Generalities Quotes

#1. Platitudes and generalities roll of the human understanding like water from a duck

Claude C. Hopkins

#2. Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

Aldous Huxley

#3. Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?

Howard Nemerov

#4. Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary ...

Alberto Manguel

#5. Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#6. Some people today are wandering generalities instead of meaningful specifics because they have failed to discover and mine the wealth of potentials in them.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

#7. Generalities don't count and won't help you in football.

Knute Rockne

#8. In the natural sciences, and particularly in chemistry, generalities must come after the detailed knowledge of each fact and not before it.

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

#9. Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

Oscar Wilde

#10. We think in generalities, but we live in details.

Alfred North Whitehead

#11. They are the best physicians, who being great in learning most incline to the traditions of experience, or being distinguished in practice do not reflect the methods and generalities of art.

Francis Bacon

#12. Our mathematics of the last few decades has wallowed in generalities and formalizations.

Hermann Weyl

#13. Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.

Alphonse De Lamartine

#14. Humbug! Most things free-born will submit to anything for a salary; therefore, keep to yourself and don't venture on generalities of which you are intensely ignorant.

Charlotte Bronte

#15. Thus we must advance from generalities to particulars; for it is a whole that is best known to sense-perception, (25) and a generality is a kind of whole, comprehending many things within it, like parts.

Aristotle.

#16. What profound reward you must glean from studying the world so closely ... Too many people turn away from small wonders, I find. There is so much more potency to be found in detail than generalities, but most souls cannot train themselves to sit still for it.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#17. That's quite different. I told you I wouldn't want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin' generalities.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#18. Politicians ... talk in generalities and lies, and I think they've caused all our grief. They're so awful, they're really funny. I hate thinking this because my dad loved politics.

Paul Lynde

#19. When one is speaking of the essence of things, it often happens that one can only speak in generalities. Concrete things capture one's attention, but they are often a little more than trivia. The more one tires to see into the distance, the more generalized things become.

Haruki Murakami

#20. Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#21. An experimental science is supposed to perform experiments that find generalities. It's not just supposed to tally up a long list of individual cases and their unique life histories. That's butterfly collecting.

Richard Lewontin

#22. To generalize is to be an idiot, said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage.

C.S. Lewis

#23. What we're told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.

Gloria Steinem

#24. In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities.

Stephen Jay Gould

#25. The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.

Benjamin Cardozo

#26. Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

Henri Bergson

#27. Its Constitution
the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.

Rufus Choate

#28. A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it's considered to be some deep philosophy . However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way.

Richard P. Feynman

#29. My potential salvation ... must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha"
while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over.

Stephen Jay Gould

#30. The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.

William Hazlitt

#31. If you're doing a large, complicated character with radio controls, it might take a number of people several months to make it and if you're talking about a quick little hand puppet, it could be made in 2 days, so there's enormous range there, and no real easy generalities.

Jim Henson

#32. In this art form, in any art form, generalities are useless.

Zubin Mehta

#33. God's providence is never characterized
in broad generalities or pious abstractions but always in the particular, in the personal, in the recognition of grace in an unlikely time, at an unlikely place. Who could have anticipated ravens?

Eugene H. Peterson

#34. The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.

E. T. Bell

#35. It [destroying Twin Towers] was a leap into another realm - the realm of crazy abstractions and mythological generalities, involving people who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes. It's important not to fall into that trap and to try to respond with a metaphysical retaliation of some sort.

Edward Said

#36. There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question. In

Walter Lippmann

#37. I understand what a normal political speech is. You get up there, tell a few jokes, you have the flags behind you, and you speak for 10 or 15 minutes in broad generalities.

Bernie Sanders

#38. The great majority of people are "wandering generalities" rather than "meaningful specifics". The fact is that you can't bit a target that you can't see. If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else. You have to have goals.

Zig Ziglar

#39. History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

Howard Nemerov

#40. When we deal in generalities, we shall never succeed. When we deal in specifics, we shall rarely have a failure. When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of performance accelerates.

Thomas S. Monson

#41. God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.

C.S. Lewis

#42. War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.

Marguerite Duras

#43. Everything that is hard to attain is easily assailed by the generality of men.

Ptolemy