Quotes about clue
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A. S. Byatt photo
Bill Maher photo
Irshad Manji photo
David Foster Wallace photo

“Chemical reasoning, as used both in applications and in basic research, resembles a detective story in which tangible clues lead to a mental picture of events never directly witnessed by the detective.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 1 : The Atom in Modern Chemistry

Kevin James photo
Derren Brown photo

“My techniques are concerned with reading signals from people, tiny unconscious clues that betray their thoughts. I tend to see it like a game…”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

Bryant Gumbel photo
Jeanette Winterson photo

“Anger is precious because it is an immediate, undeniable clue to what our minds (so much more cautious in rejection and resistance than our bodies) will not tolerate.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"In Defence of Anger" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

Robert Musil photo
Alan Moore photo
Lupe Fiasco photo
E. W. Hobson photo

“The second period, which commenced in the middle of the seventeenth century, and lasted for about a century, was characterized by the application of the powerful analytical methods provided by the new Analysis to the determination of analytical expressions for the number π in the form of convergent series, products, and continued fractions. The older geometrical forms of investigation gave way to analytical processes in which the functional relationship as applied to the trigonometrical functions became prominent. The new methods of systematic representation gave rise to a race of calculators of π, who, in their consciousness of the vastly enhance means of calculation placed in their hands by the new Analysis, proceeded to apply the formulae to obtain numerical approximations to π to ever larger numbers of places of decimals, although their efforts were quite useless for the purpose of throwing light upon the true nature of that number. At the end of this period no knowledge had been obtained as regards the number π of the kind likely to throw light upon the possibility or impossibility of the old historical problem of the ideal construction; it was not even definitely known whether the number is rational or irrational. However, one great discovery, destined to furnish the clue to the solution of the problem, was made at this time; that of the relation between the two numbers π and e, as a particular case of those exponential expressions for the trigonometrical functions which form one of the most fundamentally important of the analytical weapons forged during this period.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), pp. 11-12

Frank Stella photo
Richard Feynman photo
John Kenneth Galbraith photo

“The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the US is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Article in The Saturday Evening Post, 1968 http://books.google.com/books?id=rxsfAQAAMAAJ&q=%22The+drive+toward+complex+technical+achievement+offers+a+clue+to+why+the+U.S.+is+good+at+space+gadgetry+and+bad+at+slum+problems%22&pg=PA86

Richard Francis Burton photo

“Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.”

Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, lin…

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

Ayumi Hamasaki photo
Edward Allington photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Martin Sheen photo
Donnie Dunagan photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Alice Walker photo

“I think unless the people are given information about what is happening to them, they will die in ignorance. And i think that's the big sin. I mean if there is such a thing as a sin, that's it, to destroy people and not have them have a clue about how this is happening.”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

Poet, Author Alice Walker Meets the Inner Journey with Global Activism in "The Cushion in the Road" http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/28/poet_author_alice_walker_meets_the (May 28, 2013).

St. Vincent (musician) photo

“I'm just the same but brand new
And anything you wrote I checked for codes and clues.”

St. Vincent (musician) (1982) American singer-songwriter

"Just the Same but Brand New"
Actor (2009)

David Lynch photo
Tom Petty photo

“Into the great wide open,
Under them skies of blue.
Out in the great wide open,
A rebel without a clue.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Into the Great Wide Open, written with Jeff Lynne
Lyrics, Into The Great Wide Open (1991)

Immanuel Kant photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Daniel Dennett photo

“I have grown accustomed to the disrespect expressed by some of the participants for their colleagues in the other disciplines. "Why, Dan," ask the people in artificial intelligence, "do you waste your time conferring with those neuroscientists? They wave their hands about 'information processing' and worry about where it happens, and which neurotransmitters are involved, but they haven't a clue about the computational requirements of higher cognitive functions." "Why," ask the neuroscientists, "do you waste your time on the fantasies of artificial intelligence? They just invent whatever machinery they want, and say unpardonably ignorant things about the brain." The cognitive psychologists, meanwhile, are accused of concocting models with neither biological plausibility nor proven computational powers; the anthropologists wouldn't know a model if they saw one, and the philosophers, as we all know, just take in each other's laundry, warning about confusions they themselves have created, in an arena bereft of both data and empirically testable theories. With so many idiots working on the problem, no wonder consciousness is still a mystery. All these charges are true, and more besides, but I have yet to encounter any idiots. Mostly the theorists I have drawn from strike me as very smart people – even brilliant people, with the arrogance and impatience that often comes with brilliance – but with limited perspectives and agendas, trying to make progress on the hard problems by taking whatever shortcuts they can see, while deploring other people's shortcuts. No one can keep all the problems and details clear, including me, and everyone has to mumble, guess and handwave about large parts of the problem.”

Consciousness Explained (1991)

Bill Maher photo
Peter Greenaway photo

“Are these clues? Which ones are important? Which ones are incidental? Which ones are circumstantial?”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

“Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth," said his cousin. "But we seem to have no other.”

Manservant and Maidservant (London: Victor Gollancz, [1947] 1972) p. 5.

Joel Mokyr photo

“The distinction between micro- and macro inventions matters because they appeared to be governed by different laws. Microinventions generally result from an intentional search for improvements, and are understandable -if not predictable- by economic forces. They are guided, at least to some extent, by the laws of supply and demand and by the intensity of search and the resources committed to them, and thus by signals emitted by the price mechanism. Furthermore, in so far as micro inventions are the by-products of experience through learning by doing or learning by using they are correlated with output or investment. Macroinventions are more difficult to understand, and seem to be governed by individual genius and luck as much as by economic forces. Often they are based on some fortunate event, in which an inventor stumbles on one thing while looking for another, arrives at the right conclusion for the wrong reason, or brings to bear a seemingly unrelated body of knowledge that just happen to hold the clue to the right solution. The timing of these inventions is consequently often hard to explain. Much of the economic literature dealing with the generation of technological progress through market mechanisms and incentive devices thus explain only part of the story. This does not mean that we have to give up the attempt to try to understand macroinventions. We must, however, look for explanations largely outside the trusted and familiar market mechanisms relied upon by economists.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Source: The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992, p. 295; as cited by Pol, Eduardo, and Peter Carroll.

“He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

You and Your Research (1986)
Context: I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

D.H. Lawrence photo

“Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificance of the fixed stars.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)
Context: Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificance of the fixed stars. Is not a man different, utterly different, at dawn from what he is at sunset? And a woman too? And does not the changing harmony and discord of their variation make the secret music of life?

Richard Wright photo
Alfred Percy Sinnett photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“We are getting great marks for the handling of the CoronaVirus pandemic, especially the very early BAN of people from China, the infectious source, entering the USA. Compare that to the Obama/Sleepy Joe disaster known as H1N1 Swine Flu. Poor marks, bad polls - didn’t have a clue!”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

As quoted by * 2020-05-10

Trump claims he is ‘getting great marks’ for coronavirus response as US death toll nears 80,000

Richard Hall

Independent

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-coronavirus-us-response-barack-obama-joe-biden-a9507346.html
2020s, 2020, May

Trevor Noah photo

“At this point, it's not even a high-level controversy. This isn't House of Cards. Like, this isn't even Veep. It wouldn't even qualify for Blue's Clues.”

Trevor Noah (1984) South African comedian

Source: The Daily Show July 11th, 2017'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwr7pEgPqk4
A Russian, an Email and an Idiot: Did Donald Trump Jr. Incriminate Himself?: The Daily Show

Ron English photo

“What you believe is without a clue. What I believe is always true.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

Ben Aaronovitch photo