Variation famous quotes

In analysing complicated variations one must examine each branch of the tree once and once only.
-- Alexander Kotov

#Tree #Analysis #Variation

After a great deal of discussion in Soviet literature about the correct definition of a combination, it was decided that from the point of view of a methodical approach it was best to settle on this definition - A combination is a forced variation with a sacrifice.
-- Alexander Kotov

#Sacrifice #Views #Variation

The range of variation in the female far exceeds the range of variation in the male.
-- Alfred Kinsey

#Males #Female #Variation

Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

#Men #Tunes #Variation

In my opinion the Open variation is absolutely correct - and more interesting than the Closed.
-- Bent Larsen

#Interesting #Variation #Chess

I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.'
-- Brian Ferneyhough

#Gmos #Musical #Variation

There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.
-- Carlos Fuentes

#Past #Variation #Novelty

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
-- Charles Darwin

#Hair #Principles #Variation

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relationship to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.
-- Charles Darwin

#Struggle #Degrees #Variation

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
-- Charles Darwin

#Opportunity #Variation #World

This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.
-- Charles Darwin

#Survival #Would Be #Variation

There are not many original shapes or silhouettes -- only a million variations.
-- Charles James

#Variation #Shapes #Silhouettes

I've fallen for one girl too many who's wanted some variation of who I am and only that. It eats you alive.
-- Christopher Krovatin

#Girl #Who I Am #Variation

Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.
-- Claude Debussy

#Writing #Light #Variation

You only get to walk variations of the same lines everyone has already drawn for you.
-- Courtney Summers

#Bullying #Variation #Lines

You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.
-- Daniel Barenboim

#Variation #Conducting #Born

A rise of wages from this cause will, indeed, be invariably accompanied by a rise in the price of commodities; but in such cases, it will be found that labour and all commodities have not varied in regard to each other, and that the variation has been confined to money.
-- David Ricardo

#Wages #Variation #Causes

Whenever the current of money is forcibly stopped, and when money is prevented from settling at its just level, there are no limits to the possible variations of the exchange.
-- David Ricardo

#Variation #Levels #Limits

The variation in the value of money, however great, makes no difference in the rate of profits;...
-- David Ricardo

#Differences #Variation #Profit

It has therefore been justly observed that however honestly the coin of a country may conform to its standard, money made of gold and silver is still liable to fluctuations in value, not only to accidental, and temporary, but to permanent and natural variations, in the same manner as other commodities.
-- David Ricardo

#Country #Gold #Variation

Granted there are only seven stories in the universe. And I agree with that. But give me a great variation of those stories. And literate.
-- Debra Winger

#Giving #Stories #Variation

By packaging a full album into a bundle of music with ringtones, videos and other combinations and variations, we found products that consumers demonstrably valued and were willing to purchase at premium prices. And guess what? We've sold tons of them.
-- Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

#Albums #Video #Variation

Only play into a variation in which your opponent is strong if you have your own personal novelty ready!
-- Edmar Mednis

#Strong #Play #Variation

Just as it is wrong to work on chess by studying only the first 10-15 moves, so it is wrong to play one and the same opening system, even though it be rich in variations and nuances.
-- Efim Geller

#Moving #Play #Variation

Geologists are rapidly becoming convinced that the mammals spread from their central Asian point of origin largely because of great variations in climate.
-- Ellsworth Huntington

#Variation #Becoming #Mammals

Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.
-- Emanuel Ax

#Successful #Waiting #Variation

Show me three variations in the leading handbook on the openings, and I will show you two of those three that are defective.
-- Emanuel Lasker

#Two #Three #Variation

Every day I studied the nude, and movement in the streets and in the shops. Out of the naturalistic surface with all its variations I wanted to derive the pictorially determined surface.
-- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

#Variation #Movement #Determined

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.
-- Ernst Mayr

#Variation #Evolution #Process

Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation.
-- Ernst Mayr

#Generations #Variation #New Start

In Darwin's theory, you just have to substitute 'mutations' for his 'slight accidental variations' (just as quantum theory substitutes 'quantum jump' for 'continuous transfer of energy'). In all other respects little change was necessary in Darwin's theory...
-- Erwin Schrodinger

