Precisely Quotes

#1. Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions.

Wassily Leontief

#2. Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed ...

Daniel Gilbert

#3. She lifted her chin and glared at him. "If you had but asked, I would've informed you that I do not attend masquerades." "That is precisely why I didn't ask.

Erica Ridley

#4. We have to have genius creative thoughts precisely four times a year and on exact dates. I actually write them on my calendar. I write, 'Friday, Nov. 8. Three o'clock. Have a genius creative idea.'

Tom Ford

#5. Monster is a compassionate picture without any obvious agenda. And it's effective precisely because it's not a polemic.

Stephanie Zacharek

#6. Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.

Judith Butler

#7. We also hate lying because it is more than just fibbing, it is a personal slight. It is the liar's way of saying, "I don't respect you." That is precisely what we tell God when we lie. Lying is our special way of saying to God, "I hate the truth. I hate you.

Todd Friel

#8. It is precisely when we have suffered defeat that we can determine to win and open the path to future victory.

Daisaku Ikeda

#9. It is difficult to understand precisely what the state hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare and crime.

William J. Brennan

#10. The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom.

Georg Cantor

#11. That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary's greatest curatives - gratitude.

Geoffrey Wood

#12. Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.

Jorge Luis Borges

#13. That last phrase, the elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type. I had something to learn.

Elena Ferrante

#14. We have to be back in three hours," Ronan said. "I just fed Chainsaw but she'll need it again."
"This," Gansey replied "is precisely why I didn't want to have a baby with you.

Maggie Stiefvater

#15. The grim irony of investing, then, is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything.

John C. Bogle

#16. I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it.

Vincent Van Gogh

#17. Create your own community of liberation. From this moment on, direct your most concerted efforts, your best work, and your greatest feats of imagination toward creating the impossible community, and do so first of all precisely where you are, with those around you.

John P. Clark

#18. Now think about the Universal Law. It reflects to you exactly and precisely what you put out. If your thought-forms say, "I haven't got a clue about what I want," the Universal Law is going to say, "Listen, mate, if you haven't got a clue, neither have I.

Stuart Wilde

#19. The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted.

Henry Steele Commager

#20. Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me.

Lionel Shriver

#21. Now multitudes of root words are identical in the American languages over vast areas some of them with precisely the same senses, and others with various shades of analogical meaning.

John W. Dawson

#22. How do you turn the invisible into the visible? The first step is to define your dream precisely; the only limit to what you can achieve is the extent of your ability to define with precision that which you desire.

Tony Robbins

#23. Commenting on his "Tractatus"...It consists of two parts: the one written here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely the 2nd part that is the important one.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#24. If only life were a book, and I could choose precisely what part I played.

Jessica Lawson

#25. The purpose of the socialists is to suppress liberty of association precisely in order to force people to associate together in true liberty.)

Frederic Bastiat

#26. She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.

Rachel Cusk

#27. You have a very precisely defined goal and you build a machine that's superhuman in its capabilities for achieving goals. If it turns out that the subsequent behavior of the robot in achieving that goal was not what you want, you have a real problem.

Stuart J. Russell

#28. Sleep is a very capricious goddess, and it is precisely when she is invoked that she delays coming.
- Page 184

Alexandre Dumas

#29. With a woman, a man always wants to let himself go. And it is precisely with a woman that he should never let himself go ... but stick to his innermost belief and meet her just there.

D.H. Lawrence

#30. For faith, properly understood, does not contradict reason in the least; indeed ... it is nothing less than the will to keep one's mind fixed precisely on what reason has discovered to it.

Edward Feser

#31. This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.

G.K. Chesterton

#32. We learn precisely enough to keep us from wanting to know any more

Greg Egan

#33. It is precisely our egoism, our self-centeredness and self-love that cause all our difficulties, our lack of freedom in suffering, our disappointments and our anguish of soul and body.

Tito Colliander

#34. It is not known precisely where angels dwell whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God's pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.

Voltaire

#35. Iran has made vile comments, anti-Semitic comments, comments about the destruction of Israel. It is precisely for that reason that even before I became president, I said Iran could not have a nuclear weapon.

Barack Obama

#36. Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

Charles Baudelaire

#37. Man must learn to know the universe precisely as it is, or he cannot successfully find his place in it. A man should therefore use his reasoning faculty in all matters involving truth, and especially as concerning his religion. He must learn to distinguish between truth and error.

John Andreas Widtsoe

#38. Being fearless precisely when you are most scared is the best hack.

