Quotes
Quotes
"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are
interested and the frog dies of it."
-E.B. White
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
-Mark Twain
"A little nonsense, now and then, is relished by the wisest men."
-Willy Wonka
"Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not,
and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is."
-Oscar Wilde
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
-Oscar Wilde
"WARNING: Intelligence+Humor=Bitchiness,
if you turn to the dark side of the force."
-TJ O'Donnell
"Never attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity."
-Robert J. Hanlon's razor
"From the moment I picked your book up until I put it down I was
convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
-Groucho Marx
"There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."
-Oscar Wilde
"Don't be so humble. You're not that great."
-Golda Meir
"Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right."
-Isaac Asimov
"The only thing I use my body for is to carry my brain around."
-Thomas Edison
"Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an
absolute swine."
-Quentin Crisp
"It costs a lot of money to look this cheap!"
-Dolly Parton
"Don't try to keep up with the Joneses - drag them down to YOUR level.
It's cheaper."
-Quentin Crisp
"The only completely consistent people are dead."
-Aldous Huxley
"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."
-Aldous Huxley
"See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time."
-Robin Williams
"When life gives you lemons, cram 'em up life's ass!"
-Kerry Smith
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign:
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
-Jonathan Swift
"Black holes are where God divided by zero."
-Anonymous
"People who have no vices are bound to have some pretty annoying virtues."
-Elizabeth Taylor
"Sincerity is the most important thing in all relationships.
Once you can fake that, you've got it made."
-Oscar Wilde
"I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure."
-Anonymous
"I used to think I never made mistakes, but I was mystaken."
-Anonymous
"[Sir, you're drunk!] Yes, madam, but in the morning I'll be sober
and you'll still be ugly!"
-Winston Churchill
"I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous."
-Tom Servo
"My brain is my second-favorite organ."
-Woody Allen
"If you don't grow up by age 35, you don't have to."
-James Gurney
"If God had meant us to be naked, we would have been born that way."
-Anonymous
"Are the gods not just? Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?"
-C.S. Lewis
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."
-Tom Waits
"Whenever I have to choose between two evils, I always like to
try the one I haven't tried before."
-Mae West
"Good sex is like good bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand."
-Mae West
"To think before you speak is like wiping your ass before you shit."
-Anonymous
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice,
but in practice there is."
-Rico Cozzio
"You can't drop an atom bomb on Chicago!"
-Peter Graves in "Beginning of the End"
"God doesn't want people created out of a Xerox machine."
.Reverend Leland Higginbotham at Divine's eulogy; Baltimore, Maryland, March, 1988
"From my point of view, being out is not about anything political. It's just because I can't be bothered to be in."
-Rupert Everett
"I am a man: I hold that nothing human is alien to me."
-Terence (Roman comic dramatist, 185 BC - 159 BC)
"Re-examine all that you have been told in school, or in church or in any
book. Dismiss whatever insults your soul."
-Walt Whitman
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
-Mark Twain
"Your saying 'I do not understand you'
is praise beyond my worth, and an insult you do not deserve."
-Kahlil Gibran
"If there's nothing wrong with me, then there has to be something wrong
with the universe."
-Dr. Beverly Crusher
"The way to a man's heart is through his self-esteem."
-Jim Griffith
"Noone can make you feel inferior without your consent."
-E. Roosevelt
"Only a few know the sweetness of the twisted apples."
-Sherwood Anderson in the story "Winesburg, Ohio."
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."
Francis Bacon (of the 17th century)
"Only when all of those around you are different will you
truly belong."
-Little Man Tate
"Dance like nobody's watching; love like you've never been hurt.
Sing like nobody's listening; live like it's heaven on earth."
-Mark Twain? or Satchel Paige? or Alfred D Souza?
"There aren't any normal people."
-John M. Scott
"Normal is a setting on my clothes dryer."
-Anonymous
"To keep the body in good health is a duty. Otherwise we shall
not be able to keep our mind strong and clear."
