Quotes about Accuracy

One of the great fallacies of time management is that setting clocks ahead of the accurate time encourages people to be early.

We will act consistently with our view of who we truly are, whether that view is accurate or not.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

The major way of doing anything with one's self is to own one's self. This means to take full responsibility and accountability for whatever I am doing at any moment, with anybody. It means, among other things, that I get rid of all the extra fingers that I point at people and situations to explain my behavior. When a person says "He made me mad" that is not accurate. It is "I made me mad." When I permit myself the luxury of taking that full responsibility, then I'm on first base, at least, because then I can do something about it.

It was not just the Church that resisted the heliocentrism of Copernicus. Many prominent figures, in the decades following the 1543 publication of De Revolutionibus, regarded the Copernican model of the universe as a mathematical artifice which, though it yielded astronomical predictions of superior accuracy, could not be considered a true representation of physical reality: "If Nicolaus Copernicus, the distinguished and incomparable master, in this work had not been deprived of exquisite and faultless instruments, he would have left us this science far more well-established. For he, if anybody, was outstanding and had the most perfect understanding of the geometrical and arithmetical requisites for building up this discipline. Nor was he in any respect inferior to Ptolemy; on the contrary, he surpassed him greatly in certain fields, particularly as far as the device of fitness and compendious harmony in hypotheses is concerned. And his apparently absurd opinion that the Earth revolves does not obstruct this estimate, because a circular motion designed to go on uniformly about another point than the very center of the circle, as actually found in the Ptolemaic hypotheses of all the planets except that of the Sun, offends against the very basic principles of our discipline in a far more absurd and intolerable way than does the attributing to the Earth one motion or another which, being a natural motion, turns out to be imperceptible. There does not at all arise from this assumption so many unsuitable consequences as most people think."

Accuracy of statement is one of the first elements of truth; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood.

With reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labor from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eyewitnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other. The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but I shall be content if it is judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it. My history has been composed to be an everlasting possession, not the showpiece of an hour.

May my silences become more accurate.

For twenty pages perhaps, he read slowly, carefully, dutifully, with pauses for self-examination and working out examples. Then, just as it was working up and the pauses should have been more scrupulous than ever, a kind of swoon and ecstasy would fall on him, and he read ravening on, sitting up till dawn to finish the book, as though it were a novel. After that his passion was stayed; the book went back to the Library and he was done with mathematics till the next bout. Not much remained with him after these orgies, but something remained: a sensation in the mind, a worshiping acknowledgment of something isolated and unassailable, or a remembered mental joy at the rightness of thoughts coming together to a conclusion, accurate thoughts, thoughts in just intonation, coming together like unaccompanied voices coming to a close.

In baseball we keep an accurate record of the hits, runs, and errors of each individual player. Life is also a great game, and in life the statistics are much more important than they are in a ball game. One of our human weaknesses in life is that when we are losing the game, we don't always like to keep track of the score. Certainly we are not very enthusiastic about putting the errors down on the paper, and most people don't even know what their individual batting average is. This makes our success much more difficult both to figure out and to attain . . . we cannot separate our success from our statistics. If each day we could see what God writes in his book about our works for that day, it would certainly motivate us to make better scores.

There is no substitute for accurate knowledge. Know yourself, know your business, know your men.

Imagine a life without uncertainty... Imagine how dull life would be if variables assessed for admission to a professional school, graduate program, or executive training program really did predict with great accuracy who would succeed and who would fall. Life would be intolerable - no hope, no challenge

I think that there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations that to have them fit experiments. If Schroedinger had been more confident of his work, he could have published it some months earlier, and he could have published a more accurate equation. It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there is not complete agreement between the results of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged, because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with further development of the theory.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.

Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.

The technical progress of industry has been a reflection of our ability to apply increasingly accurate methods of measurement to material things. The art of measuring psychological human dimensions is relatively undeveloped. To all of the complexities of management we must bring to bear infinite patience and persistence, consistency and complete sincerity.

Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned - the habit of making history into the proof of their theories.

In this lovely land of corrugated cartons and plastic bags, we want our entertainment packaged neatly . . . an attractive label on the outside, a complete and accurate detailing of contents . . . no loose ends, no odd parts, nothing left out.

Because the Nazi venom worked its way even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to force us into silence every word became as precious as a declaration of principle; because we were persecuted, each of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment.

To be sure, mathematics can be extended to any branch of knowledge, including economics, provided the concepts are so clearly defined as to permit accurate symbolic representation. That is only another way of saying that in some branches of discourse it is desirable to know what you are talking about.

Science is simply common sense at its best that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

This seems to be one of the many cases in which the admitted accuracy of mathematical processes is allowed to throw a wholly inadmissible appearance of authority over the results obtained by them. Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.

Granted the endless variations of moral customs, still the essential standards persist. As in a scientific laboratory, all else may change but the standards are unalterable- disinterested love of truth, fidelity to facts, accuracy in measurement, exactness of verification-so, in life as a whole, the towering ethical criteria remain unshaken. Falsehood is never better than truth, theft better than than honesty, treachery better than loyalty, cowardice better than courage.

When a person is groping in life, we say "he has not found himself." This statement is not accurate. Self is created, not found.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

It is now almost certain that the genealogies in both Gospels are genealogies of Joseph, which if we may rely on early traditions of their consanguinity involve genealogies of Mary also. The Davidic descent of Mary is implied in Acts 2:30; 13:23; Rom. 1:3; Luke 1:32, etc. St. Matthew gives the legal descent of Joseph through the elder and regal line, as heir to the throne of David; St. Luke gives the natural descent. Thus, the real father of Salathiel was heir of the house of Nathan, but the childless Jeconiah (Jer. 22:30) was the last lineal representative of the elder kingly line. The omission of some obscure names and the symmetrical arrangement into tesseradecads were common Jewish customs. It is not too much to say that after the labors of Mill (on the Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels, pp. 147-217) and Lord A. C. Hervey (on the Genealogies of our Lord, 1853) scarcely a single difficulty remains in reconciling the apparent divergencies. And thus in this as in so many other instances, the very discrepancies which appear to be most irreconcilable, and most fatal to the historic accuracy of the four evangelists, turn out, on closer and more patient investigation, to be fresh proofs that they are not only entirely independent, but also entirely trustworthy.

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with outstanding accuracy.

If I were to prescribe one process in the training of men which is fundamental to success in any direction, it would be thoroughgoing training in the habit of accurate observation. It is a habit which every one of us should be seeking ever more to perfect.

Expect only five percent of an intelligence report to be accurate. The trick of a good commander is to isolate the five percent.

These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it would be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas - and new connections between ideas - lead you away from commonly held perceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you into the darkness.