Tentative Quotes - page 2

Where do babies come from? Don't bother asking adults. They lie like pigs. However, diligent independent research and hours of playground consultation have yielded fruitful, if tentative, results. There are several theories. Near as we can figure out, it has something to do with acting ridiculous in the dark. We believe it is similar to dogs when they act peculiar and ride each other. This is called "making love". Careful study of popular song lyrics, advertising catch-lines, TV sitcoms, movies, and T-Shirt inscriptions offers us significant clues as to its nature. Apparently it makes grown-ups insipid and insane. Some graffiti was once observed that said "sex is good." (Matt Groening)
Where do babies come from Don't bother asking adults. They lie like pigs. However, diligent independent research and hours of playground consultation have yielded fruitful, if tentative, results. There are several theories. Near as we can figure out, it has something to do with acting ridiculous in the dark. We believe it is similar to dogs when they act peculiar and ride each other. This is called making love. Careful study of popular song lyrics, advertising catch-lines, TV sitcoms, movies, and T-Shirt inscriptions offers us significant clues as to its nature. Apparently it makes grown-ups insipid and insane. Some graffiti was once observed that said sex is good. All available evidence, however, points to the contrary. View quote
Matt Groening
I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tentative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience: This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightly. Those times that can fly. View quote
Peter Heller
But sometimes, maybe most times, it isn't that clear. It is dark and you are near the edge of a cliff, but you're moving slowly, not sure which direction you're heading in. Your steps are tentative but they are still blind in the night. You don't realize how close you are to the edge, how the soft earth could give away, how you could just slip a bit and suddenly plunge into the dark. View quote
Harlan Coben
Running at night used to frighten me. Part of it was simply safety, the question of whether level ground would truly appear under each tentative footstep, and whether the temporary but complete blindness suffered while running toward headlights was, in fact, concealing death. View quote
Don Kardong
Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers. View quote
Tim O'Brien
Conceptual expressions are tentative and provisional... [because] the intellectual account... are constructed theories of experience. View quote
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
See, they return ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back. View quote
Ezra Pound
In every form of research there must be a beginning. We own to much that is tentative, much that may turn out erroneous. But it is thus, and thus only, that each science in turn takes its stand. I venture to assert that both in actual careful record of new and important facts, and in suggestiveness, our society's work and publications will form no unworthy preface to a profounder science both of man, of nature, and of "worlds not realized" than this planet has yet known. View quote
William Crookes
REFUSAL, n. Denial of something desired Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists the refusal assentive. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself. (Arundhati Roy)
It's yet another mark of Auden's superiority that whereas his contemporaries could be didactic about what they had merely thought or read, Auden could be tentative about what he felt in his bones. View quote
Clive James
The future announces itself from afar. But most people are not listening. The noisy clatter of the present drowns out the tentative sound of things to come. The sound of the new does not fit old perceptual patterns and goes unnoticed by most people. And of the few who do perceive something coming, most lack the energy, initiative, courage or will to do anything about it. Leaders who have the wit to perceive and the courage to act will be credited with a gift of prophecy that they do not necessarily have." View quote
John W. Gardner
As I thought about this, I noted that the bacterium is just a physical system; it's just a bunch of molecules that hang together and do things to one another. So, I wondered, what characteristics are necessary for a physical system to be an autonomous agent? After thinking about this for a number of months I came up with a tentative definition. My definition is that an autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time. View quote
Stuart Kauffman
Congress, after years of stalling, finally got around to clearing the way for informal discussions that might lead to possible formal talks that could potentially produce some kind of tentative agreements... View quote
Dave Barry
Our maturity is evidenced by our beginning to take responsibility for our planet on a global scale, albeit in a very tentative, barely discernible way. We are beginning to realize what we are doing to our environment... We are beginning to see that we cannot go on despoiling the planet, polluting the air, rivers and oceans. View quote
Benjamin Creme
There wasn't any answer to that. So he tried harder, and the question got more circumstantial and tentative, and at the same time more precise and exact; and still there were no answers, only the fuller and fuller form of the question, evolving as Auberon had described to her all life evolving, reaching out limbs and inventing organs, reticulating joints, doing and being in more and more complex yet more and more compact and individuated ways, until the question, perfectly asked, understood its own answerlessness. View quote
John Crowley
The greater the speed required of us in the digital world – and speed does matter, but never at the expense of accuracy or fairness or anything which would imperil trust – the more we should be honest about the tentative nature of what is possible. View quote
Alan Rusbridger
Simi­larly calculating from the available figures for the three coun­tr­ies, the Hindu per­centage had come down to 65.15% in 1991. To evaluate the trend of the Hindu percentage, we must take into account that the pre-Indepen­dence census always had a tentative category "trib­al" or "animist", variously defined and therefore making odd quantitative jumps (but always between 2.26% and 3.26%), from 2.57% in 1881 to 2.26% in 1941. After Indepen­dence, this category was included in the Hindu categ­ory. So, putting everything on the post-In­dependence deno­mi­nator, we include the "animists" in the Hindu percentage to get a total Hindu percentage of 77.35% for 1881, 71.72% for 1941, and 65.15% for 1991. Here again, we see a long-term ac­celerat­ion of the ob­served trend: a decrease of 5.63% in the sixty years between 1881 and 1941, and a larger decre­ase of 6.57% in the shorter period of fifty years bet­ween 1941 and 1991. View quote
Koenraad Elst
Sexual behaviour in our species goes through three characteristic phases: pair-formation, pre-copulatory activity, and copulation, usually but not always in that order. The pair-formation stage, usually referred to as courtship, is remarkably prolonged by animal standards, frequently lasting for weeks or even months. As with many other species it is characterized by tentative, ambivalent behaviour involving conflicts between fear, aggression and sexual attraction. The nervousness and hesitancy is slowly reduced if the mutual sexual signals are strong enough. View quote
Desmond Morris