Quotes About Precision

Devant une certaine fenêtre du premier étage, dit-il, il y a un hêtre qui est parmi les plus beaux arbres du parc. — Ma chambre. C'est une grande chambre. Sa bouche à lui fut humide d'avoir bu et elle eut à son tour, dans la douce lumière, une implacable précision. — Une chambre calme, dit-on, la meilleure.

Omissions are not accidents.

The revolutionary thing about Borges's prose is that it contains almost as many ideas as words, for his precision and concision are absolutes.

elegidos y dosificados según leyes precisas por la inteligencia del creador, alcanzan la vida propia de una verdad positiva. La supuesta frialdad flaubertiana para narrar las venturas y desventuras de los personajes era la actitud con que Achille-Cléophas examinaba, recetaba, amputaba, curaba o declaraba perdidos a sus pacientes. Pero

La economía de recursos es maniática: nunca sobra ni un dato ni una palabra, aunque, a menudo, han sido escamoteados algunos ingredientes para hacer trabajar a la inteligencia del lector.

Prepositions are to language as aim is to a gun.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch. It's a high-speed collaboration resembling, at its best, ballet or modern dance.

As an art form, cooktalk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules, with a rigid, traditional framework in which one may operate.

What most people don't get about professional-level cooking is that it is not all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavours and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking - the real business of preparing the food you eat - is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way.

As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system - and it is profoundly upsetting if another cook or, God forbid, a waiter - disturbs your precisely and carefully laid-out system.

His hands flew, twirled, an entire ballet with ten digits. It had taken him, he told me, three years, during his training and apprenticeship, just to be considered as having mastered rice alone. For three years in his first kitchen, it had been all he'd been allowed to touch.

So, Justo's not being disingenuous when he says he identifies each piece of fish with the name and reputation of his chef. That—at that level of fine dining—is The System, where every server, every cook has to look at every little detail as having the potential to bring down the temple. Everything—absolutely everything—must be right. Always.

If a cook can't make soup between two and seven, she can't make it in a week.

Si la cuerda no fuera delgada, no tendría gracia caminar por ella

The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right?

for 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.

not seek for exactness in all matters alike, but in each according to the subject-matter, and so far as properly belongs to the system.

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 demonstrative proofs.

If, however, the poetic end might have been as well or better attained without sacrifice of technical correctness in such matters, the impossibility is not to be justified, since the description should be, if it can, entirely free from error.

For the carpenter's and the geometer's inquiries about the right angle are different also; the carpenter restricts himself to what helps his work, but the geometer inquires into what, or what sort of things, the right angle is, since he studies the truth. We must do the same, then in other areas too, [seeking the proper degree of exactness], so that digressions do not overwhelm our main task.

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