Definition of Variation

Variation

The act of varying; a partial change in the form, position, state, or qualities of a thing; modification; alternation; mutation; diversity; deviation; as, a variation of color in different lights; a variation in size; variation of language.

Extent to which a thing varies; amount of departure from a position or state; amount or rate of change.

Change of termination of words, as in declension, conjugation, derivation, etc.

Repetition of a theme or melody with fanciful embellishments or modifications, in time, tune, or harmony, or sometimes change of key; the presentation of a musical thought in new and varied aspects, yet so that the essential features of the original shall still preserve their identity.

One of the different arrangements which can be made of any number of quantities taking a certain number of them together.

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Variation Quotations

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin

I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.
James A. Michener

In stating the principles which regulate exchangeable value and price, we should carefully distinguish between those variations which belong to the commodity itself, and those which are occasioned by a variation in the medium in which value is estimated, or price expressed.
David Ricardo

A rise of wages from this cause will, indeed, be invariably accompanied by a rise in the price of commodities; but in such cases, it will be found that labour and all commodities have not varied in regard to each other, and that the variation has been confined to money.
David Ricardo

I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.'
Brian Ferneyhough

Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place.
Phillip E. Johnson

After every movie, I always kick myself for the same things-didn't do enough, not enough variation, not enough interesting choices, too bland.
Robin Wright Penn

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.
Dave Van Ronk

The interaction of the variation in our genes is what's responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor.
Walter Gilbert

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.
Ernst Mayr

Cuvier had preceded Lamarck in specifying the kinds and degrees of variation, which his own observations and critical judgment of the reports of others led him to admit.
Richard Owen

The older the layers, the more each of them is uniform over a great extent; the newer the layers, the more they are limited and subject to variation within small distances.
George Cuvier

When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world.
Eric Schmidt

I sometimes ponder on variation form and it seems to me it ought to be more restrained, purer.
Johannes Brahms

More Variation Quotations

Variation Translations

variation in French is dissidence
variation in Italian is aberrazione

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