James Altucher

#39. And why should we, of all people, expect the proud new developing nations to see the world precisely as we see it? Was any new nation ever more outspoken, independent and unaligned than the young America of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln?

Chester Bowles

#40. The Americans' great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.

Geoffrey Wood

#41. I sometimes think love consists precisely of the voluntary gift by the loved object of the right to tyrannize over it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#42. Among tech-minded kids, I think Alan Turing was a tremendous inspiration. He was a guy that was so different than the people around him. He was an outsider in his own time, but because he was an outsider is precisely why he was able to accomplish things nobody thought was possible.

Graham Moore

#43. I did precisely the wrong thing. The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit and I sold it out. Of all the speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game. Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit.

Jesse Lauriston Livermore

#44. Prayer is the way to both the heart of God and the heart of the world - precisely because they have been joined through the suffering of Jesus Christ Praying is letting one's own heart become the place where the tears of God's children merge and become tears of hope.

Henri Nouwen

#45. The tendency of a CEO, and particularly (speaking from experience) of a new CEO trying to make an impact in a founder-led company, is to try to make too big an impact. It is hard to check that CEO ego at the door and let others make decisions, but that is precisely what needs to be done.

Eric Schmidt

#46. Some of the sweetest spirits are housed in frail frames. Great spiritual strength is often developed by those with physical challenges precisely because they are challenged. Such individuals are entitled to all the blessings that God has in store for His faithful and obedient children.

Russell M. Nelson

#47. Perfection, then, is not a change in the essential character but the completion of a course. This is precisely what Jesus must have meant when he admonished his disciples and us to 'be perfect,' as our Heavenly Father is perfect.

Ravi Zacharias

#48. entropy taken with a negative sign', which by the way is not my invention. It happens to be precisely the thing on which Boltzmann's original argument turned.

Erwin Schrodinger

#49. You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it's precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly.

Cornel West

#50. Stalin's postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.

John Lewis Gaddis

#51. University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

Henry A. Kissinger

#52. The only reason why we wish to exchange thoughts is that we are different. If we were all the same, we would die dumb. No thought would be expressed after we found that our thoughts were precisely alike. We differ-our thoughts are different. Therefore the commerse that we call conversation.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#53. Mairi stared at Parlabane with an expression he had seen too often down the years: that look of distress at having discovered precisely how deep the rabbit hole goes, and what darkness lay at its end.

Christopher Brookmyre

#54. Our most fundamental spiritual experiences consist on experiences of risk, fear and chances that make us jump from a cliff of emotional turmoil and into a chaos of excitement. It's precisely the potential for disappointment, pain and total annihilation that make them so spiritual.

Robin Sacredfire

#55. We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.

Eric Hoffer

#56. USDA regulations spell out precisely what sort of facility and system is permissible, but they don't set thresholds for food-borne pathogens. (That would require the USDA to recall meat from packers who failed to meet the standards, something the USDA, incredibly, lacks the authority to do.)

Michael Pollan

#57. Ironically, parenting is a shame and judgment minefield precisely because most of us are wading through uncertainty and self-doubt when it comes to raising our children.

Brene Brown

#58. All serious and good writing anticipates precisely this kind of reading-ruminative and leisurely, a dalliance with words in contrast to wolfing down information.

Eugene H. Peterson

#59. She replied that it was precisely men well versed in religion who beat their wives. The precepts of religion permitted such punishment. A virtuous woman was not supposed to complain about her husband. Her duty was perfect obedience.

Nawal El Saadawi

#60. I remember when in the early days of rock'n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I'll say "1959" or "1961." I can hear precisely. It's like it has a huge date stamp on it.

Brian Eno

#61. What's with the serum?"
I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything ... Turn a massacre into a sex orgy ... "
Or a joke."
Precisely. Arty type ... No principles ...

William S. Burroughs

#62. My impression is that most women public service workers have a long fuse. Precisely because they care so deeply about services, more than anyone, they still want to find a sensible and fair negotiated agreement. But their patience has run out.

Frances O'Grady

#63. There is nothing that has been created without some reason, even if human nature is incapable of knowing precisely the reason for them all.

Saint John Chrysostom

#64. One should never know too precisely whom one has married

Friedrich Nietzsche

#65. There is, indeed, nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice-looking, fairly intelligent, and even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one's own, to be precisely like other people.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#66. If we say we have "faith," then we must live like we do. And the "waiting place" is precisely the "place" God uses to examine our faith and see if it is genuine.

