Tact Quotes (8 quotes)
It is above all the duty of the methodical text-book to adapt itself to the pupil’s power of comprehension, only challenging his higher efforts with the increasing development of his imagination, his logical power and the ability of abstraction. This indeed constitutes a test of the art of teaching, it is here where pedagogic tact becomes manifest. In reference to the axioms, caution is necessary. It should be pointed out comparatively early, in how far the mathematical body differs from the material body. Furthermore, since mathematical bodies are really portions of space, this space is to be conceived as mathematical space and to be clearly distinguished from real or physical space. Gradually the student will become conscious that the portion of the real space which lies beyond the visible stellar universe is not cognizable through the senses, that we know nothing of its properties and consequently have no basis for judgments concerning it. Mathematical space, on the other hand, may be subjected to conditions, for instance, we may condition its properties at infinity, and these conditions constitute the axioms, say the Euclidean axioms. But every student will require years before the conviction of the truth of this last statement will force itself upon him.
In Methodisches Lehrbuch der Elementar-Mathemalik (1904), Teil I, Vorwort, 4-5.
It is, so to speak, a scientific tact, which must guide mathematicians in their investigations, and guard them from spending their forces on scientifically worthless problems and abstruse realms, a tact which is closely related to esthetic tact and which is the only thing in our science which cannot be taught or acquired, and is yet the indispensable endowment of every mathematician.
In Die Entwickelung der Mathematik in den letzten Jahrhunderten (1869), 28. As translated in Robert Édouard Moritz, Memorabilia Mathematica; Or, The Philomath’s Quotation-book (1914), 92. From the original German, “Es ist, so zu sagen, ein wissenschaftlicher Tact, welcher die Mathematiker bei ihren Untersuchungen leiten, und sie davor bewahren muss, ihre Kräfte auf wissenschaftlich werthlose Probleme und abstruse Gebiete zu wenden, ein Tact, der dem ästhetischen nahe verwandt, das einzige ist, was in unserer Wissenschaft nicht gelehrt und gelernt werden kann, aber eine unentbehrliche Mitgift eines Mathematikers sein sollte.”
No special virtues are needed [other than those of an ordinary woman, are needed for a nurse], but the circumstances demand the exercise of them in a special way. There are seven, the mystic seven, your lamps to lighten at … tact, tidiness, taciturnity, sympathy, gentleness, cheerfulness, all linked together by charity.
In Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler (1929), Vol. 2, 361. From a letter replying when asked for his opinion whether “special virtues are needed for a nurse,” to which he referred in a commencement address (7 May 1913) to the Johns Hopkins nurses, Johns Hopkins Hospital Nurses' Alumnae Magazine, (Jul 1913), xii, 72-81, as cited in above book.
Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.
Samuel Butler, Henry Festing Jones (ed.), The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1917), 222.
Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far.
In A Call to Order (1926), 7.
Tact is the saving virtue without which no woman can be a success in any way, as a nurse or not. She may have all the others, but without tact she is a failure.
In Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler (1929), Vol. 2, 361.
The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not; he must take care not to be the slave of his symbols, but always to have before his mind the realities which they merely serve to express. For these and other reasons it seems to me of the highest importance that a mathematician should be trained in no narrow school; a wide course of reading in the first few years of his mathematical study cannot fail to influence for good the character of the whole of his subsequent work.
In Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A, (1890), Nature, 42, 467.
The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not.
In Presidential Address to the 60th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (Sep 1890), published in Report of the Annual Meeting (1891), 60, 725.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
