Quotes About Approximation

If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by the laws.

The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers. According to the traditional theory, as it exists in all the books, the goodness of our constitution consists in the entire separation of the legislative and executive authorities, but in truth its merit consists in their singular approximation. The connecting link is the cabinet.

In its happiest efforts, translation is but approximation, and its efforts are not often happy. A translation may be good as translation, but it cannot be an adequate reproduction of the original.

All theological language is an approximation, offered tentatively in holy awe. That's the best human language can achieve. We can say, "It's like—it's similar to…," but we can never say, "It is…" because we are in the realm of beyond, of transcendence, of mystery.

WAGs... That's a technical term we engineers use. It means 'Wild-Assed Guess'.

Most important part of doing physics is the knowledge of approximation.

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

Unless our laboratory results are to give us artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they must be subjected to interpretation by gradual re-approximation to conditions of life.

1337% of Pi ? 42

It is better to be approximately right than to be precisely wrong. —Warren Buffett

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man. —Bertrand Russell

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 (384 b.c.–322 b.c.)

Perhaps everything in life is the degeneration of something else. Perhaps existence is always an approximation – an advent, or surroundings. Just as Christianity was but the prophetic degeneration of a debased Neo-Platonism, the Romanization of Hellenism through Judaism,* so our age – senile and carcinogenic* – is the multiple deviation of all great goals, concordant or conflicting, whose defeat gave rise to all the negations we use to affirm ourselves.*

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

una cifra, pensó cuando volvió a quedarse solo, siempre es aproximativa, no existe la cifra correcta, sólo los nazis creían en la cifra correcta y los profesores de matemática elemental, sólo los sectarios, los locos de las pirámides, los recaudadores de impuestos (Dios acabe con ellos), los numerólogos que leían el destino por cuatro perras creían

Historiallisissa kysymyksissä suurinkin mahdollinen varmuus on vain likiarvo.

The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.

Take the so-called standard of living. What do most people mean by "living"? They don't mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives.

Chronological age is only an approximation of your functional age.

I enjoy worldbuilding very much. I generally start with an approximation. With 'Flesh and Spirit' and 'Breath and Bone,' because I was thinking of a world on the brink of a dark age, I began with the sense of Roman Britain. But I purposely set the geography to match something other than Britain - which has been overdone.

There is also a running wobble between extreme precision, specious or otherwise, and approximation ("just over fifteen hundred", "just over sixty-nine percent"), so the whole risks annoying non-geek and ultra-geek readers, garnering the worst of both worlds.

Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated.

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. Nicomachean Ethics