Guesswork Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. ~ Anonymous

Speculation cannot replace education. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's like any time a white friend suggests Korean barbecue. Or when I see a Food Network special where some tattooed white dude with a nineteenth-century-looking beard-and-mustache combo introduces viewers to this kimchi al pastor bánh mì monstrosity he peddles from a food truck that sends out location tweets. It's like when white people tell me how much they love kimchee and bull-go-ghee, and the words just roll off their tongues as if there exists nothing irreconcilable between the two languages.
It's like, don't touch my shit.
It's difficult to articulate because I know it's not rational. But as a bilingual immigrant from Korea, as someone who code-switches between Korean and English daily while running errands or going to the supermarket, not to mention the second-nature combination of the languages that I'll speak with my parents and siblings, switching on and switching off these at times unfeasibly different sounds, dialects, grammatical structures? It's fucking irritating. I don't want to be stingy about who gets to enjoy all these fermented wonders -- I'm glad the stigma around our stinky wares is dissolving away. But when my husband brings me a plate of food he made out of guesswork with a list of ingredients I've curated over the years of my burgeoning adulthood with the implicit help of my mother, my grandmother, and my grandmother's mother who taught me the patience of peeling dozens of garlic cloves in a sitting with bare hands, it puts me in snap-me-pf ~ Sung Yim

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

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

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

Such a system of checks and balances -- parenting -- of projections and guesswork and cost-benefit ratios. ~ Gin Phillips

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

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

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

From all this we concluded that the first two divisions of theoretical philosophy should
rather be called guesswork than knowledge, theology because of its completely invisible
and ungraspable nature, physics because of the unstable and unclear nature of the matter;
hence there is no hope that philosophers will ever be agreed about them; and that only
mathematics can provide sure and unshakable knowledge to its devotees, provided one
approaches it rigorously. For its kind of proof proceeds by indisputable methods, namely
arithmetic and geometry (tr. Toomer, p. 6). ~ Ptolemy

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

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

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

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

Why all this guesswork? You can see what needs to be
done. If you can see the road, follow it. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Only small fish swim in schools. (p. 31)

"Don't ever see another human being, lock yourself up and live like a misanthrope." And another power tells me to accept people, talk to them. There is a struggle all the time within me. I also know that if I stay away from people, then I have to deal with only one human being-myself - and I 'd rather have other people than to all the time have only myself for an associate. When you are with yourself your egotism grows, your bitterness and suspicions grow. You become twice as meshuga as before. (p. 32)

An assimilated Jew is a man who is ashamed of his origin, who denies his roots. He wants to make believe that he's somebody else. (p. 60)

I believe in God but I have my doubts about revelation. I would say that I have no proof whatsoever
that God reveals Himself or tells us how to behave, what He wants. I believe that God is a silent God, and He must have a very good reason why He is silent. If He would begin to talk, He would have to speak in three thousand languages and in all kinds of dialects. God speaks in deeds, but the language of deeds is so large its vocabulary is as large as the universe perhaps. So we only understand a very small part of His language. Everything man says about God is pure guesswork. But since I believe in God's existence and since God created man and formed his brain, I believe also that there must be something of the divine in men's ideas about Him even if they are far fr ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

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