#Energy #Mutation #Variation

What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.
-- Erwin Schrodinger

#Space #Variation #Body

Cooking is for capturing the taste of the food and then enhancing it, as a composer may take a theme and then delight us with his variations.
-- Fernand Point

#Cooking #Variation #Delight

Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.
-- Franz Liszt

#Variation #Brahms

The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity.
-- G. Stanley Hall

#Past #Men #Variation

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.
-- George C. Williams

#Numbers #Variation #Theory

The first colour charts were unsystematic. They were based directly on commercial colour samples. They were still related to Pop Art. In the canvases that followed, the colours were chosen arbitrarily and drawn by chance. Then, 180 tones were mixed according to a given system and drawn by chance to make four variations of 180 tones. But after that the number 180 seemed too arbitrary to me, so I developed a system based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions.
-- Gerhard Richter

#Art #Numbers #Variation

Every lecture should state one main point and repeat it over and over, like a theme with variations. An audience is like a herd of cows, moving slowly in the direction they are being driven towards. If we make one point, we have a good chance that the audience will take the right direction; if we make several points, then the cows will scatter all over the field. The audience will lose interest and everyone will go back to the thoughts they interrupted in order to come to our lecture.
-- Gian-Carlo Rota

#Moving #Order #Variation

A student well versed in even one technique will naturally see corresponding points in other techniques. A upper level punch, a lower punch, a front punch and a reverse punch are all essentially the same. Looking over thirty-odd kata, he should be able to see that they are essentially variations on just a handful.
-- Gichin Funakoshi

#Technique #Variation #Levels

The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big improvement on the Adam design, or that Adam was an extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability. Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.)
-- Glen Duncan

#Two #Design #Variation

There are endless new variations on how to hurt a woman physically, emotionally, financially, and socially,
-- Gloria Allred

#Hurt #Variation #Endless

Granted the endless variations of moral customs, still the essential standards persist. As in a scientific laboratory, all else may change but the standards are unalterable- disinterested love of truth, fidelity to facts, accuracy in measurement, exactness of verification-so, in life as a whole, the towering ethical criteria remain unshaken. Falsehood is never better than truth, theft better than than honesty, treachery better than loyalty, cowardice better than courage.
-- Harry Emerson Fosdick

#Loyalty #Honesty #Variation

Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson

#Variation #Strict

His brothers were the type; he was the variation.
-- Henry Adams

#Family #Brother #Variation

Natural selection based on the differential multiplication of variant types cannot exist before there is material capable of replicating itself and its own variations, that is, before the origination of specifically genetic material or gene-material.
-- Hermann Joseph Muller

#Variation #Natural #Genes

Originality is only variation.
-- Holbrook Jackson

#Variation #Originality

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Hands #Band #Variation

... much seemingly chance variation in human behavior is not due to chance; it is in fact the logical result of a few basic, observable differences in mental functioning.
-- Isabel Briggs Myers

#Differences #Variation #Facts

Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.
-- Jack Horner

#Variation #Dinosaurs #Had Enough

There are patterns which emerge in one's life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation of a theme
-- Jacqueline Carey

#Variation #Patterns #Endless

There are patterns which emerge in one's life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation on a theme. So musicians say the greatest sonatas are composed; whether or not it is true, I do not know, but of a surety I have seen it emerge in the tapestry of my life.
-- Jacqueline Carey

#Karma #Musician #Variation

I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite.
-- James Taylor

#Writing #Opposites #Variation

Half the variations which are calculated in a tournament game turn out to be completely superfluous. Unfortunately, no one knows in advance which half
-- Jan Timman

#Games #Variation #Half

I sometimes ponder on variation form and it seems to me it ought to be more restrained, purer.
-- Johannes Brahms

