real numbers. Each of those real numbers could represent constants that could make a universe like ours. Since there are an infinite number of potential constants within that wiggle room, there are an infinite number of potential universes, like ours, that could have existed in lieu of ours. Thus, there is really nothing special about our universe."
Author: G.M. Jackson

10. "The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances [...]."
Author: Gilles Deleuze

11. "Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there."
Author: Heather O'Neill

12. "Coffee excites my mind in ways not describable my words. The closest approximation is a sperm whale in orgasm, only silent and bubblier."
Author: Jarod Kintz

13. "We are surrounded by various histories and fragments from the ages. Some are true. Some are only the approximation of truth. Some truths are hard to accept. If you believe only what you like in the histories, and reject what you don't want to believe, it is not the truth you seek, but a confirmation of your own opinions. You will never find truth that way."
Author: Jeff Wheeler

14. "Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other."
Author: John Michael Greer

15. "The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

16. "In this game he had acquired a great deal of muddled knowledge, more than one approximation and less than one certitude. And absence of energy, a curiosity that was too sharp to be crushed immediately, a lack of order in his ideas, a weakening of his spiritual boundaries, which were promptly twisted, an excessive passion for running along forked roads and wearying of the path as soon as he had started on it, mental indigestion demanding varied dishes, quickly tiring of the foods he desired, digesting almost all, but badly, was his state."
Author: Joris Karl Huysmans

17. "Miss Wynter, I think you should be the evil queen," Harriet said."There's an evil queen?" Daniel echoed. With obvious delight."Of course," Harriet replied. "Every good play has an evil queen."Frances actually raised her hand. "And a un—""Don't say it," Elizabeth growled.Frances crossed her eyes, put her knife to her forehead in an approximation of a horn, and neighed."
Author: Julia Quinn

18. "I tell students, 'If you are learning from YouTube I almost don't want to teach you because what you learn from YouTube it takes 10 times as long to unlearn.' They do an approximation of the centre of the note, an approximation of the interpretation, a cloned version."
Author: Kiri Te Kanawa

19. "The teaching of the sexual tantras all come down to one point. Although desire, of whatever shape or form, seeks completion, there is another kind of union than the one we imagine. In this union, achieved when the egocentric model of dualistic thinking is no longer dominant, we are not united with it, nor am I united with you, but we all just are. The movement from object to subject, as described in both Eastern meditation and modern psychotherapy, is training for this union, but its perception usually comes as a surprise, even when this shift is well under way. It is a kind of grace. The emphasis on sexual relations in the tantric teachings make it clear that the ecstatic surprise of orgasm is the best approximation of this grace."
Author: Mark Epstein

20. "The various approximations that constitute our current physics theories are successful because simple mathematical structures can provide good approximations of how a self-aware substructure will perceive more complex mathematical structures. In other words, our successful theories are not mathematics approximating physics, but mathematics approximating mathematics!"
Author: Max Tegmark

21. "Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest."
Author: Milan Kundera

22. "I suppose that having lost true love once, I never wanted to replace it with a lukewarm approximation that would only serve to make me remember it forever."
Author: Paola Kaufmann

23. "The ideal project does not exist, each time there is the opportunity to realize an approximation."
Author: Paulo Mendes Da Rocha

24. "Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself."
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

25. "We are looking at a future where to a first approximation, everyone is wealthy."
Author: Ralph Merkle

26. "The effect your readers want is for what they read to trigger in them the sights and sounds and smells of what's happening in the story. They don't want approximations, they don't want a report, they want to experience the story's reality."
Author: Ray Rhamey

27. "Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation."
Author: Richard Dawkins

28. "To a good approximation, all species are insects"
Author: Robert May

29. "Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously 'present,' an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be."
Author: Sol Luckman

30. "Awkward approximations, dull stammerings which cannot convey my sense of exhilaration as I seem to burst impediments, to exceed bounds of the possible, to experience, in the ruins of the human, the birth of something utterly new."
Author: Steven Millhauser

31. "If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue."
Author: Terry Eagleton

32. "I want to see the world without explaining away its mystery by calling things wicked, righteous, sinful, and good. I want to erase in myself the easy explanations, the always mendacious explanations about why things happen the way they do, and in this way, come to know the mystery of being–-not by any approximation in thought, but by being. I want to be and not be ashamed of being."
Author: Therese Doucet

33. "Tiff needed the words on the page to become the voice in her head, her own voice, or an approximation of it, and she needed the paper and the sound of the scratch of her chapped fingertips against it as she fiddled with each page."
Author: Timothy Schaffert

34. "Justice based purely on laws is about as accurate as a portrait created out of large low-resolution color pixels.If you stand back far enough it looks good.Come any closer and the glaring approximations overtake all semblance of the original.Justice should be viewable under the microscope, not from a telescope.And for that it needs to be based not on law but on truth."
Author: Vera Nazarian

35. "Maybe this is what life is like - we try to see clearly but what we see is never clear and is never going to be. The more we strive the murkier it becomes. All we are left with are approximations, nuances, multitudes of plausible explanations. Take your pick."
Author: William Boyd

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