Precision Quotes

Do you love me?"
There was an awkward silence for a moment. Then Father gave a little chuckle. "Jonas. You, of all people. Precision of language, please!"
"What do you mean?" Jonas asked. Amusement was not at all what he had anticipated.
"Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it's become almost obsolete," his mother explained carefully.
Jonas stared at them. Meaningless? He had never before felt anything as meaningful as the memory.
"And of course our community can't function smoothly if people don't use precise language. You could ask, 'Do you enjoy me?' The answer is 'Yes,'" his mother said.
"Or," his father suggested, "'Do you take pride in my accomplishments?' And the answer is wholeheartedly 'Yes.'"
"Do you understand why it's inappropriate to use a word like 'love'?" Mother asked.
Jonas nodded. "Yes, thank you, I do," he replied slowly.
It was his first lie to his parents. ~ Lois Lowry

Marcelina loved that miniscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth.

Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie.

Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. ~ Ian McDonald

Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution ~ Walter Isaacson

Rather than seeing ourselves as insignificant specks in the immensity of the cosmos, we can consider that immensity an indicator of our worth. It seems the Creator invested a great deal-a universe of 50 billion trillion stars, plus a hundred times more matter, all fine-tuned to mind-boggling precision-for us. If not for the strength and abundance of evidence in support of that notion, it would seem the height of arrogance. Humility demands that we take a deeper and wider look at that evidence. ~ Hugh Ross

When you didn't force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn't catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn't impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then ... what? ~ Rebecca Goldstein

He had fought back with every weapon in his arsenal, being alternatively obtuse, evasive and pedantic, for it was wonderful how you could obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision. ~ J.K. Rowling

China is so central to our economic lives that journalists have had no choice but to engage China with greater technical analysis and precision. ~ Evan Osnos

I was a tap dancer as a child, so I understand precision and repetition. ~ Elliott Gould

Picture perfect, I paint a perfect picture bomb the hoochies wit' precision, my intentions to get richer. ~ Tupac Shakur

It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the signboard at the coner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge? ~ Anthony Trollope

Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we will never eliminate necessary precision - so there will always be code. ~ Robert C. Martin

Meanwhile, in a lecture at the Sverdlov University two years later, under the
pressure of outside events and interior realities, Lenin spoke with a precision which left little doubt about the
indefinite continuation of the proletarian super-State. "With this machine, or rather this weapon [the State], we shall
crush every form of exploitation, and when there are no longer any possibilities of exploitation left on earth, no more
people owning land or factories, no more people gorging themselves under the eyes of others who are starving,
when such things become impossible, then and only then shall we cast this machine aside. Then there will be neither
State nor exploitation." Therefore as long as there exists on earth, and no longer in a specific society, one single
oppressed person and one proprietor, so long the State will continue to exist. It also will be obliged to increase in
strength during this period so as to vanquish one by one the injustices, the governments responsible for injustice, the
obstinately bourgeois nations, and the people who are blind to their own interests. And when, on an earth that has
finally been subdued and purged of enemies, the final iniquity shall have been drowned in the blood of the just and
the unjust, then the State, which has reached the limit of all power, a monstrous idol covering the entire earth, will
be discreetly absorbed into the silent city of Justice.
Under the easily ~ Albert Camus

I am not a bomber. I'm more about precision and being target-oriented. I have to rely on all parts of my game firing if I'm going to win. ~ Luke Donald

All our bright minds," Feynman said sardonically, "and we can't figure how to stop the enemy from dumping dirt on us." Freeman said with delicate precision, "We are hothouse flowers, really. Not made for the blunt edge of war." Nods ~ Gregory Benford

Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing. ~ Erik Larson

Extension brings space, space brings freedom, freedom brings precision. Precision is truth. ~ B.K.S. Iyengar

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

As a lady of clocklike precision yourself, you may appreciate my schedule. I have kept strictly to it every day for the past decade. From eight in the morning to eight in the evening, I devote myself to my duties. Then from eight in the evening to eight in the morning, I . . . do . . . not. ~ Erica Ridley

