Manage Quotes (26 quotes)
“You know that it is quite preposterous of you to chase rainbows,” said the sane person to the
poet.
“Yet it would be rather beautiful if I did one day manage to catch one,” mused the poet.
“Yet it would be rather beautiful if I did one day manage to catch one,” mused the poet.
'Dreams' in Little Stings (1907, 1908), 59.

A chemist on Labor Day, bright,
Crafted a barbecue sauce, just right.
With beakers and flasks,
He managed the tasks,
Concocting a flavor delight.
Crafted a barbecue sauce, just right.
With beakers and flasks,
He managed the tasks,
Concocting a flavor delight.
Limerick and art by Artificial Intelligence. Prompt by Webmaster.
Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to [money management]; for. ... want of attention to pecuniary matters … has impeded the progress of science and of genius itself.
Advice to Young Men (1833), 50.
Business men are to be pitied who do not recognize the fact that the largest side of their secular business is benevolence. ... No man ever manages a legitimate business in this life without doing indirectly far more for other men than he is trying to do for himself.
Defining what makes a business legitimate. In Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887), 44.
Change—and extinctions—are inevitable. There are many things totally out of our control. I think we have to come up with a formula that will enable us to preserve biodiversity without necessarily managing it in the sense of trying to freeze it in time. It can't be kept as we first knew it.
From interview with Scott Harris, 'Conversations: Richard Leakey (July-Aug '96)' originally on website of emagazine.com.
Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'être. Virtually all of our aunts and uncles had Ph.D.s in science or engineering, and it was taken for granted that the next generation of Chu's were to follow the family tradition. When the dust had settled, my two brothers and four cousins collected three MDs, four Ph.D.s and a law degree. I could manage only a single advanced degree.
Autobiography in Gösta Ekspong (ed.), Nobel Lectures: Physics 1996-2000 (2002), 115.
Gel’fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly. I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel’fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences!
In '1991 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize', Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Mar 1991), 38, No. 3, 186. This is from her acceptance of the 1991 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize.
Guide to understanding a net.addict’s day:
Slow day: didn’t have much to do, so spent three hours on usenet.
Busy day: managed to work in three hours of usenet.
Bad day: barely squeezed in three hours of usenet.
Slow day: didn’t have much to do, so spent three hours on usenet.
Busy day: managed to work in three hours of usenet.
Bad day: barely squeezed in three hours of usenet.
Probably originated earlier, but Webmaster found it posted, cited as Anonymous, in the alt.quotations discussion group, at least as early as 2009.
He will manage the cure best who has foreseen what is to happen from the present state of matters.
In 'The Book of Prognostics', Part 1 (400 BC), as translated by Francis Adams, The Genuine Works of Hippocrates (1849), Vol. 1, 113. Also seen translated as “He will manage the cure best who foresees what is to happen from the present condition of the patient.”
I believe in the not-too-distant future, people are going to learn to trust their information to the Net more than they now do, and be able to essentially manage very large amounts and perhaps their whole lifetime of information in the Net with the notion that they can access it securely and privately for as long as they want, and that it will persist over all the evolution and technical changes.
From transcript of interview by Steve Inskeep, 'Computing Pioneers Discuss the State of the Net', Morning Edition (22 Aug 2005) on npr.org website.
I have mentioned mathematics as a way to settle in the mind a habit of reasoning closely and in train; not that I think it necessary that all men should be deep mathematicians, but that, having got the way of reasoning which that study necessarily brings the mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge, as they shall have occasion. For in all sorts of reasoning, every single argument should be managed as a mathematical demonstration; the connection and dependence of ideas should be followed till the mind is brought to the source on which it bottoms, and observes the coherence all along; …
In The Conduct of the Understanding, Sect. 7.
I never could do anything with figures, never had any talent for mathematics, never accomplished anything in my efforts at that rugged study, and to-day the only mathematics I know is multiplication, and the minute I get away up in that, as soon as I reach nine times seven— [He lapsed into deep thought, trying to figure nine times seven. Mr. McKelway whispered the answer to him.] I’ve got it now. It’s eighty-four. Well, I can get that far all right with a little hesitation. After that I am uncertain, and I can’t manage a statistic.
Speech at the New York Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind (29 Mar 1906). In Mark Twain and William Dean Howells (ed.), Mark Twain’s Speeches? (1910), 323.
I think people get it upside down when they say the unambiguous is the reality and the ambiguous is merely uncertainty about what is really unambiguous. Let’s turn it around the other way: the ambiguous is the reality and the unambiguous is merely a special case of it, where we finally manage to pin down some very special aspect.
In William Byers, How Mathematicians Think (2007), 25.
It is now necessary to indicate more definitely the reason why mathematics not only carries conviction in itself, but also transmits conviction to the objects to which it is applied. The reason is found, first of all, in the perfect precision with which the elementary mathematical concepts are determined; in this respect each science must look to its own salvation .... But this is not all. As soon as human thought attempts long chains of conclusions, or difficult matters generally, there arises not only the danger of error but also the suspicion of error, because since all details cannot be surveyed with clearness at the same instant one must in the end be satisfied with a belief that nothing has been overlooked from the beginning. Every one knows how much this is the case even in arithmetic, the most elementary use of mathematics. No one would imagine that the higher parts of mathematics fare better in this respect; on the contrary, in more complicated conclusions the uncertainty and suspicion of hidden errors increases in rapid progression. How does mathematics manage to rid itself of this inconvenience which attaches to it in the highest degree? By making proofs more rigorous? By giving new rules according to which the old rules shall be applied? Not in the least. A very great uncertainty continues to attach to the result of each single computation. But there are checks. In the realm of mathematics each point may be reached by a hundred different ways; and if each of a hundred ways leads to the same point, one may be sure that the right point has been reached. A calculation without a check is as good as none. Just so it is with every isolated proof in any speculative science whatever; the proof may be ever so ingenious, and ever so perfectly true and correct, it will still fail to convince permanently. He will therefore be much deceived, who, in metaphysics, or in psychology which depends on metaphysics, hopes to see his greatest care in the precise determination of the concepts and in the logical conclusions rewarded by conviction, much less by success in transmitting conviction to others. Not only must the conclusions support each other, without coercion or suspicion of subreption, but in all matters originating in experience, or judging concerning experience, the results of speculation must be verified by experience, not only superficially, but in countless special cases.
