James Clerk Maxwell Quotes

51 quotes in 1113 categories

• Accordingly, we find Euler and D'Alembert devoting their talent and their patience to the establishment of the laws of rotation of the solid bodies. Lagrange…
• In the heavens we discover [stars] by their light, and by their light alone ... the sole evidence of the existence of these distant worlds…
• But when we face the great questions about gravitation Does it require time? Is it polar to the 'outside of the universe' or to anything?…
• Natural causes, as we know, are at work, which tend to modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the arrangements and dimensions of…
• In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin…
• It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely…
• Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means…
• Thus science strips off, one after the other, the more or less gross materialisations by which we endeavour to form an objective image of the…
• The dimmed outlines of phenomenal things all merge into one another unless we put on the focusing-glass of theory, and screw it up sometimes to…
• The experimental investigation by which Ampere established the law of the mechanical action between electric currents is one of the most brilliant achievements in science.…
• The popularisation of scientific doctrines is producing as great an alteration in the mental state of society as the material applications of science are effecting…
• Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the…
• An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the…
• It was a great step in science when men became convinced that, in order to understand the nature of things, they must begin by asking,…
• All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce…
• Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when…
• In fact, whenever energy is transmitted from one body to another in time, there must be a medium or substance in which the energy exists…
• Gases are distinguished from other forms of matter, not only by their power of indefinite expansion so as to fill any vessel, however large, and…
• In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of obtaining…
• The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments,…

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