calculation quotes

Affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.

-Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam
^4  Of Mrs Todgers. Martin Chuzzlewit, ch.8.

   It iswonderful, when a calculation ismade, how littlethe mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
  Remark, 6  Apr. Collected in  James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.2.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know onlya few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, byany confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but reallyconcurring, laws, which Thoreau we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

-Thoreau, Henry David
  Walden, or Life in theWoods,'The Pond inWinter'.

When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect, What calculation, number, measurement, replied? We Irish, born into that ancient sect But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked, Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.

-Yeats,W(illiam) B(utler)
  'The Statues', stanza 4. Collected in Last Poems (1939).

4 Quotes found. Displaying quotes 1 through 4

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2005 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.