Favorite Quotes (some longer, in no particular order)

"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)

"In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him. I am quite aware that we have just now light-heartedly expelled in imagination many excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly, responsible for the building of the temple of science; and in many cases our angel would find it a pretty ticklish job to decide. But of one thing I feel sure: if the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have come to be, any more than a forest can grow which consists of nothing but creepers. For these people any sphere of human activity will do, if it comes to a point; whether they become engineers, officers, tradesmen, or scientists depends on circumstances. Now let us have another look at those who have found favor with the angel. Most of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other, in spite of these common characteristics, than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple? That is a difficult question and no single answer will cover it. To begin with, I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity. " -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), on the occasion of Max Planck's 60th birthday - 1918

"All beautiful things belong to the same age." -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." -- Steven Weinberg (1933-2021)

"Profound study of nature is the most fertile source of mathematical discoveries. Not only has this study, in offering a determinate object to investigation, the advantage of excluding vague questions and calculations without issue; it is besides a sure method of forming analysis itself, and of discovering the elements which it concerns us to know, and which natural science ought always to preserve: these are the fundamental elements which are reproduced in all natural effects. We see, for example, that the same expression whose abstract properties geometers had considered, and which in this respect belongs to general analysis, represents as well the motion of light in the atmosphere, as it determines the laws of diffusion of heat in solid matter, and enters into all the chief problems of the theory of probability. The analytical equations, unknown to the ancient geometers, which Descartes was the first to introduce into the study of curves and surfaces, are not restricted to the properties of figures, and to those properties which are the object of rational mechanics; they extend to all general phenomena. There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and from obscurities, that is to say more worthy to express the invariable relations of natural things. Considered from this point of view, mathematical analysis is as extensive as nature itself; it defines all perceptible relations, measures times, spaces, forces, temperatures; this difficult science is formed slowly, but it preserves every principle which it has once acquired; it grows and strengthens itself incessantly in the midst of the many variations and errors of the human mind. Its chief attribute is clearness; it has no marks to express confused notions. It brings together phenomena the most diverse, and discovers the hidden analogies which unite them. If matter escapes us, as that of air and light, by its extreme tenuity, if bodies are placed far from us in the immensity of space, if man wishes to know the aspect of the heavens at successive epochs separated by a great number of centuries, if the actions of gravity and of heat are exerted in the interior of the earth at depths which will be always inaccessible, mathematical analysis can yet lay hold of the laws of these phenomena. It makes them present and measurable, and seems to be a faculty of the human mind destined to supplement the shortness of life and the imperfection of the senses; and what is still more remarkable, it follows the same course in the study of all phenomena; it interprets them by the same language, as if to attest the unity and simplicity of the plan of the universe, and to make still more evident that unchangeable order which presides over all natural causes." -- Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), The Analytical Theory of Heat

"Now one may ask, "What is mathematics doing in a physics lecture?" We have several possible excuses: first, of course, mathematics is an important tool, but that would only excuse us for giving the formula in two minutes. On the other hand, in theoretical physics we discover that all our laws can be written in mathematical form; and that this has a certain simplicity and beauty about it. So, ultimately, in order to understand nature it may be necessary to have a deeper understanding of mathematical relationships. But the real reason is that the subject is enjoyable, and although we humans cut nature up in different ways, and we have different courses in different departments, such compartmentalization is really artificial, and we should take our intellectual pleasures where we find them." -- Richard Feynman (1918-1988)

"One of the most joyful moments of my life was when I was led by listening to E.B. Wilsons exposition of Gibbsian thermodynamics to infer an eternal truth that was independent of its physics or economics exemplification. A student who studied only one science would be less likely to recognize what belongs to logic rather than to the nature of things." --Paul A. Samuelson (1915-2009)

"Technical skill is mastery of complexity while creativity is mastery of simplicity." --Christopher Zeeman (1925-2016)

"Courage is the beginning of action but chance is the master of the end." --Democritus (460-370 BC)

"I could behold / The antechapel where the statue stood / Of Newton with his prism and silent face, / The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone." --Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

"It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature." --John von Neumann (1903-1957)

"The negation of a formally proved statement is a false statement. The negation of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." --Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." --John von Neumann (1903-1957)

"I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men. I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free." --Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

"The function of a mathematician is to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds." -- G. H. Hardy (1877-1947), A Mathematician`s Apology

"By studying the masters, not their pupils." --Niels Henrik Abel (1802 – 1829), when asked how he developed his remarkable mathematical ability

"We are the University." --Isidor Rabi (1898-1988), interrupting Dwight Eisenhower, then President of Columbia University, who had addressed the faculty as `employees of the university,` 1948

"The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed." --Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), A Farewell to Arms  

PROSPERO, to Ferdinand

"You do look, my son, in a moved sort,

As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep." 

--William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Tempest