Famous quotes containing the words precision, instrument and/or approach:
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Prayer is not an old womans idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (18691948)
“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmers hearth,how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)