Famous quotes containing the word probable:
“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 (15331592)
“I have very lately read the Prince of Abyssinia [Samuel Johnsons Rasselas]MI am almost equally charmed and shocked at itthe style, the sentiments are inimitablebut the subject is dreadfuland, handled as it is by Dr. Johnson, might make any young, perhaps old, person trembleO 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 (17521840)
“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 (384323 B.C.)