Numbers quotes
4.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that. And what I keep coming back to is [her] dying declaration: 'So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change.'"
"We have never worried about numbers. In the marketplace, Apple is trying to focus the spotlight on products, because products really make a difference. You can't con people in this business. The products speak for themselves."
"It takes these very simple-minded instructions - 'Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it's greater than this other number' - but executes them at a rate of, let's say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic."
"Education is like a diamond with many facets: It includes the basic mastery of numbers and letters that give us access to the treasury of human knowledge, accumulated and refined through the ages; it includes technical and vocational training as well as instruction in science, higher mathematics, and humane letters."
"The value of time, that is of being a little ahead of your opponent, often provides greater advantage than superior numbers or greater resources."
"You realise that having a number one record and being loved and adored isn't the most important thing in the world. But at the same time, I don't have a problem with it."
"We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers."
"Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires."
"Some crimes get honor and renown by being committed with more pomp, by a greater number, and in a higher degree of wickedness thanothers. Hence it is that public robberies, plunderings, and sackings have been looked upon as excellencies and noble achievements, and the seizing of whole countries, however unjustly and barbarously, is dignified with the glorious name of gaining conquests."
"The habit of ubiquitous interventionism, combining pinprick strikes by precision weapons with pious invocations of high principle, would lead us into endless difficulties. Interventions must be limited in number and overwhelming in their impact."
"If I could have been a marine biologist I would have, but I didn't have that kind of intelligence. Numbers were never my strong point."
"[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them."
"I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your life's blueprint. Number one...should be a deep belief in your own dignity. Your worth and your own somebodiness... Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance."
"Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and daemons."
"I was always making things. I made model airplanes and did a number of hands-on activities. I liked creating in some form or another, not realizing what it was all about."
"Even with a margin of safety in the investor's favor, an individual security may work out badly. For the margin guarantees only that he has a better chance for profit than for loss - not that loss is impossible. But as the number of such commitments is increased the more certain does it become that the aggregate of the profits will exceed the aggregate of the losses."
"And what is the greatest number? Number one."
"Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes in a day."
"Information costs are reduced by the existence of large numbers of buyers and sellers. Under these conditions, prices embody the same information that would require large search costs by individual buyers and sellers in the absence of an organized market."
"When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this, which I take and work with. My films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time. The beginning of any film for me is this need to express something. It is to make it nurture and grow that I write my script- it is directing it that makes my tree blossom and bear fruit."
