39 Precision Quotes

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

No one has ever used historical examples, near or remote, with the detail, precision, and directness to be found in every page of Shaw.

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

I have only been funny about seventy four percent of the time. Yes I think that is right. Seventy-four percent of the time.

My neighbors thought I was insane because I was standing there with a stopwatch grilling ice cubes for three days.

My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. 'Would you hit a woman with a child?- No, I'd hit her with a brick.' Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.

'In 'Hawaiian Wedding song', (1960), Elvis takes particular advantage of his voice's strong lower middle and higher note registers, made particularly difficult because of the need to sing in cascading notes. Elvis meets the challenge on every occasion, his performance being absolutely meticulous, with not a hint of vocal strain.'

In this way we often had to perform very minute operations, sometimes several of them on one and the same animal.

I think you didn't get a reply because you used the terms 'correct' and 'proper', neither of which has much meaning in Perl culture. :-)

Cells are required to stick precisely to the point. Any ambiguity, any tendency to wander from the matter at hand, will introduce grave hazards for the cells, and even more for the host in which they live. Minor inaccuracies may cause reactions in which neighboring cells are recognized as foreign, and done in. There is a theory that the process of aging may be due to the cumulative effect of imprecision, a gradual degrading of information. It is not a system that allows for deviating.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning.

His voice was low, clear and distinct...Professor Huxley's method is slow, precise, and clear, and he guards the positions that he takes with astuteness and ability. He does not utter anything in reckless fashion which conviction sometimes countenances and excuses, but rather with the deliberation that research and close inquiry foster.

Come the recording day, a group of male choristers, more accustomed to singing church services than backing vocals, descended on Bush's home, which was equipped with its own studio. Doubtless they were imagining that they were about to meet a wild-eyed rock babe, but Kate, quiet and unassuming - the kind of sympathetic, slightly shy girl who greets you from behind the counter at the local chemist - introduced us to her friend the bass player Del Palmer, who engineered the session. None of the singers or Richard had ever gone over and over four or five phrases so exactingly. No measure of Bach or Mozart had, in their experience, been subjected to such surgical scrutiny, and I began to worry that their voices might begin to tire. But Bush knew and got what she wanted and Hello Earth is, I think, a remarkable track on the album that finally broke the American market and established her as an iconic and hugely influential figure. I can't wait to hear what she has been up to now.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning.

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.

Distinction without a difference.

I'm glad you like adverbs - I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

He could hit a whole bucket of balls from there and not get one closer than that.

On matters of intonation and technicalities I am more than a martinet- I am a martinetissimo.

El modo de dar una vez en el clavo es dar cien veces en la herradura.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Who has reached the extreme limits of scale with the same infallible precision, equally guarded against the false refinement of artificial elegance and the roughness of spurious force? Who has better known how to breathe anguish and dread into the purest and most exquisite forms?

What was evident was that Mozart was simply written down music already finished in his head. And music, finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty. ~ Peter Shaffer (spoken by Antonio Salieri in Shaffer's play Amadeus and slightly reworded in the movie adaptation of the play)

The folksong collectors Bartok (Hungary) and Plicka (Czechoslovakia) notated the perceived interval deviations with a plus or minus sign (+,-). Older folksong collectors had notated all the intervals in the system of semitones, not observing the finer modifications of intervals. This first gained currency from the phongraph and tape recordings of folk music from various lands....From folksong I learned to perceive melodic intervals a little smaller or greater than those of the semitone-system....In my youth it often happened that the folk singers, who during the intermissions of dance festivals sang songs of 'their kind,' deviating from the semitone system, demanded that the first violinist of the Wisowitzer Kapelle play 'their' melody just as they sang it. Once a tempermental singer threatened to strike the double-bass player with a beer mug if he didn't 'play along' with the song, exactly as he sang it.

Mozart's music is particularly difficult to perform. His admirable clarity exacts absolute cleanness: the slightest mistake in it stands out like black on white. It is music in which all the notes must be heard. ~ Gabriel Faure