-Buddha
"At first I thought I should be a second Beethoven; presently
I found that to be another Schubert would be good; then gradually,
satisfied with less and less, I resigned to be a Humperdinck."
-Engelbert Humperdinck
"Sousa was no Beethoven. Nonetheless, he was Sousa."
-Deems Taylor
"I may not be a first-class composer,
but I am a first-class second-rate composer."
-Richard Strauss
"The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians."
- Arthur Miller
"Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul."
-Plato
"A recorded performance has the possibility of being perfect;
a live performance has the possibility of being live."
-Irving Kolodin
"Music is essentially useless, as is life."
-George Santayana
"Let's Ban Applause... I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."
-Glenn Gould
"There are only three kinds of pianists - Jewish, homosexual and bad."
-attributed to Vladimir Horowitz
"There is nothing to it. You only have to hit the right note at
the right time, and the instrument plays itself."
-Johann Sebastian Bach
"My music is best understood by children and animals."
-Igor Stravinsky
"Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven."
-Lawrence Duncan
"The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses
between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides!"
-Artur Schnabel
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the
inexpressible is music."
-Aldous Huxley
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic
hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.
There's also a negative side."
-Hunter S. Thompson
"Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead
of dying, he sings."
-Robert Benchley
"In opera, there is always too much singing."
-Claude Debussy
"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there
were no singers!"
-Gioacchino Rossini
"I cannot tell you how much I love to play for people. Would
you believe it - sometimes when I sit down to practice and there is
no one else in the room, I have to stifle an impluse to ring for
the elevator man and offer him money to come in and hear me."
-Artur Rubinstein
"I am not fitted to give concerts. The audience intimidates
me, I feel choked by its breath, paralyzed by its curious glances,
struck dumb by all those strange faces."
-Frederic Chopin
"Wagner's music is actually better than it sounds."
-Mark Twain
"One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first
hearing, and I certainly don't intend hearing it a second time."
-Gioacchino Rossini
"Art was not created as a way to riches. Strive to become a
true artist; all else will take care of itself."
-Robert Schuman
"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my
swimming pool than play Bach and starve."
-Xavier Cougat
"There are only two kinds of music - good and bad."
-Duke Ellington
"I produce music as an apple tree produces apples."
-Camille Saint-Saens
"I write as a sow piddles."
-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
"There are 480 species of animal that exhibit homosexual behaviour, but only one species of animal on Earth that exhibits homophobic behaviour. So which is normal?"
-Stephen Fry
"God doesn't want people created out of a Xerox machine."
-Reverend Leland Higginbotham at Divine's eulogy; Baltimore, Maryland, March, 1988
"Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men
holding guns than holding hands?"
-Ernest Gaines
"They gave me a medal for killing a man, and a
discharge for loving one."
-Sargeant Leonard Matlovich
"Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by
thinking incessantly about the sins of others."
-C. S. Lewis (God in the Dock, "Miserable Offenders," p. 124)
"If you can't giggle, tickle, scream, laugh,
run around the room naked, pour liqueur on each other and lick it off, tie
each other down, have whipped cream fights,
and dance and sing with each other,
then you are having sex with him too soon."
-Frank (xxxlbear)
"It always seemed to me a bit pointless to disapprove of homosexuality. It's like disapproving of rain." -Francis Maude
"The only queer people are those who don't love anybody." -Rita Mae Brown
"The Bible contains 6 admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision." -Lynn Lavner
"...I am increasingly convinvced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about about spirituality and ehtics beyond religion altogether.
-The Dalai Lama
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves,
and wiser people so full of doubts."
-Bertrand Russell
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
-Albert Einstein
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
-Mark Twain
"Re-examine all that you have been told in school, or in church or in any
book. Dismiss whatever insults your soul."
-Walt Whitman
"Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each."
-Plato
"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read."
-Frank Zappa
"Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul."
-Plato
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
-Dr. Howard Thurman
"You were not made to live your lives as brutes, But to be followers of virtue and knowledge."
