|
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
|
|
No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated
mathematically.
-Leonardo da Vinci
|
|
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-Antoine de Saint Exupéry
|
|
My work is a game, a very serious game.
-M. C. Escher
|
|
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret,
they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which,
with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed
phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely
and precisely that it is expected to work.
-John von Neumann
|
|
Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his
goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
-Thomas Jefferson
|
|
The simplest of schoolboy is now aware of truths for which Archimedes
would have given his life.
-Ernest Renan, 1883
|
|
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
-Michelangelo
|
|
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
-Sir Isaac Newton
|
|
Though science can cause problems, it is not by ignorance that we will
solve them.
-Isaac Asimov
|
|
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river
and he's not the same man.
-Heraclitus
|
|
One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of
earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.
-David Hilbert
|
|
This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.
-Wolfgang Pauli (on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague)
|
|
It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree
of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness
where only an approximation is possible.
-Aristotle
|
|
... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been
approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left
to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place
of decimals.
-James Clerk Maxwell (Scientific Papers 2, 244, October 1871.)
|
|
Ask her to wait a moment—I am almost done.
-Carl Friedrich Gauss (while working, when informed that his wife is dying)
|
|
Results! Why man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand
things that won't work.
-Thomas Alva Edison
|
|
The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists
in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently
great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation
is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be . . .
-Antoine Lavoisier
|
|
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as
to discover new ways of thinking about them.
-Sir William Bragg
|
|
Blaise Pascal used to mark with charcoal the walls of his playroom,
seeking a means of making a circle perfectly round and a triangle whose
sides and angle were all equal. He discovered these things for himself
and then began to seek the relationship which existed between them. He
did not know any mathematical terms and so he made up his own. Using these
names he made axioms and finally developed perfect demonstrations, until
he had come to the thirty-second proposition of Euclid.
-C. M. Cox
|
|
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.
-Galileo Galilei
|
|
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right
keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-Johann Sebastian Bach
|
|
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the
set I go into the other room and read a book.
-Groucho Marx
|
|
When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I
think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if
the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller
|
|
Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.
-German Proverb
|
|
Nature uses as little as possible of anything.
-Johannes Kepler
|
|
Never express yourself more clearly than you think.
-Niels Bohr
|
|
May every young scientist remember... and not fail to keep his eyes
open for the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to
give consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important
discovery.
-Patrick Blackett
|
|
The reader will find no figures in this work. The methods which I set
forth do not require either constructions or geometrical or mechanical
reasonings: but only algebraic operations, subject to a regular and uniform
rule of procedure.
-Joseph-Louis LaGrange
|
|
Do you not think it a matter worthy of lamentation that when there
is such a vast multitude of them [worlds], we have not yet conquered one?
-Alexander the Great
|
|
To the devil with those who published before us.
-Aelius Donatus (4 A.D.)
|
|
You will be able to appreciate the influence of such an Engine on the
future progress of science. I live in a country which is incapable
of estimating it.
-Charles Babbage (on computing machines)
|
|
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
-Charles H. Duell (Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899)
|
|
There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get off the thing
he was educated in.
-Will Rogers
|
|
[about Fourier] It was, no doubt, partially because of his very disregard
for rigor that he was able to take conceptual steps which were inherently
impossible to men of more critical genius.
-Rudoph E. Langer
|
|
I didn't think; I experimented.
-Wilhelm Roentgen
|
|
[about Archimedes:]... being perpetually charmed by his familiar siren,
that is, by his geometry, he neglected to eat and drink and took no care
of his person; that he was often carried by force to the baths, and when
there he would trace geometrical figures in the ashes of the fire, and
with his finger draws lines upon his body when it was anointed with oil,
being in a state of great ecstasy and divinely possessed by his science.
-Plutarch
|
|
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see
the problem.
-G. K. Chesterton
|
|
Within the problem lies the solution.
-Milton Katselas
|
|
I found your essay to be good and original. However, the part
that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.
-Samuel Johnson
|
|
Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection
of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
-Jules Henri Poincaré
|
|
I recognize that many physicists are smarter than I am—most of them
theoretical physicists. A lot of smart people have gone into theoretical
physics, therefore the field is extremely competitive. I console myself
with the thought that although they may be smarter and may be deeper thinkers
than I am, I have broader interests than they have.
