A Quote by William of Ockham

Never increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.

William of Ockham

Quote Topics

Anything Beyond Entities Explain Increase Necessary Never Number Required

Quote Author

William of Ockham
English - Philosopher
1288 - April 9, 1347

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit

Ezra Pound

It seems that the increased number of scientific workers, their being split up into groups whose studies are limited to a small subject, and over-specialization have brought about a shrinking of intelligence. There is no doubt that the quality of any human group decreases when the number of the individuals composing this group increases beyond certain limits... The best way to increase the intelligence of scientists would be to decrease their number.

Alexis Carrel

When you increase the number of gardens, you increase the number of heavens too!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination

C. Wright Mills

You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.

Alan Watts

Faith is, necessary to explain anything, and to reconcile the foreknowledge of God with human evil.

William Wordsworth

We have now gone beyond 100 in number, and the desire to join seems rather to increase, though it was thought the foundations would retard it, it seems quite otherwise.

Catherine McAuley

When you hear me say "by any means necessary," I mean exactly that. I believe in anything that is necessary to correct unjust conditions-political, economic, social, physical, anything that is necessary.

Malcolm X

Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.

Brian Kernighan

It's tricky to ask a filmmaker to explain his own work; usually we're the least qualified to make sense of what we've done, unfortunately, because of the tunnel vision required to create anything over four years.

Stephen Gaghan

Spirituality points, always, beyond: beyond the ordinary, beyond possession, beyond the narrow confines of the self, and - above all - beyond expectations. Because "the spiritual" is beyond our control, it is never exactly what we expect.

Ernest Kurtz

After mature deliberation of counsel, the good Queen to establish a rule and immutable example unto all posterity, for the moderation and required modesty in a lawful marriage, ordained the number of six times a day as a lawful, necessary and competent limit.

Michel de Montaigne

Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone's wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they're causing, and they will not stop until they've run the world economy off a cliff.

Philipp Meyer

Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

William of Ockham

In 2006, the number of children in targeted school choice programs nationwide will reach six digits for the first time, representing a 40 percent increase in the number of children in targeted school choice programs and an even bigger increase in the amount of public funding.