-(Dante, Inferno XXVI, 119-120)
"Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work."
-Aristotle
"Real breakthroughs are not found because you want to develop some new technology, but because you are curious and want to find out how the world is."
-Anton Zeilinger, Vienna University
"I am a man: I hold that nothing human is alien to me."
-Terence (Roman comic dramatist, 185 BC - 159 BC)
"Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability
and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of
individual employees."
-Edsger W. Dijkstra
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is filled with educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are alone omnipotent. 'Press on!' has been and always will be the answer to every human problem."
-Calvin Coolidge
"We shall not cease our explorations, and the end of our exploring will
be to arrive back where we started and know the place for the first time"
-T.S. Eliot
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
-The Pigs of Animal Farm by George Orwell
"If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention!"
-Katherine Doyle
"We don't stop playing because we grow old;
we grow old because we stop playing."
-George Bernard Shaw?
"I wasted time and now doth time waste me."
-William Shakespeare
"Dance like nobody's watching; love like you've never been hurt.
Sing like nobody's listening; live like it's heaven on earth."
-Mark Twain? or Satchel Paige? or Alfred D Souza?
"Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by
thinking incessantly about the sins of others."
-C. S. Lewis (God in the Dock, "Miserable Offenders," p. 124)
"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what
happens to you."
-Aldous Huxley
"Make no small plans, for they have no magic to
stir men's blood."
-Daniel Burnham
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
-Margaret Mead
"Live simply that others may simply live."
-Mohandas Gandhi, 1869-1948
"If you ask me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you:
I came to live out loud."
-Emile Zola
"If we really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it,
because the answer is not separate from the problem."
-J.Krishnamurti
"When I dare to be powerful -- to use my strength in the
service of my vision, then it becomes less and less
important whether I am afraid."
-Audre Lorde
"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is
no path and leave a trail."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare;
it is because we do not dare that they are difficult."
-Seneca
"A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well
that no one would find fault with what he had done."
-Cardinal Newman
"What doesn't kill me makes me stronger."
-Albert Camus
"When I feed the poor, they call me saint. When I ask why the
poor do not have food, they call me communist."
-Dom Helder Camara
"They gave me a medal for killing a man, and a
discharge for loving one."
-Sargeant Leonard Matlovich
"Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased."
-J. Krishnamurti
"The examined life is the only life worth living."
-Socrates
"It is easier to find an excuse than to find a reason."
-Doug Brown
"Always forgive your enemies --nothing annoys them so much."
Oscar Wilde
"Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one."
-Eleanor Roosevelt
"The true measure of how free a society is, is how it treats its dissidents."
Glenn Greenwald
"When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you DON'T believe?"
- Quentin Crisp
"The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules, but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages."
- Banksy
"The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians."
- Arthur Miller
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-Benjamin Franklin
"Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them."
-T.S. Eliot
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
-The Pigs of Animal Farm by George Orwell
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation
of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical."
-Thomas Jefferson
"Human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they
believe they are protecting God."
-Barbara Brown Taylor
"Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike
propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't."
-Brad Holland
"If you can't giggle, tickle, scream, laugh,
run around the room naked, pour liqueur on each other and lick it off, tie
each other down, have whipped cream fights,
and dance and sing with each other,
then you are having sex with him too soon."
-Frank (xxxlbear)
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
-Maya Angelou
"He was part of my dream, of course - but then I was part of his dream too."
-Lewis Carroll
"Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for
painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad
husband and an ill provider."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't
gonna make it with anyone anyhow."
-Lennon & McCartney
"I don't want a man I can live with, I want a man
that I can't live without."
-Giles, Nichols & Godard, sung by Lace
"What is the good of friendship if one cannot say
exactly what one means?"
-Oscar Wilde
"It's not the men in your life that count, it's the
life in your men."
-Mae West
"Good sex is like good bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand."
-Mae West
"When a person gets kissed for the first time, they fall down and
they don't get up for at least an hour."