The development of mathematics toward greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules ... One might therefore conjecture that these axioms and rules of inference are sufficient to decide any mathematical question that can at all be formally expressed in these systems. It will be shown below that this is not the case, that on the contrary there are in the two systems mentioned relatively simple problems in the theory of integers that cannot be decided on the basis of the axioms. ~ Kurt Godel

There's also a lot of punch you get from doing an extreme closeup and have it just be that image with nothing around it. There's a clarity and precision and impact there that you sometimes lose if you put everything else in that background. ~ Jim Lee

Contrary to most people's beliefs, music is in me, forever. I can recall it at any moment with utter precision. ~ Shayan Italia

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

To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty ~ John Ruskin

Indeed, if communist central planners could have organized the economy with as much detail, precision, and flexibility as a modern-day Toyota or Wal-Mart, communism would probably still exist. ~ Jim Stanford

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

In football as in watchmaking, talent and elegance mean nothing without rigour and precision. ~ Lionel Messi

The slaveholders of America had devised with almost scientific precision their systems for keeping the Negro defenseless, emotionally and physically. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

You have wavered uncertainly between two systems, between drawing and coloring, between the painstaking phlegm, the stiff precision, of the old German masters, and the dazzling ardor, the happy fertility, of the Italian painters. ~ Honore De Balzac

...the God in whom the majority of Christians throughout history have professed belief would appear to be evil (at least, judging by the dreadful things we habitually say about him). And I intend nothing more here than an exercise in sober precision, based on the presumption that words should have some determinate content.

(from Radical Orthodoxy 3.1 (2015): 1-17) ~ David Bentley Hart

We live in a time of the greatest precision and of maximum contrasts: photomontage offers us a means to express this. It shows ideas: photography shows us objects. ~ Herbert Bayer

Let's have some precision in language here: terrorism means deadly violence -- for a political and/or economical purpose -- carried out against people and other living things, and is usually conducted by governments against their own citizens (as at Kent State, or in Vietnam, or in Poland, or in most of Latin America right now), or by corporate entities such as J. Paul Getty, Exxon, Mobil Oil, etc etc., against the land and all creatures that depend upon the land for life and livelihood. A bulldozer ripping up a hillside to strip mine for coal is committing terrorism; the damnation of a flowing river followed by the drowning of Cherokee graves, of forest and farmland, is an act of terrorism.
Sabotage, on the other hand, means the use of force against inanimate property, such as machinery, which is being used (e.g.) to deprive human beings of their rightful work (as in the case of Ned Ludd and his mates); sabotage (le sabot dropped in a spinning jenny) -- for whatever purpose -- has never meant and has never implied the use of violence against living creatures. ~ Edward Abbey

We live in times that are in many ways ambiguous. Maybe that's why kids want precision in what they read - they don't like that moral ambiguity. ~ Lois Lowry

Like most modern words, "Heresy" is used both vaguely and diversely. It is used vaguely because the modern mind is as averse to precision in ideas as it is enamored of precision in measurement. It is used diversely because, according to the man who uses it, it may represent any one of fifty things. ~ Hilaire Belloc

Being a painter myself ... whenever I could dispense with architectural precision, I indulged in the picturesque, in which case I sacrificed a few details when necessary in favor of an imposing effect that would give a monument its real character and also preserve the poetic charm that surrounds it. ~ Charles Negre

Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind. ~ James Arthur

She walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. But at the moment when strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself
then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision. ~ Sebastian Smee

For many years Minos has been lucky to have in his court the most gifted inventor, the most skilled artificer outside of the Olympian forges of Hephaestus. His name is Daedalus and he is capable of fashioning moving objects out of metal, bronze, wood, ivory and gemstones. He has mastered the art of tightly coiling leaves of steel into powerful springs, which control wheels and chains to form intricate and marvellous mechanisms that mark the passage of the hours with great precision and accuracy, or control the levels of watercourses. There is nothing this cunning man cannot contrive in his workshop. There are moving statues there, men and women animated by his skill, boxes that play music and devices that can awaken him in the morning. Even if only half the stories of what Daedalus can achieve are true then you can be certain that no more cunning and clever an inventor, architect and craftsman has ever walked this earth. ~ Stephen Fry

