A Quote by John Tukey

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

John Tukey

Quote Topics

Always Answer Better Exact Far Made Often Precise Question Right Than Vague Which Wrong

Quote Author

John Tukey
American - Scientist
June 16, 1915 - July 26, 2000

An approximate answer to the right question is worth far more than a precise answer to the wrong one.

John Tukey

A dialogue is very important. It is a form of communication in which question and answer continue till a question is left without an answer. Thus the question is suspended between the two persons involved in this answer and question. It is like a bud with untouched blossoms . . . If the question is left totally untouched by thought, it then has its own answer because the questioner and answerer, as persons, have disappeared. This is a form of dialogue in which investigation reaches a certain point of intensity and depth, which then has a quality that thought can never reach.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.

John Tukey

[My father] impressed upon me from the first, that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known: that the question, "Who made me?" cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself, "Who made God?

John Stuart Mill

If you ask the wrong question, of course, you get the wrong answer. We find in design it's much more important and difficult to ask the right question. Once you do that, the right answer becomes obvious.

Amory Lovins

This is a rather unusual situation in physics. We perform approximate calculations which are valid only in some regime and this gives us the exact answer. This is a theorist's heaven- exact results with approximate methods.

Nathan Seiberg

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

To be a scientist you have to be willing to live with uncertainty for a long time. Research scientists begin with a question and they take a decade or two to find an answer. Then the answer they get may not even answer the question they thought it would. You have to have a supple enough mind to be open to the possibility that the answer sometimes precedes the question itself.

Hanya Yanagihara

We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask - and to answer - the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer.

Matthew Woodring Stover

When you talk about being exceptional, you do two things: You clearly answer the question 'Who are you?' which is your purpose. And you answer the second question, 'Where are you going?' which is your aspiration and how you're going to get there.

Punit Renjen

Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Education, they [philosophers] felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.

Leo Strauss

I never buy anything unless I can fill out on a piece of paper my reasons. I may be wrong, but I would know the answer to that ...I'm paying $32 billion today for the Coca Cola Company because... If you can't answer that question, you shouldn't buy it. If you can answer that question, and you do it a few times, you'll make a lot of money.

Warren Buffett

Intellectuals know how to answer the question, 'What God do I believe in?' not only through the question of 'What God do I abhor?' Intellectuals can also answer the question of 'What flag do I wave?' without having to answer the question of 'What flag do I burn.'