Quotes About Significance

their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it.

good news is good news first; how good matters rather little.

How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcome that counts.

Outside of that it is the magnitude that counts.

When he blew up, close to a couple of decades of performance were overshadowed by a single event that only lasted a few minutes.

One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.fn3

but their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences can be—nay, generally are—more meaningful.

The payoff, what happens to you (the benefits or harm from it), is always the most important thing, not the event itself.

Unless something moves by more than its usual daily percentage change, the event is deemed to be noise. Percentage moves are the size of the headlines. In addition, the interpretation is not linear; a 2% move is not twice as significant an event as 1%, it is rather like four to ten times. A 7% move can be several billion times more relevant than a 1% move!

Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically—and in fact the more powerful, the more incomplete our linguistic grasp.

People got to do something useful if they're going to take up space in the world.

Ideas do matter and do have consequences.

It is a good lesson--though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all that he aims at.

She knocked a third time, three regular strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for, modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help playing some tune of what we feel , upon the senseless wood.

In a population of hundreds of millions, such a small number of people is a mere drop in the bucket... but enough drops can make any bucket overflow

To name her is to sink her," he told me. "That which we name takes greater weight than the sea it displaces. Ask any shipwreck.

If pennies become worthless, does that devalue our thoughts to less than nothing?

But birthdays are random... Defining one's life by the day one was cut from an umbilical cord is completely arbitrary.

That which we name takes greater weight than the sea it displaces. Ask any shipwreck.

I was never going to amount to much anyway, but now, statistically speaking, there's a better chance that some part of me will go on to greatness somewhere in the world. I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.

Los símbolos tienen fuerza —anuncia—. Tú ves una cruz, y sientes algo. Ves una esvástica, y sientes otra cosa. Sin embargo, la esvástica es también un símbolo hindú que significa <>, y eso demuestra que los símbolos pueden ser mortalmente corrompidos. Por eso yo me invento los míos. Para mí están cargados de significado, y eso es lo que cuenta.

Who's the fat guy?" Citra asked. "He looks important," said Rowan. "Indeed," said Scythe Faraday. "'The fat guy,' as you call him, is the High Blade. The most powerful man in the MidMerican Scythedom. He presides over conclave.