Famous quotes containing the word probable:
“I have very lately read the Prince of Abyssinia [Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas]MI am almost equally charmed and shocked at it—the style, the sentiments are inimitable—but the subject is dreadful—and, handled as it is by Dr. Johnson, might make any young, perhaps old, person tremble—O heavens! how dreadful, how terrible it is to be told by a man of his genius and knowledge, in so affectingly probable a manner, that true, real happiness is ever unattainable in this world!”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“It makes me hate accepting things that are probable when they are held up before me as infallibly true. I prefer these words which tone down and modify the hastiness of our propositions: “Perhaps, In some sort, Some, They say, I think,” and the like.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)