-Linus Pauling
|
|
One of the principal objects of theoretical research in my department
of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears
in its greatest simplicity.
-Josiah Willard Gibbs
|
|
This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered
as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
-Anonymous, Western Union internal memo, 1876
|
|
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem
as a nail.
-Abraham Maslow
|
|
Vigorous writing is concise.
-William Strunk
|
|
There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of
science.
-Louis Pasteur
|
|
The greater difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful
pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.
-Epicures
|
|
[On the concept of mathematical groups:] ... what a wealth, what a grandeur of
thought
may spring from what slight beginnings.
-H. F. Baker
|
|
In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not
to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
-William Osler
|
|
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at
least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
-Rene Descartes
|
|
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
-Thomas Watson (chairman of IBM, 1943)
|
|
If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot
teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach
me?
-St. Augustine
|
|
The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the
phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.
-Isaac Newton
|
|
I think that there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more
important to have beauty in one's equations that to have them fit experiment.
If Schroedinger had been more confident of his work, he could have published
it some months earlier, and he could have published a more accurate equation.
It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty
in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a
sure line of progress. If there is not complete agreement between the results
of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too
discouraged,
because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not
properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with further
development
of the theory.
-Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
|
|
Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting
of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible
expenditure of thought.
-Ernst Mach
|
|
For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and
wrong.
-Henry Louis Mencken
|
|
Hell, there are no rules here—we're trying to accomplish something.
-Thomas A. Edison
|
|
Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical
utility, may generally rest assured that he will seek in vain.
-H.L.F. von Helmholtz
|
|
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
-Linus Pauling
|
|
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that
can be counted counts.
-(Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)
|
|
Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.
-Popular Mechanics (forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949)
|
|
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers
by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well
as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple
to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the
great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the
first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of
the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of
Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.
-Pierre-Simon de Laplace
|
|
If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has
at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
-Van Gogh
|
|
All truth passes through 3 stages. First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being
self-evident.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
|
|
I recognize the lion by his paw.
-Jacques Bernoulli (After reading an anonymous solution to a problem that he realized was Newton's solution)
|
|
We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
-Thomas Alva Edison
|
|
The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents,
and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
-Daniel Boorstin
|
|
You're aware the boy failed my grade school math class, I take it?
And not that many years later he's teaching college. Now I ask you: Is
that the sorriest indictment of the American educational system you ever
heard? No aptitude at all for long division, but never mind. It's him they
ask to split the atom. How he talked his way into the Nobel prize is beyond
me.
-Karl Arbeiter: former teacher of Albert Einstein
|
|
God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday,
and Saturday.
-Sir William Bragg
|
|
The calculus is the greatest aid we have to the application of physical
truth in the broadest sense of the word.
-W. F. Osgood
|
|
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the
name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important
respects, what they seem to be.
-Hubert H. Humphrey
|
|
[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and
become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written
in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other
geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend
a single word.
-Galileo Galilei
|
|
All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and
yet it is the most precious thing we have.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's
mind there are few.
-Shunryu Suzuki
|
|
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
-H. M. Warner (founder of Warner Brothers, in 1927 on talking pictures)
|
|
One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have
an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are
wiser that we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more
out of them than was originally put into them.
-Heinrich Hertz
|
|
Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration.
-Pierre-Simon de Laplace
|
|
Even if you're on the right track you'll get run over if you just sit
there.
-Will Rogers
|
|
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking
what no one else has thought.
-Albert Szent-Gyorgi
|
|
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is
the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is
a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is
as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time
to make it short.
-Blaise Pascal
|
|
If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again. Then quit.
There's no use being a damn fool about it.
-W. C. Fields
|
|
Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe.
-János Bolyai (A reference to the creation of a non-euclidean geometry)
|
|
Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.
-Pierre Laplace, to Napoleon on why his celestial mechanics make no mention of God
|
|
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the
care of human frame, and in the cause and prevention of disease.
-Thomas Edison
|
|
If we are still going to have to put up with these damn "quantum jumps",
I am sorry that I ever had anything to do with quantum theory.
-Erwin Schrödinger (in a conversation with Niels Bohr)
|
|
Who, by vigor of mind almost divine, the motions and figures of the
planets, the paths of comets, and the tides of the seas first demonstrated.
