Quotes About Tentativeness

I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.

Pussyfooting is a vice I have been concerned to avoid.

Think back to some encounter you had today in your office, in a store, with a servant or tradesman in your home. Try to remember just the form your request took. Making all due allowances for courtesy, or for the respectfulness due to superiors and elders, was there not in addition a tentativeness about your request? Didn't you ask for coöperation in such a way as to leave room for refusal, or grudging action, or for being ignored?

Grant's aggressive decision to press forward toward Vicksburg in November 1862, stood in stark contrast with the tentativeness of other major Union commanders. McClellan hesitated after his incomplete victory at Antietam on September 17, allowing Lee to cross back over the Potomac into the safety of Virginia. Buell, following his strategic victory at Perryville on October 8, did not pursue a bloodied Bragg.

In economics, models are spoken of as being made of physics when in truth they are made of Lego. They have that degree of provisionality and tentativeness and, importantly, rebuildability. There's a permanent invitation to take them apart and put them together again in a form that works better.

Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge—not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time.

She de-realizes her behavior by this sense of tentativeness, reversibility, contingency, arbitrariness of everything she does—and since situations only become real to her after a long time (perhaps never fully so) she has the space—of incomplete commitment, so to speak—to behave destructively, unreliably, erratically, self-indulgently, irresponsibly.

It was tentativeness, not boldness, that transformed Pardis's general mission into a specific success.

Todo tiembla bajo nuestros pies, no conocemos seguridades, si nos preguntan cómo estamos, la respuesta es «sin novedad» o «más o menos»; nos movemos de una incertidumbre a otra, caminamos cautelosos en una región de claroscuros, nada es preciso, no nos gustan los enfrentamientos, preferimos negociar.

His sudden falling-away, his tentativeness, his loss of will, made me dislike him, and I realized that I was disappointed.

I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith.

If intellectual life involves a certain amount of self-awareness about alternative interpretations or a certain amount of tentativeness in exploring the connection between evidence and conclusions, it was hard to find any encouragement for the intellectual life in the self-assured dogmatism of fundamentalism.