Top 69 Approximate Quotes
#1. In order to approximate dinosaurian physiology, the trio of scientists carried out the unenviable task of sticking thermometers in the cloacae of American alligators.
Brian Switek
#2. An approximate answer to the right question is worth far more than a precise answer to the wrong one.
John Tuley
#3. To write incorporeal poems, almost without words. To approximate the impossible, where art disappears and the Word becomes.
Anna Kamienska
#4. Get ready the greatest new educational facility at the approximate dynamic population center of the North American continent
R. Buckminster Fuller
#5. A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
Milan Kundera
#6. She introduced herself to my parents with one of her mighty, bunny-crushing handshakes. (I'd never seen Claudia crush a bunny, to be fair, but that's the approximate level of pressure.)
Maureen Johnson
#7. In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.
Garrett Hardin
#8. To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis.
Maggie Nelson
#9. Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.
Edward Abbey
#10. There are a number of ways to establish someone's approximate survival expectations without actually asking.
John Green
#11. The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#12. Scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the volcano with enough paper it will cough up the One Ring.
Charles Stross
#13. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A
Will Durant
#14. A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance.
Gian Carlo Menotti
#15. Today, most Americans are too cynical, or tired, or both, to even approximate our Founders' courageous repudiation of injustice.
Marianne Williamson
#16. Avoid pulpits, platforms, stages and pedestals. Keep to the hard ground. It is the only way you can judge your approximate status as a man.
Antonio Machado
#17. All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
Charles Baudelaire
#18. Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#19. In modern science laws of nature are usually phrased in mathematics. They can be either exact or approximate, but they must have been observed to hold without exception - if not universally, then at least under a stipulated set of conditions. For
Stephen Hawking
#20. If I'm broken, the break will be clean and easily mended. If he breaks, I'm not sure if there will be enough pieces to approximate. I can afford to go along with what he thinks will protect him. I can have this, and I can give him what he thinks he needs, even if he may deserve better.
Mary Ann Rivers
#21. No one is mocked with the yearning for that which he has no ability to attain. If he holds the right mental attitude and struggles earnestly, honestly toward his goal, he will reach it, or at least approximate to it.
Orison Swett Marden
#22. Truth is for the gods; from our human point of view, it is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach.
Bertrand Russell
#23. Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.
Richard P. Feynman
#24. A lot of my lyrics are approximate meaning without me knowing why they sound right.
Matt Berninger
#25. The probabilitation of possibilities is the mother of many unrealistic ideas,uninformative decisions,inappropriate measures and unfair actions because most of the times we were approximate where we needth to be exact.
Mpho Leteng
#26. Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#27. There are no easy words for the insights of the spirit, and approximate language used in good faith can cause approximate truths to spread like a disease.
Densey Clyne
#28. The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.
Mary Roach
#29. It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#30. What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning.
Carl Jung
#31. I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.
Julian Barnes
#32. This is a rather unusual situation in physics. We perform approximate calculations which are valid only in some regime and this gives us the exact answer. This is a theorist's heaven- exact results with approximate methods.
Nathan Seiberg
#33. Stripping away artifice - it's the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life - but there's nothing bigger than life.
Robert Duvall
#34. A fundie claimed "God invented science". All of science is tentative and approximate, also sometimes mistaken. Is that the best God can do?
Graham Kendall
#35. Pursuit of the approximate can conclude. Not so pursuit of the absolute.
Mason Cooley
#36. If I show consideration for others," Lillian Lynburn said grumpily, "will you tell me again about how you shot my husband?"
Jon rolled his eyes. "Yes, Leigh, if you manage to approximate human behavior for half an hour, I will tell you your favorite story again.
Sarah Rees Brennan
#37. From the cradle to the grave, you are measured against the ever-present yardstick of the average, judged according to how closely you approximate it or how far you are able to exceed it.
Todd Rose
#38. The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.
Louis MacNeice
#39. One time he was so hungover he had to consult a cottage cheese carton to determine the approximate date.
George Carlin
#40. A formal and consistent theory of inductive processes cannot represent the operation of every human mind in detail; it will represent an ideal mind, but it will help the actual mind to approximate that ideal.
Harold Jeffreys
#41. The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
Margaret Atwood
#42. Theoretically, great opportunities lay ahead of a young man of energy in that day and place, but Carl Miller had been incapable of establishing either with his superiors or his subordinates the reputation for approximate immutability which is essential to success in a hierarchic industry.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#43. Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
John Tukey
#44. Given an approximate knowledge of a system's initial conditions and an understanding of natural law, one can calculate the approximate behavior of the system.
James Gleick
#45. Simplicity and beauty are the signs not of truth but of a well-constructed approximate model of a limited domain of phenomena.
Lee Smolin
#46. Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence, that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. A friend of mine in the ER told me that the animal consciousness is one of the here-and-now and that the human being can approximate it by drinking five martinis while soaking in a hot tub.
Thom Jones
#48. With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.
John Dufresne
#49. Translation can never do more than the approximate,so we shall, at least, be gloriously inaccurate.
Karen Healey
#50. When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.
Jack Henry Abbott
#51. Amazing that Americans can obtain so much mass, approximate stuff of two or three people in Beijing.
Andrew Durbin
#52. WE APPROXIMATE THE BIRD'S BODY BY A SPHERE OF RADIUS 5CM, said Sib, I had no idea aerodynamics was so entertaining
Helen DeWitt
#53. The doctor always prescribes the approximate, for there aren't any set of perfect treatments for diseases.
Aporva Kala
#54. That our knowledge only illuminates a small corner of the Universe, that it is incomplete, approximate, tentative and merely probable need not concert us. It is genuine nevertheless. Physical science stands as one of the great achievements of the human spirit.
Arthur David Ritchie
#55. What we have, in fact, is not a theory at all but a large collection of approximate calculations, together with a web of conjectures that, if true, point to the existence of a theory.
Lee Smolin
#56. Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere ...
John Szarkowski
#57. All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.
Margaret Atwood
#58. If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.
Joyce Carol Oates
#59. An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.
John Tukey
#60. Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts, gas leaks 20 parts, dewdrops gathered in a brickyard at sunrise 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix. The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle.
O. Henry
#61. Chefs who cook in these ivory towers are in control in their own world. We try to approximate that world as best we can, but ultimately our goal is to please our clients.
David Castle
#62. All models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind ...
George E.P. Box
#63. Thus, the more succinctly a train of thought was expounded, and the more comprehensive the unity of its basic idea, the closer it would approximate to the prerequisites of the mathematical way of thinking.
Max Bill
#64. The Sufi must be able to alternate his thought between the relative and the Absolute, the approximate and the Real.
Idries Shah
#65. It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things is approximate to their real value ...
Ananda Coomaraswamy
#66. All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.
John Barth
#67. Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)
John Baldessari
#68. No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.
Kate Morton
#69. All of my early images were really visual experiments to me. They were attempts to answer unasked questions like, what happens if you put images of six men and six women together, or if we combined a monkey's image with a human, would the result approximate an image of early man?
Nancy Burson
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