-Isaac Newton [His epitaph]
|
|
All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
-Bertrand Russell
|
|
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point
is to discover them.
-Galileo Galilei
|
|
In my opinion, the greatest single failure of American education is
that students come away unable to distinguish between a symbol and the
thing the symbol stands for.
-Paul Lutus
|
|
The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe that all
his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction.
-Michael Faraday
|
|
He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I
ever met.
-Abraham Lincoln
|
|
He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements
of the foremost men of later times.
-Gottfried Whilhem Leibniz
|
|
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
-Niels Bohr (to Wolfgang Pauli)
|
|
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that
never were and ask why not.
-George Bernard Shaw
|
|
Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time
raising money.
-Leon Lederman
|
|
Gauss replied, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical
conclusions, that he had them long ago, all he was worrying about was how
to reach them!
-René J. Dubos
|
|
The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by
their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge
of a physical law. They reveal the kinship between other facts, long known,
but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another.
-Jules Henri Poincaré
|
|
There is no shame in not knowing; the shame lies in not finding out.
-Russian proverb
|
|
Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.
-William Shakespeare
|
|
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to
solve other problems.
-Rene Descartes
|
|
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
-Euripides
|
|
We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
-Decca Recording Co. (rejecting the Beatles, 1962)
|
|
You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
-Henry Ford
|
|
It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism
while the wolf remains of a different opinion.
-Dean William Inge
|
|
Nobody since Newton has been able to use geometrical methods to the
same extent for the like purposes; and as we read the Principia we feel
as when we are in an ancient armoury where the weapons are of gigantic
size; and as we look at them we marvel what manner of man he was who could
use as a weapon what we can scarcely lift as a burden.
-Whewell
|
|
If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, Of what, then, is an empty
desk a sign?
-Albert Einstein
|
|
And on the pedestal these words appear—"My name is Ozymandias, king
of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay, Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and
level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
|
|
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
-Chinese Proverb
|
|
For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena
can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by
means of which new theories can be created.
-Freeman Dyson
|
|
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less
obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are
no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid.
There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There
are no straight lines.
-R. Buckminster Fuller
|
|
Even the blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.
-Proverb
|
|
Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve.
He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.
-Leonardo DaVinci
|
|
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief
that one's work is terribly important.
-Bertrand Russell
|
|
Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish.
-Michelangelo
|
|
Wherever [mathematical] groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced,
simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.
-Eric Temple Bell
|
|
I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by
looking up something and finding something else on the way.
-Franklin P. Adams
|
|
In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word
you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.
-Sydney Smith
|
|
The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is
utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. To be sure,
his art originated in the necessity for clothing such creatures, but this
was long ago; to this day a shape will occasionally appear which will fit
into the garment as if the garment had been made for it. Then there is
no end of surprise and delight.
-Dantzig
|
|
Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.
-Pythagoras
|
|
As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be
perceived but not explained.
-Arthur Cayley
|
|
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed
us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
-Galileo Galilei
|
|
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
-George Bernard Shaw
|
|
There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics...
We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than
in that of Homer.
-Voltaire
|
|
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards
ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
-Leonardo da Vinci
|
|
Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do
not understand it myself anymore.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
"Can you do addition?" the White Queen asked. "What's one and one and
one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?" "I don't
know," said Alice. "I lost count."
-Lewis Carroll
|
|
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
-Rodin
|
|
When you want to test the depths of a stream, don't use both feet.
-Chinese Proverb
|
|
It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible
to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with
such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.
-John Von Neumann, 1949
|
|
I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.
-Francois-Auguste Rodin (when asked how he managed to make his remarkable
statues)
|
|
How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.
-Alfred de Musset
|
|
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt
of in your philosophy.
-William Shakespeare
|
|
Once in Persia reigned a king, who, upon his signet ring, 'graved a
maxim true and wise, which, if held before the eyes, gave him counsel at
a glance, fit for every change and chance. Solemn words, and these are
they: "Even this shall pass away."
-Theodore Tilton
|
|
And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown it that the ancients
did not know everything.
-Pierre de Fermat
|
|
A wisely chosen illustration is almost essential to fasten the truth
upon the ordinary mind, and no teacher can afford to neglect this part
of his preparation.
-Howard Crosby
|
|
The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
-Hippocrates
|
|
Experimentalists think that it is a mathematical theorem while the
mathematicians believe it to be an experimental fact.
