Paul Pinelle > Paul's Quotes

“This kind of search in the dark, with its tense desire, lasting for years, full of foreboding, with it's exhausting change form aspiration to frustration and it's final breakthrough to lucidity, all of this you only know properly if you experienced it.”
― Albert Einstein

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
― Galileo Galilei

“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
― Albert Einstein

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Be the change you want to see in the world”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Spinoza: The Letters

“The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form. Some further changes will be needed, just about as drastic as the changes made in passing from Bohr's orbit theory to quantum mechanics. Some day a new quantum mechanics, a relativistic one, will be discovered, in which we will not have these infinities occurring at all. It might very well be that the new quantum mechanics will have determinism in the way that Einstein wanted.”
― Paul Dirac

“Sir Isaac Newton was asked how he discovered the law of gravity. He replied, "By thinking about it all the time.”
― Sir Isaac Newton

“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
― Isaac Newton

“You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

“At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
― Isaac Newton

“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.”
― Henri Poincaré, Science and Method

“The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”
― Delos Banning McKown

“A man asked Gautama Buddha, "I want happiness."
Buddha said, "First remove "I," that's Ego, then remove "want," that's Desire.
See now you are left with only "Happiness.”
― Gautama Buddha, Sayings of Buddha

“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Rule your mind or it will rule you.”
― Buddha

“A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.”
― Sir Isaac Newton

“To generalize is to be an idiot.”
― William Blake

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading”
― Siddhārtha Gautama

“The attempts to try to represent the electric field as the motion of some kind of gear wheels, or in terms of lines, or of stresses in some kind of material have used up more effort of physicists than it would have taken simply to get the right answers about electrodynamics. It is interesting that the correct equations for the behavior of light were worked out by MacCullagh in 1839. But people said to him: 'Yes, but there is no real material whose mechanical properties could possibly satisfy those equations, and since light is an oscillation that must vibrate in something, we cannot believe this abstract equation business'.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol 2

“Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“To realize that you do not understand is a virtue; not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.”
― Lao Tzu

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss, The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far: Why Are We Here?