#Variation #Sometimes #Form

The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon...
-- John A. Keel

#Age #Variation #Ufo

There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme.
-- John Lennon

#Music #Variation #Notes

There are infinitely many variations of the initial situation and therefore no doubt indefinitely many theorems of moral geometry.
-- John Rawls

#Doubt #Variation #Moral

The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; nay, it is not going too far, to say that it is most influenced by what it detects least. Let the painter define, if he can, the variations of lines on which depend the change of expression in the human countenance.
-- John Ruskin

#Eye #Expression #Variation

Trained as a musician, [photographer Ansel] Adams understood the richness of variation that could be unfolded from a simple theme.
-- John Szarkowski

#Music #Simple #Variation

Ninety percent of the book variations have no great value, because either they contain mistakes or they are based on fallacious assumptions; just forget about the openings and spend all that time on the endings.
-- Jose Raul Capablanca

#Mistake #Book #Variation

The morphological characteristics of plant and animal species form the chief subject of the descriptive natural sciences and are the criteria for their classification. But not until recently has it been recognized that in living organisms, as in the realm of crystals, chemical differences parallel the variation in structure.
-- Karl Landsteiner

#Animal #Differences #Variation

I am a great believer in variations on the routine.
-- Kaye Gibbons

#Routine #Variation #Believer

Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Variation #Matter #Sin

Being gay is a natural normal beautiful variation on being human. Period. End of subject. Therefore, any argument which says differently is an immoral supremacist one. Call it out as such. ... Be outraged, offended, angry and intolerant of any discussion or any one who describes you as unequal, undeserving or unnatural for being just as you are.
-- Larry Kramer

#Beautiful #Gay #Variation

In modern praxis lost positions are salvaged most often when the play is highly complicated with many sharp dynamic variations to be calculated.
-- Leonid Shamkovich

#Play #Variation #Chess

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation
-- Lillian Hellman

#Confidence #Variation #Statistician

The variation between countries is partly due to cultural and institutional differences, but undoubtedly the economic landscape within each territory is crucial.
-- Lorna Byrne

#Country #Differences #Variation

Then I began to play. Variations on a G major chord, the most wonderful chord known to mankind, infinitely happy. I could live inside a G major chord, with Grace, if she was willing. Everything uncomplicated and good about me could be summed up by that chord.
-- Maggie Stiefvater

#Play #Grace #Variation

It amazes me that we are all on Twitter and Facebook. By "we" I mean adults. We're adults, right? But emotionally we're a culture of seven-year-olds. Have you ever had that moment when are you updating your status and you realize that every status update is just a variation on a single request: "Would someone please acknowledge me?
-- Marc Maron

#Mean #Years #Variation

Perhaps bacteria may tentatively be regarded as biochemical experiments; owing to their relatively small size and rapid growth, variations must arise much more frequently than in more differentiated forms of life, and they can in addition afford to occupy more precarious positions in natural economy than larger organisms with more exacting requirements.
-- Marjory Stephenson

#Growth #Variation #Owing

Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
-- Mary McCarthy

#Variation #Morality #Uncertain

Number is the Word but is not utterance it is wave and light, though no one sees it it is rhythm and music, though no one hears it. Its variations are limitless and yet it is immutable. Each form of life is a particular reverberation of Number.
-- Maurice Druon

#Numbers #Light #Variation

You may even have Jews in your midst who did not learn their way of life from us, and did not inherit it from a Jewish forebear. We may have authentic gentiles in our midst: these single protests are of no account; they are extreme and irrelevant variations.
-- Maurice Samuel

#Variation #May #Way

Everybody has a theme. You talk to somebody awhile, and you realize they have one particular thing that rules them. The best you can do is a variation on the theme, but that's about it.
-- Meg Wolitzer

#Motivation #Variation #Realizing

I want to focus on each scene. I'm a real perfectionist, and I don't want to feel like I didn't consider every possible variation of a scene. I come from a theater background, so I'm used to a lot of repetition, and I'm used to really attacking something over and over and over again.
-- Michael Shannon

