Quotes · Skopia

12 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Laws of physics✕clear

We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea · 1870

★ 1.2

The opinion seems to have got abroad, that, in a few years, all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals.

James Clerk Maxwell

1871

★ 1.8

Essay · Magazine · Scientific literature

Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which only the actual world, but every possible world, must conform.

Bertrand Russell

1907

★ 1.9

Film · Sports (film) · Romantic comedy (film) · Sports · Romantic comedy

Well, actually, nobody on this planet ever really chooses each other. I mean, it's all a question of quantum physics, molecular attraction, and timing. Why, there are laws we don't understand that bring us together and tear us apart. It's like pheromones. You get three ants together, they can't do dick. You get 300 million of them, they can build a cathedral.

Bull Durham · 1988

★ 2.0

The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.

Albert A. Michelson

1899

★ 2.6

Philosophical literature

That all things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.

1604

★ 3.6

Scientific literature

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?...Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

Stephen Hawking

A Brief History of Time · 1988

★ 3.6

Scientific literature

The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.

Principia · 1687

★ 4.8

Speech · Commencement address

A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1978

★ 6.0

Scientific literature

Moreover, in a system of two bodies mutually acting upon each other, since the differences between their centres and the common centre of gravity of both are reciprocally as the bodies, the relative motions of those bodies, whether of approaching to or of receding from that centre, will be equal junong themselves. Therefore since the changes which happen to motions are equal and directed to contrary parts.

Principia · 1687

★ 7.3

Give me but one firm spot on which to stand and I will move the earth.

Diodorus Siculus, History of the World · 212 BC

★ 7.5

Scientific literature

Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.

Principia · 1687

★ 7.5