-Wendy, age 8
"Don't say you love somebody and then change your mind ... Love isn't
like picking what movie you want to watch."
-Natalie, age 9
"Sincerity is the most important thing in all relationships.
Once you can fake that, you've got it made."
-Oscar Wilde
"...and I gave him the best two weeks of my life."
-Joe Tully
"Men and women, women and men. It will never work."
-Erica Jong
"Then, my noble friend, geometry will draw the soul towards truth, and create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up that which is now unhappily allowed to fall down."
-Plato, The Republic, VII. 522-528, "Quadrivium"
"The important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing"
-Albert Einstein
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
-Albert Einstein
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves,
and wiser people so full of doubts."
-Bertrand Russell
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
-Carl Sagan
"She tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out"
-Lewis Carroll
"They have poisoned the Thames and killed the fish in the river.
A little further development of the same wisdom and science will
complete the poisoning of the air, and kill the dwellers on the banks.
I almost think it is the destiny of science to exterminate the human race."
-Thomas Love Peacock (1860)
"I like the scientific spirit - the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine - it always keeps the way beyond open - always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake - after a wrong guess."
- Walt Whitman
"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."
-P.A.M. Dirac
"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should
expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose,
no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
-Richard Dawkins
"It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly)
that direct arguments against Christianity and theism
produce hardly any effect on the public;
and freedom of thought is best promoted
by the gradual illumination of men's minds
which follows from the advance of science."
-Charles Darwin
"Water is H2O: hydrogen two parts, oxygen one.
But there is also a third thing that makes water and nobody knows what that is."
-D. H. Lawrence
"There is something about this world that doesn't allow
us to understand it."
-Sorin Istrail
"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can
suppose."
-J. B. S. Haldane (Possible Worlds, 1927)
"We shall not cease our explorations, and the end of our exploring will
be to arrive back where we started and know the place for the first time"
-T.S. Eliot
"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
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy
is about telescopes."
-Edsger W. Dijkstra
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
-Edsger W. Dijkstra
"Nothing is more absurd than the attempt to distinguish
between science and art."
-Norman Campbell
"There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts."
-Vladimir Nabokov
"Pure logic could never lead us to anything but tautologies;
it can create nothing new; not from it alone can any science issue."
-Henri Poincarè
"Real breakthroughs are not found because you want to develop some new technology, but because you are curious and want to find out how the world is."
-Anton Zeilinger, Vienna University
"If the tools are bad, nature's voice is muffled. If the tools
are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question."
-Freeman J. Dyson
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination."
-Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal.
The rest is poetry and imagination."
-Max Planck
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
-Albert Einstein
"Science does not know its debt to imagination."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest
sources of happiness in life."
-Linus Pauling
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious."
-Albert Enistein
"The two most common elements in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity."
-Anonymous
"I think all you scientists are crackpots."
-Unknown actor in "When Worlds Collide"
"I happen to hold a bachelor of science degree in geology...
And my greatest contribution to the field of science
is that I never entered it."
-Colin Powell
"The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians."
-Arthur Miller
"Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them."
-T.S. Eliot
"Art is the only lie worth believing.
For best reception, listen through your belly."
-Avril Dell
"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."
-P.A.M. Dirac
"Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for
painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad
husband and an ill provider."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Water is H2O: hydrogen two parts, oxygen one.
But there is also a third thing that makes water and nobody knows what that is."
-D. H. Lawrence
"When bankers get together they talk about art.
When artists get together, they talk about money."
-Oscar Wilde
"In commercial art, you find out how
much they're going to pay you, then
you do the work. In fine art, it's the
other way around."
-Brad Holland
"Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike
propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't."
-Brad Holland
"Nothing is more absurd than the attempt to distinguish
between science and art."
-Norman Campbell
"There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts."
-Vladimir Nabokov
"Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously
as physics, chemistry or money."
-Ernst Levy
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an
artist once he grows up."
