Quotes About Variation

There are recurring cycles, ups and downs, but the course of events is essentially the same, with small variations. It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.

Adopt the character of the twisting octopus, which takes on the appearance of the nearby rock. Now follow in this direction, now turn a different hue.

After a while, you find yourself waiting for that wrong note, you want to hear that wrong note, that subtle variance in pitch. People aren't machines. They make mistakes. They hit wrong notes.

Good and bad are not of different kinds but only vary in degree; both vary in quantity not in quality. There is nothing called quality but only a variation in quantity; a quality is an effect of varying quantities. This way a good becomes bad at a limiting point that is known to us; but a bad already became bad at a limit that is not known to us!

Whether it's in health and education, or the quality of local infrastructure, there's no doubt that a chasm exists between various parts of the U.K.

In Los Angeles, it's always nice out. In New York, it can be nice out or horrifying. You really have no idea what you're going to get on any given day.

It's not just lifespan that varies with free-radical leak, health span does

It was certainly not this mummified and outrageously painted old woman he was seeing before him, but the entire female species, as it was his custom to call women. The individual disappeared, the features were obliterated, whether young or senile, beautiful or ugly - those were mere unimportant variations. Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite.

Communication is not a yes-or-no but rather a more-or-less affair.

People can look different from hour to hour depending on the angle of daylight.

It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.

The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.

I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.

El delicioso hecho íntimo ocurrido anoche había sido la causa de que todo el caleidoscopio de su vida variara, y había evocado el pasado de un modo avasallador.

La Luna cambia, varía, se muestra y se oculta –asintió la Echadora de Cartas–. La Luna es engañosa. Ella es, en gran medida, la responsable del estado de confusión del Loco.

God is Infinite, and as a person partakes in this Infinite Reality, he or she is also partaking in the infinite variation of this Reality. There's no solid reality as people commonly think of it.

[T]he satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive. Swift destroyed the human race; Mark Twain and Thurber enabled it to go on. We human beings are all absurd variations of one another in any case, and this is what comedy of all kinds puts down on paper.

Why, no one is sane, straight along, year in & year out, & we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, & express themselves in various forms — fortunately harmless forms as a rule — but in whatever form they occur an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us distinctly over the sanity-line for a little while...

What they're doing down there is mourning. As millions of people across the infinitude of the grid shall always be mourning, coping with every imaginable variation of loss. Every loss deserves a telling.

There are no monotone "values" in biology.

the good society would have a low rate of inheritance of social status and correspondingly low variations in income and wealth.

the Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson encapsulated Boas's insight into a pithy maxim: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speakers to express—for in theory any language could express anything—but in what information each language obliges it speakers to express.

People can cope with the chaos of change over the years (that is, with 'diachronic variation'), simply because they can cope with the even greater chaos of synchronic variation, the diversity at any one point in time.