Many of the points made by the antiwar movement have been consciously assimilated by the Pentagon and its lawyers and advisers. Precision weaponry is good in itself, but its ability to discriminate is improving and will continue to improve. Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The quest for precision is analogous to the quest for certainty, and both should be abandoned. ~ Karl Popper

There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Children display a universal love of mathematics, which is
par excellence the science of precision, order, and intelligence. ~ Maria Montessori

With strange detachment, Naomi's mind noticed nothing but the beauty of the jump. Air sliced along her body as it streamed straight as an arrow in its path of utmost precision. The world fell away behind her. For an immeasurable moment, Naomi wasn't a terrestrial being at all. She was wildly liberated like a bird, soaring through the sky with the chaotic freedom of a wild animal. ~ Jennifer Perry

We chose to do this work mathematically, which has the advantage of precision but is not always appreciated by readers. It is perhaps for this reason that anthropologists have not shown much interest in these models, unlike economists, for example, for whom the use of mathematics poses no problem. However, one could reach the same conclusions by using just a bit of common sense. ~ Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Israel's rebirth as a nation after two thousand years is a freak phenomenon of history. But in all the branches of science the observation of freak phenomena yields important clues to general laws. Dwarf stars and human giants, radioactivity and parthenogenesis, prophets, maniacs and saints are all freaks which carry the conditions of normality to a pointed and profiled extreme. So does this race of eternal victims with its flayed skin and exposed nerves, which demonstrates, with the horrible precision of an anatomic atlas, a condition of man otherwise mercifully hidden from us. ~ Arthur Koestler

Who else but a lover retains the ability to wound the other person with such passion, such precision? And who else but that lover has the capacity to heal what he or she has done? ~ A. Manette Ansay

No one knows where he who invented the plow was born, nor where he died; yet he has done more for humanity than the whole race of heroes who have drenched the earth with blood and whose deeds have been handed down with a precision proportionate only to the mischief they wrought. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

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

Bumblebees detect the polarization of sunlight, invisible to uninstrumented humans; put vipers sense infrared radiation and detect temperature differences of 0.01C at a distance of half a meter; many insects can see ultraviolet light; some African freshwater fish generate a static electric field around themselves and sense intruders by slight perturbations induced in the field; dogs, sharks, and cicadas detect sounds wholly inaudible to humans; ordinary scorpions have micro--seismometers on their legs so they can detect in darkness the footsteps of a small insect a meter away; water scorpions sense their depth by measuring the hydrostatic pressure; a nubile female silkworm moth releases ten billionths of a gram of sex attractant per second, and draws to her every male for miles around; dolphins, whales, and bats use a kind of sonar for precision echo-location.
The direction, range, and amplitude of sounds reflected by to echo-locating bats are systematically mapped onto adjacent areas of the bat brain. How does the bat perceive its echo-world? Carp and catfish have taste buds distributed over most of their bodies, as well as in their mouths; the nerves from all these sensors converge on massive sensory processing lobes in the brain, lobes unknown in other animals. how does a catfish view the world? What does it feel like to be inside its brain? There are reported cases in which a dog wags its tail and greets with joy a man it has never met before; he turns out to be the ~ Carl Sagan

The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision. ~ Edward Hirsch

Most people don't realize how sophisticated pool tables are. Yes, tables have bolts and staples on the rails but these suckers hold together mostly by gravity and by the precision of their construction. If you treat a good table right it will outlast you. Believe me. Cathedrals are built like that. There are Incan roads in the Andes that even today you couldn't work a knife between two of the cobblestones. The sewers that the Romans built in Bath were so good that they weren't replaced until the 1950's. That's the sort of thing that I can believe in. ~ Junot Diaz

The sea has formed the English character and the essential England is to be found in those who follow it. From blue waters they have learned mercifulness, and they have also learned - in the grimmest of schools - precision and resolution. The sea endures no makeshifts. If a thing is not exactly right it will be vastly wrong. ~ John Buchan

