Provisionally Quotes

#1. The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it.

Ernst Mach

#2. We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.

Ariel Durant

#3. With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific ... As soon as it lays hold of the feelings, it becomes spirit.

Robert Musil

#4. God provides something to you through somebody. Thats same God can give something to somebody through you. If you make yourself a greedy traffic on the way and deprive the final destined owner of what you supposed to keep provisionally, you make God upset.

Israelmore Ayivor

#5. A Christian can believe that God 'ordained' the 'powers that be' - including political rulers and slaveholders - for purposes too deep for us to understand fully, and that while they last we must provisionally accept them; but that they were not meant to last forever.

Joseph Sobran

#6. What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.

Honore De Balzac

#7. The 'law of wills and causes,' formulated by Comte, ... is that when men do not know the natural causes of things, they simply attribute them to wills like their own; thus they obtain a theory which provisionally takes the place of science, and this theory forms a basis for theology.

Andrew Dickson White

#8. If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through "the eternal feminine," and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?

Simone De Beauvoir

#9. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence, I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.

H.P. Lovecraft

#10. Sometimes I'm haunted by the thought that we only have one life and we live it provisionally, waiting in vain for the day that our real life will begin. And so life passes by.

Ignazio Silone

#11. Tolerance is that important but subordinate virtue by which, instructed in our own weakness, we bear with what is bad without pretending that it is good. We bear with it provisionally, even if sometimes there is nothing we can do about it or ever will be able to do about it. It

Anthony Esolen

#12. In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality
the principle of order versus the split atom.

Ezra Pound

#13. Well, what I've said is that the war in Iraq will always be clouded by how it began, which was a wrong premise, that there were in fact no weapons of nuclear - weapons of mass destruction.

Robert M. Gates

#14. Happiness is the most elusive thing for human beings to find.

Frederick Lenz

#15. Ethics is not a mystic fantasy
nor a social convention
nor a dispensable, subjective luxury ... Ethics is an objective necessity of man's survival
not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but the grace of reality and the nature of life.

Ayn Rand

#16. In Louisiana, one of the first stages of grief is eating your weight in Popeyes fried chicken. The second stage is doing the same with boudin. People have been known to swap the order. Or to do both at the same time.

Ken Wheaton

#17. If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?

Eric Ries

#18. I noticed you right away." She gave me an approving look. "I like quiet, polite men. And men who wear Hugo Boss. I was hoping you weren't gay. Or that you were only half-gay. Like Paul."
"Uh ... sorry," I said. "It's pretty much full-time now. The pay's not great, but the perks ...

Josh Lanyon

#19. At the conclusion of my argument I received very high compliments from the Chief Justice and later from other of the Judges. What they said I do not care to repeat.

William Henry Moody

#20. When you have two notes from two different performances Auto-Tuned, it sounds like a car horn. And then you add harmonies, and it starts to sound like baby seals honking. - Tom Lord-Alge on Auto-Tune

Greg Milner

#21. How can I tell you what I think until I've heard what I'm going to say?

Stephen Fry

#22. Sadness is a very interesting idea, this idea of sadness being some kind of default setting that artists will go into. And then I started thinking about this idea of sadness and happiness, and the idea that sadness is very loud, and happiness is quiet.

Glen Hansard

#23. Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.

Christopher Hitchens

#24. Being in the present moment, one can step outside the mechanical train of life, and this is where the inner revolution begins.

Belsebuub

#25. The woman who knew that I had dyslexia - I never interviewed her.

George W. Bush

#26. You can't manufacture passion or "motivate" people to feel passionate. You can only discover what ignites your passion and the passions of those around you.

James C. Collins

#27. India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.

Yann Martel