Quotes about physics

I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final. You know, I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

— Woody Allen

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

— Gaston Bachelard

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

— Francis H. Bradley

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

— William James

A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.

— William James

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

— Samuel Johnson

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

— H. L. Mencken

That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.

— Boris Pasternak

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars.

— Giambattista Vico

Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.

— Voltaire

When he to whom a person speaks does not understand, and he who speaks does not understand himself, that is metaphysics.

— Voltaire

No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.

— William S. Burroughs

We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

— Julius Robert Oppenheimer

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

— George Wald

A physicist's journey starts with putting two numbers together, and ends with taking the Universe apart.

— Michael Wakcher

Mass is resistance to motion.

— Eric Parslow

We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness - the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols... Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that... which science is admittedly unable to give.

— Arthur Stanley Eddington

To every reaction there is always opposed an equal reaction.

— Isaac Newton

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

— Isaac Newton