#Real #Focus #Variation

When my opponent's clock is going I discuss general considerations in an internal dialogue with myself. When my own clock is going I analyse conctrete variations.
-- Mikhail Botvinnik

#Variation #Opponents #Chess

Capablanca's phenomenal move-searching algorithm in those early years, when he possessed a wonderful ability for calculating variations very rapidly, made him invincible.
-- Mikhail Botvinnik

#Moving #Years #Variation

Films have gotten leaner and leaner, cutting out all variations from the story line.
-- Neil Jordan

#Cutting #Variation #Lines

The variations I've composed on the graceful Neapolitan ditty, 'Oh Mamma, Mama Cara,' outshine everything. I can't describe it
-- Niccolo Paganini

#Mama #Variation #Popularity

The problem with digital architecture is that an algorithm can produce endless variations, so an architect has many choices.
-- Peter Eisenman

#Choices #Variation #Algorithms

The moment at which music reveals its true nature is contained in the ancient exercise of the theme with variations. The complete mystery of music is explained right there.
-- Pierre Schaeffer

#Exercise #Variation #Mystery

My serve can get better, for sure. It's not just about serving bombs, but positioning, variation in speed, in spin.
-- Rafael Nadal

#Get Better #Variation #Bombs

All animals are minor variations on a very particular theme.
-- Richard Dawkins

#Animal #Variation #Theme

Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.
-- Richard Holbrooke

#Variation #Jazz #Endless

Cuvier had preceded Lamarck in specifying the kinds and degrees of variation, which his own observations and critical judgment of the reports of others led him to admit.
-- Richard Owen

#Variation #Degrees #Kind

It is said that an ounce of common sense can outweigh a ton of 'variations'.
-- Savielly Tartakower

#Common Sense #Chess #Variation

Shall we ever live to see the following wise prohibition - the audience is forbidden to smoke and the masters are forbidden to 'smoke out' the audience by playing exchanging variations?
-- Savielly Tartakower

#Wise #Variation #Chess

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
-- Seamus Heaney

#Wise #Variation #World

They've offered me every variation on Audrey Horne, none of which were as good or as much fun.
-- Sherilyn Fenn

#Fun #Variation #Audrey

You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited - and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.
-- Stephen Jay Gould

#Together #Variation #Facts

I think the eyeball is the same, [in] an American or African. The problem is the same, the treatment is the same. Yet why should there be so much variation in quality and in service?
-- Thulasiraj Ravilla

#Thinking #Quality #Variation

I had the afro when I was in high school. I had the flattop during a short period in the early '90s. And I've had different variations of dreadlocks. I'll admit to those!
-- Tim Meadows

#School #Variation #Afros

We're interested by public personas and private personas, otherwise we wouldn't put on with actors rambling on with the same kind of stuff, over and over again, saying variations of the same thing. I'm always amazed by how fascinated people still are by actors because it's the same version of events that actors describe, all the time.
-- Toby Jones

#People #Rambling #Variation

Postulate 3. Assignable causes of variation may be found and eliminated.
-- Walter A. Shewhart

#May #Causes #Variation

The interaction of the variation in our genes is what's responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor.
-- Walter Gilbert

#Variation #Vigor #Responsible

Etching will suggest subtle variations of tone, the most delicate shadings, all with black lines, which, as far as lines go, are unsurpassed for sheer beauty.
-- Walter J. Phillips

#Black #Variation #Lines

The positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance....Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism.
-- William A. Dembski

#Variation #Want #Resistance

The only work that can be compared to Chopin's Etudes, innovatively, where every note is essential and one becomes completely exposed, is the Brahms-Paganini variations. These are etudes - not as interesting musically as, say, the Brahms-Handel - but they are incredible.
-- Carlo Grante

#Interesting #Essentials #Variation

Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the future, or underlying purpose.
-- Henry Gee

#Memories #Purpose #Variation

Some of my favorite music is incredibly repetitive, or on the surface has an element of repetition. But once you go beneath the surface, you realize in the repetition is constant variation.
-- John Dieterich

#Variation #Elements #Realizing