Guesswork Quotes

The Moon and Mars were the two most likely candidates for life in the solar system; what exists beyond our solar system is mere guesswork. (Walter Lang)

We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.

Terry Pratchett

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.

Paul Theroux

My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter - so was my father - and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files and rulers. It all dealt with conciseness and precision. It eliminated guesswork. One has to know his tools, so he doesn't work against himself.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Most people are too indifferent or lazy to acquire facts with which to think accurately. They prefer to act on "opinions" created by guesswork or snap-judgments.

Napoleon Hill

C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance.

Erik Naggum

In order to predict effectively, we need to use science. And the reason that we need to use science is because then we can reproduce what we're doing; it's not just wisdom or guesswork. And if we can predict, then we can engineer the future.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

The one thing I have learned about editing over the years is that you have to edit and publish out of your own tastes, enthusiasms, and concerns, and not out of notions or guesswork about what other people might like to read.

Norman Cousins

The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.

Bill James

It takes me forever to say my prayers these days, but I don't care, because this time around, I want to make sure God doesn't have to do any guesswork.

Terry McMillan

Very few people ever had the opportunity to see Cézanne at work, because he could not endure being watched while at the easel. For one who has seen him paint, it is difficult to imagine how slow and painful his progress was on certain days. In my portrait there are two little spots of canvas on the hand which are not covered. I called Cézanne's attention to them. "If the copy I'm making in the Louvre turns out well," he replied, "perhaps I will be able tomorrow to find the exact tone to cover up those spots. Don't you see, Monsieur Vollard, that if I put something there by guesswork, I might have to paint the whole canvas over starting from that point?" The prospect made me tremble.
During the period that Cézanne was working on my portrait, he was also occupied with a large composition of nudes, begun about 1895, on which he labored almost to the end of his life. (Paul Cézanne)

Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork. You want to find out what the facts are, and what you do is in that respect similar to what a laboratory technician does. Possibly philosophers would look on us mathematicians the same way as we look on the technicians, if they dared.

Paul Halmos