A Quote by John Fowles

An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.

John Fowles

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Aphorism Generalization Modern Therefore

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John Fowles
English - Novelist
March 31, 1926 - November 5, 2005

An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.

Anatole Broyard

The essence of knowledge is generalization. That fire can be produced by rubbing wood in a certain way is a knowledge derived by generalization from individual experiences; the statement means that rubbing wood in this way will always produce fire. The art of discovery is therefore the art of correct generalization. ... The separation of relevant from irrelevant factors is the beginning of knowledge.

Hans Reichenbach

The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case.... The principle of leverage is a scientific generalization.

R. Buckminster Fuller

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

To be thoroughly modern, an aphorism should trail off vaguely rather than coming to a point.

Mason Cooley

An aphorism is not an aphorism unless you know what it means.

Winston Churchill

APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. The flabby wine-skin of his brain Yields to some pathologic strain, And voids from its unstored abysm The driblet of an aphorism. "The Mad Philosopher," 1697

Ambrose Bierce

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.

Ian Hacking

How can a modern anthropologist embark upon a generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion? By thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as a mathematical pattern.

Edmund Leach

Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

L. Frank Baum

Prediction can never be absolutely valid and therefore science can never prove some generalization or even test a single descriptive statement and in that way arrive at final truth.

Gregory Bateson

Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems.

Thomas B. Macaulay

The most striking about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.

E. F. Schumacher

Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds... Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that "usually rather." Safe generalizations are quite boring.

Joseph Epstein

It's modern day. It is modern day. Some of the cars are older but it is absolutely modern day. There are modern cars in it, modern people, modern clothes, modern talk. We wrote 'Valentine' to sort of pay tribute to all the old slasher movies that we grew up with and I think that we did that.

Todd Farmer

Newton's great generalization, which he called the "third law of motion," was that "Action and reaction are always equal to each other;" and that law has been one of the most pregnant of all truths about the mystery of force;--one of the brightest windows through which modern eyes have looked into the world of Nature.

Phillips Brooks

A Quote by John Fowles

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