“❝Everything should be made simple as possible but no simpler.❞ Repeated throughout his life, see: Quote Investigator”
All Quotes
433 quotes in total
“Un homme heureux est trop content du présent pour trop se soucier de l'avenir. A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.”
“Mes Projets d'Avenir”
“Autoritätsdusel ist der größte Feind der Wahrheit. Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
“Letter to Jost Winteler (July 8th, 1901), quoted in The Private Lives of Albert Einstein by Roger Highfields and Paul Carter (1993), p. 79 . Einstein had been annoyed that Paul Drude , editor of Annalen der Physik , had dismissed some criticisms Einstein made of Drude's electron theory of metals.”
“Lieber Habicht! / Es herrscht ein weihevolles Stillschweigen zwischen uns, so daß es mir fast wie eine sündige Entweihung vorkommt, wenn ich es jetzt durch ein wenig bedeutsames Gepappel unterbreche... / Was machen Sie denn, Sie eingefrorener Walfisch, Sie getrocknetes, eingebüchstes Stück Seele...? Dear Habicht, / Such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege when I break it now with some inconsequential babble... / What are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul...?”
“Opening of a letter to his friend Conrad Habicht in which he describes his four revolutionary Annus Mirabilis papers (18 or 25 May 1905) Doc. 27”
“If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/c².”
“It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing”
“Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content?”
“Philosophy is the science of truth.”
“My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside. Letter to Alexander the Great as quoted by William Whewell , History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), Ch. 2, Sect. 2”
“Nature does not do anything in vain .”
“Of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being”
“Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact. I.13 , 78a.22”
“We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus [all things being equal] of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses”
“Also known as Occam's razor or the principle of parsimony / economy”
“Richard McKeon (tr.) (1963), p. 150”
“The science which has to do with nature clearly concerns itself for the most part with bodies and magnitudes and their properties and movements, but also with the principles of this sort of substance, as many as they may be. On the Heavens Book I, pg. 1”
“But it is better to assume principles less in number and finite, as Empedocles makes them to be. All philosophers... make principles to be contraries... (for Parmenides makes principles to be hot and cold, and these he demominates fire and earth) as those who introduce as principles the rare and the dense. But Democritus makes the principles to be the solid and the void; of which the former, he says, has the relation of being, and the latter of non”
“The Beagle staid at St. Helena five days, during which time I lived in the clouds in the centre of the Isd.”
“throw off minute granules or atoms, which circulate freely throughout the system, and when supplied with proper nutriment multiply by self”
“(It is sometimes claimed that modern biologist are dogmatic "Darwinists" who uncritically accept all of Darwin's ideas. This is false: No one today accepts Darwin's hypothesis of gemmules and pangenesis .)”
“Concluding Remarks and Summary”
“Aggregation of the Protoplasm within the Cells of the Tentacles”
“(Detractors sometimes claim Darwin thought that the cell was an undifferentiated mass of protoplasm. Anyone reading the passage above will realize that Darwin thought no such thing.)”
“de minimis lex non curat ,”
“de minimis non curat lex”
“As I was led to keep in my study during many months worms in pots filled with earth, I became interested in them, and wished to learn how far they acted consciously, and how much mental power they displayed. Introduction, p. 2”
“On the Formation of Mould,”