Quotes About Precision

Rem tene, verba sequntur (Keep to the subject, and the words will follow)

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

Jurists, with rare exceptions, are unconsciously and tenaciously averse to clarity and brevity.

The process of measurement must have a beginning and end. The establishment of those points has an effect on the outcome.

Words can be as irrevocable as an action. They can cut as deeply as a surgeon's scalpel.

O poder é feito de minúcias.

He had learned to play his instrument with the same joyless precision that barefoot waifs exercised in stoking the coal fires of a debtors' prison.

First you say I am a murderer - an agent in league against you - and now I am a deluded heartsick girl! Pray make up your mind so I can scoff at you with precision!

Man with a crossbow in the proper position at the proper time's worth a corps of heavy artillery half an hour late and ten miles down the road from where it should be.

Better by far spend two whole days on a quarter page ad, and have it right, than fill a whole page full of bombastic piffle and senseless inanities...

You should always count aloud the number of times you strike the shuttle-cock, and you will be surprised to find how interesting the game begins to grow as your number mounts up, and how very anxious you become at last for fear the shuttle-cock should fall. Try as much as you can not to become excited about the game, because the moment you do so you become nervous, and may sometimes miss a blow that you would not have missed had you been cool.

Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

I am a dancer. I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living... In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God.

One may as much miss the Mark, by aiming too high, as too low.

If I hit it right, it's a slice. If I hit it left, it's a hook. If I hit it straight, it's a miracle.

But slight mistakes accumulate, and grow to gross errors if unchecked.

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel

As an engineer he favored blunt speech

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

Simplicity is king. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal. (in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review)

SMaC" is the essence of consistent tactical excellence. SMaC (pronounced "smack," with a very hard "k" sound at the end . . . SmmaacK!) stands for "Specific, Methodical, and Consistent.

Fanatical attention to consistency and detail •