Why is it that foolishness repeats itself with such monotonous precision? ~ Frank Herbert

The kind of precision manufacturing epitomized in the armories, while it was important, was only a small share of the economy until quite late in the century. Large-scale natural resource development and processing was the name of the game. ~ Charles R. Morris

All that is worth seeing in good boxing can best be witnessed in a contest with soft gloves. Every value is called out: quickness, force, precision, foresight, readiness, pluck, and endurance. With these, the rowdy and 'rough' are not satisfied. ~ John Boyle O'Reilly

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. "There she blows!" Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board ~ Herman Melville

So our task as stewards of the word begins and ends in love. Loving language means cherishing it for its beauty, precision, power to enhance understanding, power to name, power to heal. And it means using words as instruments of love. ~ Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Music in the church ought to be much more than an emotional stimulant. In fact, this means music and preaching should have the same aim. Both properly pertain to the proclamation of God's Word. Preaching is properly seen as an aspect of or worship. And conversely, music is properly seen as an aspect of the ministry of the Word, just like preaching. Therefore the songwriter ought to be skilled in Scripture and as concerned for theological precision as the preacher. Even more so, because the songs he writes are likely to be sung again and again (unlike a sermon that is preached only once). ~ John F. MacArthur Jr.

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night's rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue - if the latter does not itself cease - fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramifications and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations. ~ Marcel Proust

Whenever I see a forecast written out to two decimal places, I cannot help but wonder if there is a misunderstanding of the limitations of the data, and an illusion of precision. ~ Barry Ritholtz

A government does not desire its powers to be strictly defined, but the subjects require the line to be drawn with increasing precision. ~ Lord Acton

I have been practicing, with scientific precision, nonviolence and its possibilities for an unbroken period of over fifty years. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Are you joining a conversation or taking it over? Stay aware of how you join a conversation and of your effect on a conversation. ~ Loren Weisman

What was it like then to witness the transformation wrought by this construction? A geometric idea of precision suddenly imposed on a landscape, lived on and in for centuries. The land itself like a body submitted to military discipline. Or like a mind, tutored along certain acceptable pathways, so that finally all that lies outside certain avenues of thought begins to assume an air of unreality.
The land of course is still there. Only now it has receded into the background. It is what you see in your peripheral vision as you speed down the highway. The complexity of it, the intricate presence of it, has been reduced now to a single word, jungle. If once you breathed its breath or slept surrounded by its dark or wakened with its light, you no longer remember. You tell yourself life has improved. The jungle is in the past. To enter it is to stray from the path, or to be pulled down into some unknown depth. It is an exotic place, intriguing but also unpredictable, uncontrolled, threatening the well-paved order of existence. ~ Susan Griffin

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible. ~ Aristotle.

Vasectomy
After the steaming bodies swept
through the hungry streets of swollen cities;
after the vast pink spawning of family
poisoned the rivers and ravaged the prairies;
after the gamble of latex and
diaphragms and pills;
I invoked the white robes, gleaming blades
ready for blood, and, feeling the scourge
of Increase and Multiply, made
affirmation: Yes, deliver us from
complicity.
And after the precision of scalpels,
I woke to a landscape of sunshine where
the catbird mates for life and
maps trace out no alibis - stepped
into a morning of naked truth,
where acts mean what they really are:
the purity of loving
for the sake of love. ~ Philip Appleman

I bought a brown-skinned glove puppet. He came with a little black briefcase and his hair was parted exactly down the middle. The precision of his parting made me uneasy; somehow it was too human at the exact same time as exposing his status as a nonhuman. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

And when I concentrate on the stars, the planets, and their motions, I have an irresistible sense of machinery, clockwork, elegant precision working on a scale that, however lofty our aspirations, dwarfs and humbles us. ~ Carl Sagan

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. ~ George Orwell

The Islamic State's ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain subset of the population. Life's hypocrisies and inconsistencies vanish in its face. Musa Cerantonio and the Salafis I met in London are unstumpable: No question I posed left them stuttering. They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win. If they had been froth-spewing maniacs, I might be able to predict that their movement would burn out as the psychopaths detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else. ~ Graeme Wood

Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one ... of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for precision. As George Grosz says, "In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist." The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not? Jacob Bronowski says in The Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering. In any case it's not established once and for all; it's evolving. ~ Marianne Moore

Clarity! Accuracy! Think of your words as a key to fit into the lock of your meaning. Cast them with precision. That key should then be swift and perfect in achieving its aim. Well shaped talk is a release from the indefinite. It is explanation. Preparation. Nothing more. ~ Jane Borodale

And we remember the end of our combat mission and the emergence of a new dawn
the precision of our efforts against al Qaeda in Iraq, the professionalism of the training of Iraqi security forces, and the steady drawdown of our forces. In handing over responsibility to the Iraqis, you preserved the gains of the last four years and made this day possible. ~ Barack Obama

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

The whaleman's rule of thumb was that, before diving, a whale blew once for each minute it would spend underwater. Whalemen also knew that while underwater the whale continued at the same speed and in the same direction as it had been traveling before the dive. Thus, an experienced whaleman could calculate with remarkable precision where a submerged whale was likely to reappear. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

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

When the twins asked what cuff-links were for - "To link cuffs together," Ammu told them - they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language. Cuff+link = cuff-link. This, to them, rivaled the precision of logic and mathematics. Cuff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language. ~ Arundhati Roy

Your true passions will rise you up before the sun, to pick you up where you left off long after the moon went to bed. When we respond to the beckon of these kinds of intrinsic dreams they will make exciting the most tedious of work, they will lighten the heaviest of burdens, and will enable us to focus with laser precision on whatever array of tasks may be at hand for their progress. ~ Connie Kerbs

Have we ever considered that Godly morals might be the precision-crafted keys that effortlessly turn the tumblers of life? And have we considered that anything else is something like a rough screwdriver trying to force a lock open? ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

So the dentist took a trip to his local supermarkets, brought seventy-eight brands of cereal back to his lab, and proceeded to measure the sugar content of each with damning precision. A third of the brands had sugar levels between 10 percent and 25 percent. Another third ranged up to an alarming 50 percent, and eleven climbed even higher still - with one cereal, Super Orange Crisps, packing a sugar load of 70.8 percent. When each cereal brand was cross-referenced with TV advertising records, the sweetest brands were found to be the ones most heavily marketed to kids during Saturday morning cartoons. ~ Michael Moss

Each day, the moon's gravitational field tugs at the earth as it rotates underneath. At CERN, this tiny stress caused the total length of the LEP tunnel to stretch and contract by about a millimeter (one-twenty-fifth of an inch) every day. Not such a big deal in a seventeen-mile-long beam pipe, but enough to cause a tiny fluctuation in the energy of the electrons and positrons - one that was easily detectable by the high-precision instruments. After some initial puzzlement at the daily energy variations, the CERN physicists quickly figured out what was going on. ~ Sean Carroll

From the passenger seat, Ronan began to swear at Adam. It was a long, involved swear, using every forbidden word possible, often in compound-word form. As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn't swear.
Ronan finished with, "For the love of ... Parrish, take some care, this is not your mother's 1971 Honda Civic."
Adam lifted his head and said, "They didn't start making the Civic until '73. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Good writing is where precision meets passion. ~ Nancy Rue

Precision is a precise art. Poignancy is pre-eminent and precludes prevarication. ~ Steven Erikson

Cold allowed precision, heat threw caution aside and plunged in rampantly. Cold was the process of deliberation and planning, heat the result of unbridled passion. Passion was fine, but only when controlled and channeled properly. ~ Steve Perry

PAPER TOWERS
The library was on the second floor of the House, not far from my room. It had two floors - the first held the majority of the books and a balcony wrapped in a wrought-iron railing held another set. It was a cavalcade of tomes, all in immaculate rows, and with study carrels and tables thrown in for good measure. It was my home away from home(away from home.
I walked inside and paused for a moment to breathe in the scent of paper and dust - the perfumes of knowledge. The library was empty of patrons as far as I could tell, but I could hear the rhythmic squeal of a library cart somewhere in the rows. I followed them down until I found the dark-haired vampire shelving books with mechanical precision. I knew him only as "the librarian." He was a fount of information, and he had a penchant for leaving books outside my door. ~ Chloe Neill