-Gabriel Lippman (in a discussion with Poincaré regarding the Gaussian curve)
|
|
Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest
fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
-Charles Caleb Colton
|
|
I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics
and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently
ended in divorce.
-Freeman Dyson
|
|
The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better
than a 'C', the idea must be feasible.
-Yale professor in response to a
paper proposing a reliable overnight delivery service written by Fred Smith,
founder of Federal Express Corp.
|
|
There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly
persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected
scientists. ... Many of these theories have been killed off only when some
decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness. .. Thus the yeoman work
in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist,
who must keep the theoreticians honest.
-Michio Kaku
|
|
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed
ideas at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
|
|
It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of
those who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and
knows how to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect
in nature, no matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can
fully understand.
-Galileo Galilei
|
|
Chance favors only the prepared mind.
-Louis Pasteur
|
|
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents,
but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that
is familiar with it.
-Max Planck
|
|
The palest ink is better than the best memory.
-Chinese Proverb
|
|
[During a lecture:] This has been done elegantly by Minkowski; but chalk
is cheaper than grey matter, and we will do it as it comes.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.
-William of Occam
(Occam's Razor)
|
|
It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats.
-Russian proverb
|
|
The farther the experiment is from theory the closer it is to the Nobel
Prize.
-Frederic Joliot-Curie
|
|
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-Richard P. Feynman
|
|
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth that
humble reasoning of a single individual.
-Galileo Galilei
|
|
God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates
empirically.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
The first rule to tinkering is to save all the parts.
-Paul Erlich
|
|
Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.
-Charles Darwin
|
|
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
-Sun Tzu
|
|
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain,
as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model
has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.
-Manfred Eigen
|
|
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood
by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry,
it's the exact opposite.
-Paul Dirac
|
|
Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does
not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
-Seneca
|
|
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic,
we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world.
One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use
of the mathematics of probability.
-Vannevar Bush
|
|
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.
-George Bernard Shaw
|
|
One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations,
whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect
on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration
of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
-Thomas Edison
|
|
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly
making exciting discoveries.
-A. A. Milne
|
|
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as
to discover new ways of thinking about them.
-Sir William Bragg
|
|
Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.
-Thomas Jefferson
|
|
If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as
continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.
-Karl Friedrich Gauss
|
|
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
Don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and
let them surprise you with their results.
-George Patton
|
|
The Reader may here observe the Force of Numbers, which can be successfully
applied, even to those things, which one would imagine are subject to no
Rules. There are very few things which we know, which are not capable of
being reduc'd to a Mathematical Reasoning; and when they cannot it's a
sign our knowledge of them is very small and confus'd; and when a Mathematical
Reasoning can be had it's as great a folly to make use of any other, as
to grope for a thing in the dark, when you have a Candle standing by you.
-John Arbuthnot
|
|
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled
by, and that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost
|
|
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
-Arthur Koestler
|
|
Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data
at all.
-Charles Babbage
|
|
It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century,
the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that
quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.
-Michio Kaku
|
|
Physics is much too hard for physicists.
-David Hilbert
|
|
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves
of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motions of the stars; and they pass by themselves without
wondering.
-Saint Augustine
|
|
I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions
come by accident; they came by work.
-Thomas Edison
|
|
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn
from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent
disinclination to do so.
-Douglas Adams
|
|
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is
suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best
friends. If they're okay, then it's you.
-Rita Mae Brown
|
|
Method is more important than strength . . . By dropping golden beads
near a snake, a crow once managed to have a passerby kill the snake for
the beads.
-Siddha Nagarjuna
|
|
I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my
mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts
of wisdom and knowledge.
-Igor Stravinsky
|
|
We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been
accomplished without passion.
-Georg Hegel
|
|
I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of
the measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even
when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even
if I am not looking at it.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
There are unknown forces in nature; when we give ourselves wholly to
her, without reserve, she lends them to us; she shows us these forms, which
our watching eyes do not see, which our intelligence does not understand
or suspect.
-Auguste Rodin
|
|
He who builds a better mousetrap these days runs into material shortages,
patent-infringement suits, work stoppages, collusive bidding, discount
discrimination—and taxes.
