64 Anecdotal Quotes

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Short Anecdotal Quotes

  • The Dance: A minimum of explanation, a minimum of anecdotes - and a maximum of sensations. β€” Maurice Bejart
  • Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit. β€” Mark Rothko
  • As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer. β€” Robert Quillen
  • The plural of anecdote is not data. β€” Marc Bekoff
  • One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography. β€” William Ellery Channing
  • Washing dishes is the anecdote to confusion. I know that for a fact. β€” Maira Kalman
  • An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea. β€” Carol Bly
  • Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes β€” Isaac Barrow
  • Good anecdote--bad reality. β€” Carrie Fisher
  • I'm no good at anecdotes. β€” Kelly Macdonald

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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” Charles R. Morris

The plural on anecdote is not evidence β€” Michael Mauboussin

I've done an informal, anecdotal survey about marriage, and I've found no evidence that it brings happiness. β€” Mary McCormack

People Writing About Anecdotal

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko
quotes on art, life and education

52 1325
Read quotes by Robert Quillen

Robert Quillen
quotes on leadership, education and life

18 159
Read quotes by Marc Bekoff

Marc Bekoff
quotes on leadership, education and culture

23 168
Read quotes by William Ellery Channing

William Ellery Channing
quotes on education, slavery and nationalism

120 591
Read quotes by Maira Kalman

Maira Kalman
quotes on art, love and being

32 208
Read quotes by Carol Bly

Carol Bly
quotes on love, life and friendship

16 21

More Anecdotal Quotes

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? β€” 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. β€” Akira Toriyama

The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition β€” thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not. β€” Michael Shermer

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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” Daniel Hannan

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” Steven Pinker

Anecdotes are sometimes the best vehicles of truth, and if striking and appropriate are often more impressive and powerful than argument. β€” 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. β€” Tucker Max

What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: β€˜He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote. β€” 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 β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” Betty Comden

Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” 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. β€” Marjorie Garber

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