Numerical precision is the very soul of science, and its attainment affords the best, perhaps the only criterion of the truth of theories and the correctness of experiments.
-- D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (1917)
This quote confuses me. At first I read it as a restatement of the famous Lord Kelvin quote on the topic -- if you don't have numbers, your understanding "is meager and unsatisfactory." Hooray for that as far as it goes. But the second half seems to suggest, reversing another famous quote, that it is better to be precisely wrong than vaguely correct.
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.