-H. E. Martz
|
|
Whatever one man is capable of conceiving, other men will be able to
achieve.
-Jules Verne
|
|
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should
not be done at all.
-Peter Drucker
|
|
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an
international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
-George
Bernard Shaw
|
|
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the
credit.
-Harry S Truman
|
|
A hundred rabbits do not make a horse.
-Russian Proverb
|
|
Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.
-Job 12:8
|
|
Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions
of one and the same reality.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering
away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing
in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and
I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
-Jacob Riis
|
|
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray,
Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right
answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion
of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-Charles Babbage
|
|
To do two things at once is to do neither.
-Publilius Syrus
|
|
A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it.
An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made
it.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
Eureka. [I have found it.]
-Archimedes
|
|
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
-French management saying
|
|
Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything,
we ought to know a little about everything.
-Blaise Pascal
|
|
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are
any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
-Howard Aiken
|
|
Slight not what's near through aiming at what's far.
-Euripides
|
|
Talk doesn't cook rice.
-Chinese proverb
|
|
Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition
above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition
by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare
scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare
of the settled disciplines.
-Benoit Mandelbrot
|
|
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used
when we created them.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
A moment's thinking is an hour in words.
-Thomas Hood
|
|
If you see a formula in the Physical Review that extends over a quarter
of a page, forget it. It's wrong. Nature isn't that complicated.
-Bernd T. Matthias
|
|
By doubting we come at truth.
-Cicero
|
|
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
-Henry Ford
|
|
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder,
but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.
-Bjarne Stroustrup
|
|
Everything you can imagine is real.
-Picasso
|
|
The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities
subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people
who study these things...
-Richard Feynman
|
|
Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing.
-Werner von Braun
|
|
Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer
and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train
a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems
that he is already too old to solve them.
-Eugene Wigner
|
|
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a
vigorous mind.
-Samuel Johnson
|
|
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
-Epictetus
|
|
Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a
thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by
many.
-Spinoza
|
|
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
-Friedrich Engels
|
|
Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.
-David Fasold
|
|
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
-Marie Curie
|
|
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be
able to decide.
-Napoleon
|
|
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but
a habit.
-Aristotle
|
|
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they
were to success when they gave up.
-Thomas Alva Edison
|
|
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
-Ken Olson, president,chairman and founder of DEC, 1977
|
|
We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product
of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot
completely prescribe its properties a priori.
-Karl Friedrich Gauss
|
|
The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this:
the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment.
-Richard P. Feynman
|
|
All is flux, nothing stays still.
-Heraclitus
|
|
All men are ignorant, just in different fields
-Einstein
|
|
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
-Rene Descartes
|
|
We will either find a way or make one.
-Hannibal
|
|
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in
contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers
of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded
and dull, but also just stupid.
-James Watson
|
|
In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.
-Marvin Minsky
|
|
Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.
-Ovid
|
|
The progress of science is often affected more by the frailties of
humans and their institutions than by the limitations of scientific measuring
devices. The scientific method is only as effective as the humans
using it. It does not automatically lead to progress.
-Steven S. Zumdahl
|
|
A professional is a person who can do his best at a time when he doesn't
particularly feel like it.
-Alistair Cooke
|
|
When someone points skyward, it's the fool that looks at the finger.
-Proverb
|
|
You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have
to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.
-Alvin Toffler
|
|
Theory attracts practice as the magnet attracts iron.
-Karl Friedrich Gauss
|
|
A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea
will keep you awake during the night.
-Marilyn Vos Savant
|
|
An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell
more than he knows.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
|
|
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
-Alfred North Whitehead
|
|
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless,
but planning is indispensable.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
|
|
Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living
at it.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.
-Epictetus
|
|
Nearly every man who develops an idea works at it up to the point where it looks impossible,
and then gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged.
-Thomas A. Edison
|
|
Mathematics is an interesting intellectual sport but it should not
be allowed to stand in the way of obtaining sensible information about
physical processes.
-Richard W. Hamming
|
|
[Criticized for using formal mathematical manipulations, without understanding
how they worked:] Should I refuse a good dinner simply because I do not
understand the process of digestion?
-Oliver Heaviside
|
|
Never cut what you can untie.
-Joseph Joubert
|
|
I never let schooling interfere with my education.