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. ~ Jennifer Egan

Surely an American doesn't want to get it wrong; if there is anything that England stands for, with its quiet central squares, its tweeds and twin sets and teas, the tight-lipped precision of its speech, it is that there is a right way to do things. This is where the right way has its ancestral home. ~ Anna Quindlen

RE: Kindle, iPad, et cetera: For a researcher, these new ways of accessing information are just extraordinary. I thing it introduces the possibility of a new standard of cognitive exactness and precision. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, author of Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics. ~ Leah Price

When I compare life to a dream I do not mean to denigrate it as some sort of meaningless fantasy. Life is too wonderful to be called an "illusion" unless we whisper the word in amazement, as we might when witnessing the most astonishing magic trick. What could be more magnificent than this glorious universe, in all its multifarious extravagance? Its awesome vastness and delicate detail. Its impersonal precision and intimate intensity. Its harsh necessities and lush sensuality. This dream of life is truly marvelous. ~ Timothy Freke

Of the ready green on a blue felt top. The gentlemen who had assembled around it for an evening of high-stakes Hold 'Em were well dressed, well fed, and well heeled, but now their mouths hung loose and their poolside tans paled. "Hands on the table, guys," Jadick said. "And don't any of you act one-armed." A short man with an air of compact power, Jadick moved with brisk precision and spoke calmly. He pulled back the hammers on his archaic but awesome weapon and said, "Scoop the fuckin' manna, boys." "Check," said Dean Pugh. He and Cecil Byrne, his fellow Wingman, went slowly around the table ~ Daniel Woodrell

If it were (Is it not) outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution or wealth that chance had made, and who were, therefore, most worthy of indulgence. ~ Victor Hugo

You know how it is between sisters in their middle age? that old old friendship, how loose-fitting it is? the comfort and safety in it? how you can let silence lie between you without it taking on any weight? how you can let words out of your mouth without wariness or precision because you know your sister will listen to what's worthwhile and let the rest fall out of her ears into the air? how you can be surly, unreasonable, stupid, in the certainty of her grace? ~ Molly Gloss

Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; ~ Jennifer Egan

She described people, scenes, and objects she had never seen with the detail and precision of a Flemish master. Her words evoked textures and echoes, the color of voices, the rhythm of footsteps. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Is it not amazing that at a time when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision, in a country, above all others, fond of liberty-that in such an age and in such a country we find men professing a religion the most humane, mild, gentle and generous, adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible, and destructive to liberty? ~ Patrick Henry

Vipassana: looking into something with clarity and precision, seeing each component as distinct, piercing all the way through so as to perceive the most fundamental reality of that thing. ~ Henepola Gunaratana

You're out there, Lespere. It's all over. It's just as if it had never happened, isn't it?"
"No."
"When anything's over, it's just like it never happened. Where's your life any better than mine, now? Now is what counts. Is it any better? Is it?"
"Yes, it's better!"
"How?"
"Because I got my thoughts, I remember!" cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.
And he was right. With a feeling of cold water rushing through his head and body, Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And thus knowledge began to pull Hollis apart in slow, quivering precision.
"What good does it do you?" he cried to Lespere. "Now? When a thing's over it's not good any more. You're no better off than me."
"I'm resting easy," said Lespere. "I've had my turn. I'm not getting mean at the end, like you. ~ Ray Bradbury

If in the moonlight from the silent bough
Suddenly with precision speak your name
The nightingale, be not assured that now
His wing is limed and his wild virtue tame.
Beauty beyond all feathers that have flown
Is free; you shall not hood her to your wrist,
Nor sting her eyes, nor have her for your own
In any fashion; beauty billed and kissed
Is not your turtle; tread her like a dove -
She loves you not; she never heard of love. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Everything changed in Bosnia, when General Wesley Clark proved that you could fight a war with high- level precision air strikes and a bare minimum of ground action. ~ Joe Bob Briggs