-Pablo Picasso
"If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery,
it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."
-Michelangelo
"Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of
subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the
antithesis of self-consciousness."
-Aaron Copeland
"Cerebration is the enemy of originality in art."
-Martin Ritt
"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose
sight of the shore for a very long time."
-Andre Gide
"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."
-Francis Bacon
"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist."
-Rene-Francois-Ghislain Magritte
"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it."
-Frank Zappa
"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening
that is translated through you into action, and
because there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique.
If you block it, it will never exist
through any other medium and be lost.
The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine
how good it is;
nor how valuable it is;
nor how it compares with other expressions.
It is your business to keep it yours,
clearly and directly to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep open and aware directly
to the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than the others."
-Martha Graham to Agnes De Mille
"Then, my noble friend, geometry will draw the soul towards truth, and create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up that which is now unhappily allowed to fall down."
-Plato, The Republic, VII. 522-528, "Quadrivium"
"We are perhaps not far removed from the time when we shall be able to
submit the bulk of chemical phenomena to calculation."
-Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, Memoires de la Societe d'Arcueil
2:207 (1808)
"Toute tentative de faire rentrer les questions chimiques dans le domaine
des doctrines mathématiques, doit être réputée jusqu'ici, et sans doute à
jamais, profondément irrationnelle, comme étant antipathique à la nature des
phénomènes : elle ne pourrait découler que d'hypothèses vagues et
radicalement arbitraires sur la constitution intime des corps, ainsi que
j'ai eu l'occasion de l'exprimer dans les prolégomènes(*) de cet ouvrage."
"Toute tentative de faire rentrer les questions chimiques dans le domaine
des doctrines mathématiques, doit être réputée jusqu'ici, et sans doute à
jamais, profondément irrationnelle, comme étant antipathique à la nature des
phénomènes : elle ne pourrait découler que d'hypothèses vagues et
radicalement arbitraires sur la constitution intime des corps, ainsi que
j'ai eu l'occasion de l'exprimer dans les prolégomènes(*) de cet ouvrage."
-Auguste Comte,
Cours de Philosophie Positive, 1830.
"Toute tentative de faire rentrer les questions chimiques dans le domaine des doctrines mathémathique doit être réputée jusqu'ici, et sans doute à jamais, profondément irrationelle, comme étant antipathique à la nature des phénomènes... si, par une aberration heureusement presque impossible, l'emploi de l'analyse mathémathique acquérait jamais, en chimie, une semblable prépondérance, il déterminerait inévitablement, et sanas aucune compensation, dans l'économie entière de cette science, une immense et rapide rétrogradation, en substituant l'empire des conceptions vaques à celui des notions positives, et un facile verbiage algébrique à une laborieuse exploration des faits"
Every attempt to put chemical questions back into the domain of mathematical
doctrines must be reputed up to now, and certainly forever, profoundly
irrational, as being contrary to the nature of phenomena: it could only
result in vague and radically arbitrary hypotheses on the close constitution
of the bodies, just as I have had the opportunity to express it in the
prolegomenon (=preliminary statement) of this work.
-Auguste Comte,
Cours de Philosophie Positive, 1830. translation by Davol Tedder
"Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of
chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and
contrary to the spirit of chemistry. If mathematical analysis
should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry - an aberration
which is happily almost impossible - it would occasion a rapid
and widespread degeneration of that science."
-Auguste Comte,
Cours de Philosophie Positive, 1830. Unknown translator.
"All of chemistry, and with it crystallography, would become a
branch of mathematical analysis which, like astronomy, taking its
constants from observation, would enable us to predict the
character of any new compound and possibly the source from which
its formation might be anticipated."
-Charles Babbage, 1838, quoted in Faster than Thought,
B. V. Bowden, ed., Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., London, 1953, p. 12.
"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical
theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry
are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the
application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated
to be soluble."
-P. Dirac, Proc. Roy. Soc (London) 123:714 (1929)
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