-Mark Twain
|
|
This example illustrates the differences in the effects which may be
produced by research in pure or applied science. A research on the lines
of applied science would doubtless have led to improvement and development
of the older methods—the research in pure science has given us an entirely
new and much more powerful method. In fact, research in applied science
leads to reforms, research in pure science leads to revolutions, and
revolutions,
whether political or industrial, are exceedingly profitable things if you
are on the winning side.
-J. J. Thomson
|
|
The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered,
and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented
in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.
-Albert Michelson, 1903
|
|
A good rest is half the work.
-Yugoslav Proverb
|
|
Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and
may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.
-William Plomer
|
|
A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value
of life.
-Charles Darwin
|
|
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge. . . observation
of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects
facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of
that combination.
-Denis Diderot
|
|
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And
miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
-Robert Frost
|
|
It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each
dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after
doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents
one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce
a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
|
|
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
-H. H. Williams
|
|
Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am
right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?
-Jane Austen
|
|
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer,
a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and
explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
-Robert X. Cringely
|
|
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
-Aristotle
|
|
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what
they sought.
-Proverb
|
|
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-Albert Einstein
|
|
Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with
meaningless marks on paper.
-David Hilbert
|
|
Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
-William Shakespeare, Hamlet
|
|
Universities are full of knowledge; the freshmen bring a little in
and the seniors take none away, and knowledge accumulates.
-Abbot Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard University
|
|
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors
have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of
books.
-Thomas Carlyle
|
|
He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn't know.
-George Simmel
|
|
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is
the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
-Mark Twain
|
|
There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the
quaintness of wit.
-Alexander Pope
|
|
Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound,
and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined;
and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.
-Denis Diderot
|
|
Descartes commanded the future from his study more than Napoleon from
the throne.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
|
|
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays
out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
-H. L. Mencken
|
|
Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.
-Dionysius the elder
|
|
People forget how fast you did a job—but they remember how well
you did it.
-Howard W. Newton
|
|
Physics as we know it will be over in six months.
-Max Born, 1928
|
|
There are in this world optimists who feel that any symbol that starts
off with an integral sign must necessarily denote something that will have
every property that they should like an integral to possess. This of course
is quite annoying to us rigorous mathematicians; what is even more annoying
is that by doing so they often come up with the right answer.
-E. J. McShane
|
|
I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.
-Werner von Braun
|
|
To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even
for any one age. `Tis much better to do a little with certainty, and leave
the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things.
-Isaac Newton
|
|
Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often
discourages it.
-Madeleine L'Engle
|
|
Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
-David Hume
|
|
Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature immediately comes
up with a better mouse.
-James Carswell
|
|
Better three hours too soon than one minute too late
-Shakespeare
|
|
We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned
the day before was wrong.
-Bill Vaughn
|
|
Delay is preferable to error.
-Thomas Jefferson
|
|
We adore chaos because we love to produce order.
-M. C. Escher
|
|
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct,
or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction
of a new order to things.
-Niccolo Machiavelli
|
|
A closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood.
-Chinese proverb
|
|
Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is
puzzle solving too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind
of man.
-Maria Goeppert-Mayer
|
|
The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the questions.
-Samuel Karlin
|
|
The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty
of messenger boys.
-Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876
|
|
Sometimes it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.
-Proverb
|
|
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (speaking of Albert Einstein)
|
|
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate
into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
-Goethe
|
|
Where there is matter, there is geometry.
-Johannes Kepler
|
|
It is a common error to infer that things which are consecutive in
order of time have necessarily the relation of cause and effect.
-Jacob Bigelow
|
|
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
-Oscar Wilde
|
|
Never try to catch two frogs with one hand.
-Chinese Proverb
|
|
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being
unable to sit still in a room.
-Blaise Pascal
|
|
University President: "Why is it that you physicists always require
so much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires
nothing but money for paper, pencils, and erasers . . . and the Department
of Philosophy is better still. It doesn't even ask for erasers."
-Isaac Asimov
|
|
Men learn while they teach.
-Seneca
|
|
If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.
-Lazarus Long
|
|
The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look
for the circumstances they want, and , if they can't find them, make them.
-George Bernard Shaw
|
|
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
-William Shakespeare
|
|
The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it
is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
-Daniel Webster
|
|
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something
from him.
-Galileo Galilei
|