Cherie Hill

#67. Myths arise from actual events, remarkable events that get talked about precisely because they are remarkable and which then get embellished in the retelling.

Matthew Reilly

#68. It may be an extreme example brought about by abnormal circumstances - but the criteria of human rights kick in, surely, precisely when the conditions are extreme and the situation is abnormal.

Breyten Breytenbach

#69. If you're 22 years old and you can't believe you're even in the position to have a career making music, the first thing you're going to think is: Maintain. Don't lose it. And that's precisely what causes you to lose everything.

Danger Mouse

#70. Once you recognize that all documentaries are performance, it's not a matter of 'if' they should be performance. They are performance, and they are performance precisely where people are playing themselves.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#71. A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.

Joan Didion

#72. You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.

Robert Anton Wilson

#73. It is precisely when we help one another that we gain our victories over corruption, but the victory is assured only when we help one another with all our strength.

Robert Payne

#74. Assuming that he believes at all, the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#75. I know this perfectly well, but it was precisely this that I liked - her thinking me silly. Such a peculiar vice: to be secretly pleased to be allowed to observe that one is being slightly robbed.

Robert Walser

#76. For when one is about to embark on some enterprise, it is precisely the books whose contents have nothing at all in common with the enterprise that are the most useful.

Franz Kafka

#77. A real reader creates her own canon, for it consists precisely of those books that she has used to create herself.

William Deresiewicz

#78. The very fact that it might not work is precisely why you should and must do this.

Seth

#79. A God who did not abolish suffering-worse , a God who abolished sin precisely by suffering-is a scandal to the modern mind.

Peter Kreeft

#80. I call God long-suffering and patient precisely because He permits evil in the world. I know that He has no evil in Him and yet if there is evil, He is the author of it and yet untouched by it.

Mahatma Gandhi

#81. Luckily for me, I didn't know precisely what it was that I'd done to merit a visit from our pack's leader. There were any number of possibilities, none of which I wanted to openly admit on the off chance that there was something I'd done that he hadn't found out yet.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

#82. I mean, if you're being directed very precisely by somebody who has admiration and who's really smart, it's great. If you're being told what to do by a nincompoop - and luckily that hasn't happened very often - it can be very frustrating.

Kristin Scott Thomas

#83. Somehow the Creator seems to favor those who know precisely what they want and what they do not want.

Napoleon Hill

#84. What matters is precisely this; the unspoken at the edge of the spoken.

Virginia Woolf

#85. It is not known precisely what Google intends to do with what it has acquired, but this much is certain: first, having a stockpile of zero day exploits would allow the company to start a private cyber war; and second, that would be illegal.

Shane Harris

#86. Who, precisely, are your Dreamers? Are their Dreams in Technicolor? Do you allow their most Outrageous Dreams to be seen in public?

Tom Peters

#87. Many mainstream winemakers use indigenous yeasts rather than commercially grown ones to ferment their grapes - precisely what natural winemakers advocate.

Roger Morris

#88. It is really hard to do comedy; it takes a lot of energy and focus. It's rather like music: It's a lot of hitting notes precisely.

Christine Baranski

#89. Every set up that you do, everything is precisely modulated and raised and lowered."

Robert De Niro

#90. To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

Leslie Fiedler

#91. Sure, I do wish I sometimes got to play more heroes, but hey, I can't beat the fact that I am working constantly. Anyway, look at me. I'm six-four, three feet wide, have a really deep voice, and this face; I'm not precisely the romantic comedy stereotype, right?

Brian Thompson

#92. In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.

Alan Lightman

#93. The wisdom of spiritual direction is precisely that we refuse to stand between God and the person who so needs to hear God for himself, for herself.

Gordon T. Smith

#94. A colored man is precisely as much entitled to submit his candidacy in a party primary, as is any other citizen. The decision must be made by the constituents to whom he offers himself, and by nobody else.

Calvin Coolidge

#95. It means that the silver coins of the United States at whatever ratio is fixed, and I want the present ratio that we have now, 16 to 1, maintained precisely as it is.

Richard Parks Bland

#96. Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

James Baldwin

#97. The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?

Robert Motherwell

#98. Communication is a science as well as an art. What does speaking precisely mean? You are consciously communicating with another person at that person's frequency, not yours.

Harbhajan Singh Yogi

#99. Searching for what I need, and I don't even know precisely what that is, I was going from a man to a man, and I saw that all of them together have less than me who has nothing, and that I left to each of them a bit of that what I don't have and I've been searching for.

Ivo Andric

#100. On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that ... Masters of the Universe.

Tom Wolfe