In Werke [Kehrbach] (1890), Bd. 5, 105. As quoted, cited and translated in Robert Édouard Moritz, Memorabilia Mathematica; Or, The Philomath’s Quotation-Book (1914), 19.
It usually develops that after much laborious and frustrating effort the investigator of environmental physiology succeeds in proving that the animal in question can actually exist where it lives. It is always somewhat discouraging for an investigator to realize that his efforts can be made to appear so trite, but this statement does not belittle the ecological physiologist. If his data assist the understanding of the ways in which an animal manages to live where it does, he makes an important contribution to the study of distribution, for the present is necessarily a key to the past.”
From 'The role of physiology in the distribution of terrestrial vertebrates', collected in C.L. Hubbs (ed.), Zoogeography: Publ. 51 (1958), 84.
Occasionally he stumbled over the truth but he always picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
As given in 'Picturesque Speech', Reader’s Digest (April 1942), 40, 92. Churchill was describing his political adversary Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, according to an “ear-witness”, estimated as said “around 1936”, printed in Kay Halle, Irrepressible Churchill: A Treasury of Winston Churchill's Wit (1966), 133; therein given as: “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.” Also seen variously misquoted for example, such as: “man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.” There is a full discussion on the quoteinvestigator.com website. [Note: the date estimate may have been inferred from Baldwin’s 1935-1937 term in office. —Webmaster.
The ants and the bees are, in many ways, far more intelligent and ingenious; they manage their government with vastly less quarreling, wastefulness and imbecility.
From The Smart Set (Aug 1919), 61. Collected in 'Man’s Place in Nature', A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949, 1956), 4.
The fact is that up to now the free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning-from minding other people’s business-and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual’s sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman’s sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
In 'Concerning Individual Freedom', The Ordeal of Change (1963), 141.
The teacher manages to get along still with the cumbersome algebraic analysis, in spite of its difficulties and imperfections, and avoids the smooth infinitesimal calculus, although the eighteenth century shyness toward it had long lost all point.
Elementary Mathematics From an Advanced Standpoint (1908). 3rd edition (1924), trans. E. R. Hedrick and C. A. Noble (1932), Vol. 1, 155.
There is a noble vision of the great Castle of Mathematics, towering somewhere in the Platonic World of Ideas, which we humbly and devotedly discover (rather than invent). The greatest mathematicians manage to grasp outlines of the Grand Design, but even those to whom only a pattern on a small kitchen tile is revealed, can be blissfully happy. … Mathematics is a proto-text whose existence is only postulated but which nevertheless underlies all corrupted and fragmentary copies we are bound to deal with. The identity of the writer of this proto-text (or of the builder of the Castle) is anybody’s guess. …
In 'Mathematical Knowledge: Internal, Social, and Cultural Aspects', Mathematics As Metaphor: Selected Essays (2007), 4.
Those who are good at archery learnt from the bow and not from Yi the Archer. Those who know how to manage boats learnt from boats and not from Wo (the legendary mighty boatman). Those who can think learnt for themselves and not from the sages.
— Kuan-Yin
As quoted in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 2: History of Scientific Thought (1956), 73, citing “in the Kuan Yin Tzu, a Taoist book of Thang (perhaps + 8th century).” Also in Alan L. Mackay, A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991), 144, citing Needham.
To be a good professional engineer, always start to study late for exams. Because it teaches you how to manage time and tackle emergencies.
Webmaster has not yet found a primary source to verify this quote. Can you help?
To the extent that remaining old-growth Douglas fir ecosystems possess unique structural and functional characteristics distinct from surrounding managed forests, the analogy between forest habitat islands and oceanic islands applies. Forest planning decision variables such as total acreage to be maintained, patch size frequency distribution, spatial distribution of patches, specific locations, and protective measures all need to be addressed.
In The Fragmented Forest: Island Biogeography Theory and the Preservation of Biotic Diversity (1984), 6.
We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.
From From Eros to Gaia (1993). In Bill Swainson, Encarta Book of Quotations (2000), 299.
When, in an experiment, all known causes being allowed for, there remain certain unexplained effects (excessively slight it may be), these must be carefully investigated, and every conceivable variation of arrangement of apparatus, etc., tried ; until, if possible, we manage so to exaggerate the residual phenomenon as to be able to detect its cause. It is here, perhaps, that in the present state of science we may most reasonably look for extensions of our knowledge
In William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait, Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867), Vol. 1, 306.
You ask me how, with so much study, I manage to retene my health. ... Morpheous is my last companion ; without 8 or 9 hours of him yr correspondent is not worth one scavenger's peruke. My practices did at ye first hurt my stomach, but now I eat heartily enou' as y’ will see when I come down beside you. [On the value of sleep, and harm of eating poorly while intent on study.]
Letter to Dr. Law (15 Dec 1716) as quoted in Norman Lockyer, (ed.), Nature (25 May 1881), 24, 39. The source refers to it as an unpublished letter.