Top 54 Provisional Quotes
#1. Apparent contradictions between religion and science often have been the basis of bitter controversy. Such differences are to be expected as long as human understanding remains provisional and fragmentary.
Henry Eyring
#2. The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
Jorge Luis Borges
#3. The ... provisional government unwaveringly believes that it can solve all the present problems together with the broad masses of Ethiopia. However, we can do this only if all the people come out in unison to implement our planned undertakings.
Meles Zenawi
#4. Custom! that skillful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.
Marcel Proust
#5. Everything we design and make is an improvisation, a lash-up, something inept and provisional.
David Pye
#7. All scientific theories are provisional and may be changed, but ... on the whole, they are accepted from Washington to Moscow because of their practical success. Where religion has opposed the findings of science, it has almost always had to retreat.
Nevill Francis Mott
#8. As soon as whatever provisional well of confidence dries up, I will feel like a frightened motherless child. And I will - what? Lessee, I'll beg friends to assure me I'm fascinating, that my soul is complex so I can once more conduce to irony. An abyss opens up.
Maryse Holder
#9. As far as he could see, the world was moving, in an orderly capitalist fashion, toward a logical, perhaps provisional, perhaps permanent, end.
Cees Nooteboom
#10. Paisley has been and remains a greater threat to the Union than the Foreign Office and the Provisional IRA rolled into one.
Enoch Powell
#11. It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.
Elena Ferrante
#12. A man who could not see the end of his"provisional existence" was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#13. In the midst of wanton aggression, we still call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to return to the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, with full and equal citizenship and due representation in its bodies and institutions - provisional or permanent.
David Ben-Gurion
#14. In the circumstances in which the Republic finds itself, the constitution cannot be inaugurated; it would destroy itself ... The provisional government of France is revolutionary until there is peace.
Louis Antoine De Saint-Just
#15. One of the essential characteristics of the state of exception-the provisional abolition of the distinction among legislative, executive, and judicial powers-here shows its tendency to become a lasting practice of government.
Giorgio Agamben
#16. For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future.
Francois Jacob
#17. She was the only thing that held together the fragile, provisional me.
Haruki Murakami
#18. The age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional.
Katherine Boo
#19. There's always an end. But the end is always the beginning of something else. The periods we write into our lives are always provisional, in one way or another.
Henning Mankell
#20. Rely on the teaching, not on the person;
Rely on the meaning, not on the words;
Rely on the definitive meaning, not on the provisional;
Rely on your wisdom mind, not on your ordinary mind.
Gautama Buddha
#21. The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.
Harry S. Truman
#22. I grew up in the theater. I began my career at 3. That was the first time I stepped onto a provisional stage.
Demian Bichir
#23. In this context, social consensus, and institutions that embody this consensus, must be made effective in order for democratization not to be abused as a provisional instrument to establish an anti-democratic regime.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#24. Home for the exile in a secular and contingent world is always provisional
Trinh T. Minh-ha
#25. In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
G.K. Chesterton
#26. The Provisional Government had lost effective military control of the capital a full two days before the armed uprising began. This was the essential fact of the whole insurrection: without it one cannot explain the ease of the Bolshevik victory.
Orlando Figes
#27. Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.
Gregory Benford
#28. Of course, economic forecasts must be revised when new information arrives and are thus necessarily provisional.
Ben Bernanke
#29. Whether we start with a provisional status and legal permanent residence ... or we set up some other way to assimilate legally, you can't ever put in something that says, 'You can never become a citizen.' That's un-American.
Jeff Denham
#30. We wait here to meet the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam to discuss together a ceremony of orderly transfer of power so as to avoid any unnecessary bloodshed in the population.
Duong Van Minh
#31. Friendship is provisional, you have to keep earning it, back and forth, give the gift that's only each other's to give
Howard Norman
#32. The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true--both objectively and subjectively--is habitually provisional.
Chuck Klosterman
#33. The federal government began investigating allegations of fraud against the Coalition Provisional Authority, a U.S. contractor accused in a bid-rigging operation involving millions of dollars. Asked to comment, a spokesperson for Halliburton said, 'Millions? With an M? That is adorable.'
Amy Poehler
#34. The actual state of our knowledge is always provisional and ... there must be, beyond what is actually known, immense new regions to discover.
Louis De Broglie
#35. It's extremely difficult to say what one actually means by 'sculpture' other than, in a provisional sense, it's something that goes on the floor or a pedestal, and loosely applies to a certain history of the use of that term.
Walead Beshty
#36. My thoughts don't really bump along this way, but they do bump somehow, and it's more honest
more pedagogically useful, more truthful
to arrange them in a loose, disconnected, provisional way than to deliver only the conclusions.
Sara Levine
#37. Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
C.S. Lewis
#38. With the growth of knowledge our ideas must from time to time be organized afresh. The change takes place usually in accordance with new maxims as they arise, but it always remains provisional.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#39. Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.
Andre Malraux
#40. scientific discovery requires the boldness of provisional commitment to a point of view, while remaining aware that this may require subsequent modification in the light of further experience.
John Polkinghorne
#41. Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.
Stephen Jay Gould
#42. A provisional government was appointed on April 1 (it consisted mainly of Talleyrand's whist partners), and the following day the Senate, on Talleyrand's urging, declared Napoleon deposed.
J. Christopher Herold
#43. My Irish passport makes me look like a chief of staff for the Provisional IRA.
Jack Higgins
#44. I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.
A.R. Ammons
#45. Where [God] is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things.
William James
#46. In the Steven F. Austin Colony, which was the first colony, Texans first established a provisional government in 1835 with the intention of writing a declaration of independence soon after.
Michael McCaul
#47. An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom as these conditions imply
low rental.
Jane Addams
#48. ...all readings are provisional, and that maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the time.
Samantha Ellis
#49. Knowledge in the Internet Age - networked knowledge - is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it's provisional; it's a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved.
David Weinberger
#50. There is not ultimate breakthrough; what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#51. Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.
Karl Marx
#52. Firstly, by learning the great lesson of wise men: patience, the certainty that everything - both good and bad - is provisional in this life. Secondly, using this sudden change of course to risk new things in daily life, to do things you always dreamed of.
Paulo Coelho
#53. Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.
Stephen Hawking
#54. fidelity and lifelong communion, it is circumscribed, limited, and provisional. The
Louis J. Cameli
