Famous quotes containing the words detecting and/or set:
“In our Mechanics’ Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter’s planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,—rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune’s greedily coveted favours, they are consequently for the most part, very prone to credulity.”
—Baruch (Benedict)