Quotes About Exactitude

#1. Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.

Eugene Delacroix

#2. Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.

Charles Baudelaire

#3. The cadence, that indecipherable, insignificant something that makes someone walk a certain way, speak in a certain tone, look with a certain pause, caress with a certain exactitude.

Angeles Mastretta

#4. Exactitude is not truth.

Henri Matisse

#5. I loved short stories, and they were all I wanted to write. I love the compression of them and the exactitude needed to get a whole world into such a small space.

Debra Dean

#6. Your powers of perception are astounding," the cat drawled. "Although I feel obliged to point out, in the interests of ontological exactitude, that I am in fact only half cat. Personally, though, I have always considered it the better half.

Django Wexler

#7. He has fantastic powers. He can be imperious, abrupt, impatient with sloppy procedures, but he is also poetic, visionary, romantic. He is possessed by two geniuses: dry-eyed, rigorous exactitude, and generous leaps of imagination - non-rigid, non-uniform and innovative.

Warren Winiarski

#8. Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

Mary Oliver

#9. Sometimes a man imagines that he will lose himself if he gives himself, and keep himself if he hides himself. But the contrary takes place with terrible exactitude.

Ernest Hello

#10. Lord Bacon said, "Writing makes an exact man." He spoke the truth. Writing produces exactitude by forcing you to set down ideas in logical relation to one another. Writing crystallizes your thoughts and makes your ideas specific.

John Haggai

#11. Cold exactitude is not art ... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas.

Eugene Delacroix

#12. I do not believe there is anything useful which men can know with exactitude that they cannot know by arithmetic and algebra.

Nicolas Malebranche

#13. She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.

Virginia Woolf

#14. Mere exactitude, of which photography and moulage [life casting] are the lowest forms, does not inspire feelings.

Auguste Rodin

#15. Exactitude is the lowest form of pictorial gratification.

S.I. Hayakawa

#16. If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.

E.B. White

#17. Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude.

Jean Baudrillard

#18. As to your Newton, I confess I do not understand his void and his gravity; I admit he has demonstrated the movement of the heavenly bodies with more exactitude than his forerunners; but you will admit it is an absurdity to maintain the existence of Nothing.
[Letter to Voltaire, 25 Nov. 1777]

Frederick The Great

#19. Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.

Charles Sanders Peirce

#20. Shall we make a positive appointment for a particular day and hour?" inquired the count; "only let me warn you that I am proverbial for my punctilious exactitude in keeping my engagements.

Alexandre Dumas

#21. If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854)

Charles Negre

#22. Man associates ideas not according to logic or verifiable exactitude, but according to his pleasure and interests. It is for this reason that most truths are nothing but prejudices.

Remy De Gourmont

#23. If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has replaced metrical skill as the first thing the poet tunes to.

Martin Langford

#24. The flaw in, say, austerity, is that its success is predicated on the relative exactitude of math rather than the shifting, liquid imperfection of people's lives.

Steven Weber

#25. The best penance is to have patience with the sorrows God permits. A very good penance is to dedicate oneself to fulfill the duties of everyday with exactitude and to study and work with all our strength.

Peter Damian

#26. It is the exact experience of mathematics. Not merely the adding up of your grocery bill, or the daily uses that we make of number. But the great concept of a universal exactitude, that numbers are an instrument of magic. And by means of them, men can unlock all the wonders of the world.

Manly Hall

#27. Whenever I am embraced by land and seascape I draw ideas for new sculptures; new forms to touch and walk around, new people to embrace, with an exactitude of form that those without sight can hold and realize ... It is essentially practical and passionate.

Barbara Hepworth

#28. On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.

Alfred North Whitehead

#29. The notation is more important than the sound. Not the exactitude and success with which a notation notates a sound; but the musicalness of the notation in its notating.

Cornelius Cardew

#30. The formless aching hunger that suffused his being wasn't there like it used to be. There was something sharper in it, like the great creeping cloud inside him had found claws.

S.P. Wayne