Famous Quotes & Sayings

G. H. Hardy

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

G. H. Hardy

I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.

G. H. Hardy

A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities has to distinguish two different questions. The first is whether the work which he does is worth doing; and the second is why he does it (whatever its value may be).

G. H. Hardy

The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid's theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.

G. H. Hardy

I wrote a great deal during the next ten [early] years,but very little of any importance; there are not more than four or five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.

G. H. Hardy

A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.

G. H. Hardy

I propose to put forward an apology for mathematics; and I may be told that it needs none, since there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy.

G. H. Hardy

The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. ... [Whereas] the physicist's reality, whatever it may be, has few or none of the attributes which common sense ascribes instinctively to reality. A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons.

Fabiola Gianotti

I grew up in environment that had more women in science.

George Stigler

That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.

George Stigler

And yet I would not freely exchange my science for those of my fellow laureates. They are forever confined in their professional discussions to the small numbers of their fellow scientists.

George Porter

Should we force science down the throats of those that have no taste for it ? Is it our duty to drag them kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century ? I am afraid that it is.

George Carlin

I've never owned a telescope, but it's something I'm thinking of looking into.

George Carlin

It turned out I was pretty good in science. But again, because of the small budget, in science class we couldn't afford to do experiments in order to prove theories. We just believed everything. Actually, I think that class was called Religion. Religion class was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were being taught in all the other classes.

Herbert Hoover

Engineering without imagination sinks to a trade.

Henri Frederic Amiel

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Society rests upon conscience, not upon science.

Henri Frederic Amiel

[T]he habit of scientific analysis ... exhausts the material offered to it...

Henri Frederic Amiel

[I]t is truth alone-scientific, established, proved, and rational truth-which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, 'faith governs the world,'-but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest-it is in reason and in science.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

Geoffrey Chaucer

For oute of olde feldys, as men sey, Comyth al this newe corn from yer to yere; And out of olde bokis, in good fey, Comyth al this newe science that men lere.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Many small make a great.

Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible.

A calculating engine is one of the most intricate forms of mechanism, a telegraph key one of the simplest. But compare their value.

Nothing cools so fast as undue enthusiasm. Water that has boiled freezes sooner than any other.

Boundaries which mark off one field of science from another are purely artificial, are set up only for temporary convenience. Let chemists and physicists dig deep enough, and they reach common ground.

Form may be of more account than substance. A lens of ice will focus a solar beam to a blaze.

In systemic searches for embryonic lethal mutants of Drosophila melanogaster we have identified 15 loci which when mutated alter the segmental patterns of the larva. These loci probably represent the majority of such genes in Drosophila. The phenotypes of the mutant embryos indicate that the process of segmentation involves at least three levels of spatial organization: the entire egg as developmental unit, a repeat unit with the length of two segments, and the individual segment.

Isaac Watts

No science is speedily learned by the noblest genius without tuition.

Isaac Newton

Are not all Hypotheses erroneous, in which Light is supposed to consist in Pression or Motion, propagated through a fluid Medium? For in all these Hypotheses the Phaenomena of Light have been hitherto explain'd by supposing that they arise from new Modifications of the Rays; which is an erroneous Supposition.

Isaac Newton

[1.] And first I suppose that there is diffused through all places an aethereal substance capable of contraction & dilatation, strongly elastick, & in a word, much like air in all respects, but far more subtile. 2. I suppose this aether pervades all gross bodies, but yet so as to stand rarer in their pores then in free spaces, & so much ye rarer as their pores are less ... 3. I suppose ye rarer aether within bodies & ye denser without them, not to be terminated in a mathematical superficies, but to grow gradually into one another.

Isaac Newton

Hypotheses non fingo. I frame no hypotheses.

Isaac Newton

Therefore, the causes assigned to natural effects of the same kind must be, so far as possible, the same.