Life & Wisdom Quote by Alexander John Ellis

“Rounding to the nearest cent” sounds like bookkeeping small talk, but Ellis is really drawing a boundary line between precision as virtue and precision as vanity. The phrase “sufficiently accurate” is doing the heavy lifting: it’s a quiet rebuke to the kind of mind that mistakes extra decimals for deeper truth. In the 19th century, when standardized measurement, industrial accounting, and statistical thinking were tightening their grip on everyday life, the temptation was to worship exactness simply because the tools for it were improving. Ellis punctures that fetish with a practical criterion: not perfect, not absolute, but fit for use.

The subtext is epistemological with a clerk’s smile. A cent is not a naturally occurring unit; it’s a social agreement backed by institutions, ledgers, and trust. Rounding acknowledges that the world underneath our numbers is noisy: errors in measurement, fluctuations in value, limits of time and attention. Ellis’s intent is to sanction a disciplined kind of approximation, the kind that keeps systems moving without pretending that all uncertainty can be bullied into submission.

“Practical purposes” also hints at power. Who gets to decide what counts as practical? In commerce, the answer is usually the system itself: what the market tolerates, what regulators require, what customers notice. Ellis’s line reads like a small philosophy of modern life: accuracy is not an abstract trophy; it’s a negotiated threshold where human convenience, institutional norms, and reality’s messiness meet.