Data are just summaries of thousands of stories - tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful. — Dan Heath
The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition — thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not. — Michael Shermer
A pint of example is worth a gallon of advice — Unknown
You can argue with someone's opinion, but you can't argue with their story. — Nicky Cruz
Nothing spoils a good story like the arrival of an eyewitness. — Mark Twain
Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. — W. S. Gilbert
I tell a little bit of my life to them, and they tell a little of theirs to me. The picture itself is just the tip of the iceberg. — Sebastiao Salgado
Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example. — Arthur Conan Doyle
The doctor may also learn more about the illness from the way the patient tells the story than from the story itself. — James B. Herrick
Your most powerful weapon in proving out a category is customer testimony. — David O. Sacks
As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened. — Kazuo Ishiguro
Audiences forget facts, but they remember stories. Once you get past the jargon, the corporate world is an endless source of fascinating stories. — Ian P. Griffin
Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not. — Michael Shermer
The Dance: A minimum of explanation, a minimum of anecdotes - and a maximum of sensations. — Maurice Bejart
Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit. — Mark Rothko
As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer. — Robert Quillen
The plural of anecdote is not data. — Marc Bekoff
One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography. — William Ellery Channing
Washing dishes is the anecdote to confusion. I know that for a fact. — Maira Kalman
An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea. — Carol Bly
Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes — Isaac Barrow
Good anecdote--bad reality. — Carrie Fisher
I'm no good at anecdotes. — Kelly Macdonald
Anecdotal Image Quotes
Anecdotal Evidence Quotes
The U.S has acquired reservoirs of goodwill around the globe over many years. But it is clear - from polling data and ample anecdotal evidence - that America is losing its allure in much of the world. — Lee H. Hamilton
Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless. — Katherine Dunn
Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state. — T. S. Eliot
MacKinnon's treatment of the central issue of pornography as she herself poses it - the harm that pornography does to women - is shockingly causal. Much of her evidence is anecdotal, and in a nation of 260 Million people, anecdotes are a weak form of evidence. — Richard Posner
If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. — Carl Sagan
There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that most champions are born into certain environments and encouraged early. Then, later on, they might get some assistance from their federations. — Jim Courier
I've been among their critics [MBA programs]. Much of what I've seen in business schools is quite non-rigorous. Anecdotal histories are stretched to illustrate favored slogans. Evidence of their effectiveness is similarly anecdotal. — Charles R. Morris
During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on? — Kate Millett
Both my assistant and my wife tell me that during battle scenes, when a character is making a 'guwaa' sort of face, my face also ends up going 'guwaa.' So afterwards, my whole face is tired. — Akira Toriyama
Always have a book at hand, in the parlor, on the table, for the family; a book of condensed thought and striking anecdote, of sound maxims and truthful apothegms. It will impress on your own mind a thousand valuable suggestions, and teach your children a thousand lessons of truth and duty. Such a book is a casket of jewels for your housebold. — Tryon Edwards
About 100 things that your kid will do that will surprise you and break your heart and it will be a combination of fact based therapy, medically advised kinds of passages accompanied by celebrity anecdotes and just some funny stuff to lighten the load. — Alan Thicke
In the mid-noughties some of these anecdotes, observational studies and marketing claims were finally tested in a number of properly randomised trials that looked at the trendiest antioxidant vitamins, especially carotene, selenium and vitamin E. They detected no benefit whatsoever for heart disease and in fact found a significantly increased cancer and heart failure risk in the groups taking them. — Tim Spector
Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness. — Mark Rothko
The 'EU in a Nutshell' is a miscellany of facts and anecdotes about the system which rules us. It's a book you can delve into in pursuit of a particular fact, or crack open for entertainment at virtually any page. — Daniel Hannan
Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters. — Kazimir Malevich
The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact. — Georges Braque
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about. — Alice Munro
After a person dies, his biographers feel free to give him a glittering list of intimate friends. Anecdotes are so much tastier spiced with expensive names. — Louise Brooks
(I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times. — Mark Rothko
Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell. — Jan Morris
Second, they [those who disagree with market efficiency] always claim they know a man, a bank, or a fund that does do better. Alas, anecdotes are not science. And once Wharton School dissertations seek to quantify the performers, these have a tendency to evaporate into the air - or, at least, into statistically insignificant t-statistics. — Paul Samuelson
Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics. — Steven Pinker
Anecdotes are sometimes the best vehicles of truth, and if striking and appropriate are often more impressive and powerful than argument. — Tryon Edwards
Due to the potent combination of my sexual recklessness and the slutty nature of some of the girls I have slept with, I have accumulated enough stories and anecdotes about abortion that they could name a Planned Parenthood clinic after me. — Tucker Max
What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote. — Martin Heidegger
He sits in his car at traffic lights on his way out sometimes and tries to estimate how many times he has sat here, waiting at these traffic lights on his way somewhere without you, hoping to meet someone with the capacity to consign you to an anecdote, to be eventually confused with others — Elliot Perlman
I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on. I had friends when we were kids getting into trouble for telling anecdotes about Communist leaders. — Jan Koum
Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation. — Alberto Manguel
I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets.... you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking. — Dorothy Parker
There is something about the creative process... which is that you can't talk about it. You try to think of anecdotes about it, and you try to explain, but you're never really saying what happened... it's a sort of happy accident. — Betty Comden
Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography. — Anita Brookner
Anecdotes and maxims are rich treasures to the man of the world, for he knows how to introduce the former at fit place in conversation. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If you have an anecdote from one source, you file it away. If you hear it again, it may be true. Then the more times you hear it the less likely it is to be true. — Anthony Holden
Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story. — Alice Munro
Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order. — Maurice Denis
The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art. — Clement Greenberg
Being an entrepreneur, everyone needs to hear a personal anecdote from you once in a while or see you go out of your way to make someone's day. Maybe it's time for a party at your house to unwind, or an afternoon off with the team to attend the ball game. — Martin Zwilling
The dogs in our lives, the dogs we come to love and who (we fervently believe) love us in return, offer more than fidelity, consolation, and companionship. They offer comedy, irony, wit, and a wealth of anecdotes, the "shaggy dog stories" and "stupid pet tricks" that are commonplace pleasures of life. — Marjorie Garber
In Conclusion
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