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It is curious how much more interest can be evoked by a mixture of gossip, romance and mystery than by facts.
I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.
Instead of making up stories, stay with the facts. For example, "I am ruined" is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. "I have 50 cents left in my bank account" is a fact.
If you repeat it, it's true. If you repeat it, it's true. And through repetition, something becomes true. If you repeat it enough. Until it becomes true. Or do I need to repeat that for you?
To her Cheshire smile, I'll stand on file, she's all I ever wanted. But you let your blue walls get in the way of these facts.
I gut check my show. I say, I say, "Gut, gut, does that feel true to you?" And Gut says, "Yes it does, Stephen. Let's get a grilled cheese sandwich."
Only feeble minds are paralyzed by facts.
Facts can't be recounted; much less twice over, and far less still by different persons. I've already drummed that thoroughly into your head.
Fact is richer than diction.
We (the FBI) are a fact-gathering organization only. We don't clear anybody. We don't condemn anybody.
Facts mean nothing unless they are rightly understood, rightly related and rightly interpreted.
As Mr. Nagle so competently points out, almost no one uses Eiffel; in fact until recently there were only 9 users. But now a 10th person just started, so we are holding a conference, appropriately titled the TENTH Eiffel USER conference, to celebrate.
Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.
Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for the average programmer, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.
I want my legacy to be that I was a man of character, I was a God fearing man and somebody who bettered the sport in terms of the way I represented the sport. But also that fact that I was a fierce competitor and fought the best in the world and was able to come out on top, so if those things could be said about me, then I look at it as a job well done.
I review all I know, but can synthesize no meaning. When I doze, the Fact, the certain accomplished calamity, wakes me roughly like a brutal nurse. I see it crouching inflexibly in a corner of the ceiling. It comes down in geometrical diagonal like lightning.It says, I remain, I AM, I shall never cease to be: your memory will grow a deathly glaze: you will forget, you will fade out, but I cannot be undone.Thus every quarter hour it puts the taste of death in my mouth, and shows me, but not gently, how I go whoring after oblivion.
Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.
We're terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don't know.
For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue.
And you know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that. We get rid of the people who, in fact, were exercising that.
But that the reasoning from these facts, the drawing from them correct conclusions, is a matter of great difficulty, may be inferred from the imperfect state in which the Science is now found after it has been so long and so intensely studied.
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