Sir Arthur Eddington Famous Quotes
"If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum."
It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.
Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.
Something unknown is doing we don't know what.
"We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo It is our own."
"We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong."
"We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'."
"Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers."
"For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal. It does not follow that every item which we confidently accept as physical knowledge has actually been certified by the Court our confidence is that it would be certified by the Court if it were submitted. But it does follow that every item of physical knowledge is of a form which might be submitted to the Court. It must be such that we can specify (although it may be impracticable to carry out) an observational procedure which would decide whether it is true or not. Clearly a statement cannot be tested by observation unless it is an assertion about the results of observation. Every item of physical knowledge must therefore be an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure."
"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
The mathematics is not there till we put it there.
Sir Arthur Eddington Quotations
"I have everything, yet have nothing and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want."
Terence
"When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading."
Henny Youngman
"Only he is free who cultivates his own thoughts, and strives without fear to do justice to them."
Berthold Auerbach
"If being wealthy is taken to mean having the means to satisfy one's every want, all but the very poor can become rich as thou at a single stroke of a magician's wand, simply by ceasing to want more than is really necessary for sustaining life. By being content with little and not giving a rap for what the neighbours think, one can attain a very large measure of freedom, shedding care and worry in a trice."
John Blofeld
There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
Freya Madeline Stark
The sands are number'd that make up my life.
William Shakespeare
He plants trees to benefit another generation.
Caecilius Statius
"Human subtelty will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous."
Leonardo DaVinci
"Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat."
Ryszard Kapuscinski
He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.
Horace