1.
Sylvia Townsend Warner -
“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.”
2.
Charles Simmons -
“Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.”
3.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
“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.”
4.
General Douglas MacArthur -
“Expect only five percent of an intelligence report to be accurate. The trick of a good commander is to isolate the five percent.”
5.
Oliver Wendell Holmes -
“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.”
6.
Charles W. Eliot -
“I recognize but one mental acquisition as a necessary part of the education of a lady or gentlemen, namely, an accurate and refined use of the mother tongue.”
7.
Tryon Edwards -
“Accuracy of statement is one of the first elements of truth; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood.”
8.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac -
“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.”
9.
Edmund Burke -
“The more accurately we search into the human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of the wisdom of Him who made it.”
10.
Douglas Noel Adams -
“In cases of major discrepancy it’s always reality that’s got it wrong ... reality is frequently inaccurate.”
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