Famous quotes containing the words arithmetic, function, prime and/or power:
“‘Tis no extravagant arithmetic to say, that for every ten jokes,—thou hast got an hundred enemies; and till thou hast gone on, and raised a swarm of wasps about thine ears, and art half stung to death by them, thou wilt never be convinced it is so.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how to be men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“And this must be the prime of life . . . I blink,
As if at pain; for it is pain, to think
This pantomime
Of compensating act and counter-act,
Defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact,
My ablest time.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truth ... unless we can trust to the human mind’s having such a power of guessing right that before very many hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined.”
—Charles S. Pierce (1839–1914)