19th century Quote by Charles Koch

Don’t just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it’s good to think in terms of the physics approach of first…

— Elon Musk

“If there is one thing we try to teach our students when they first arrive at the University of Manchester, ready to learn to…

— Brian Cox Jeff Forshaw

A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.

— B. F. Skinner

In the matter of physics, the first lessons should contain nothing but what is experimental and interesting to see. A pretty experiment is in…

— Albert Einstein

First-principles thinking sets goals in known terms and then pursues them, inventing and learning new things as necessary, but it rarely uncovers brand new…

— Bryan Johnson

What gets me excited is the original principle.

— Heston Blumenthal

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

— Elon Musk

It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than it is to apply them.

— Winston Churchill

I accept no principles of physics which are not also accepted in mathematics.

— Rene Descartes

The physicist is like someone who's watching people playing chess and, after watching a few games, he may have worked out what the moves…

— Martin Rees

There is something very pleasing about the principles of science and the rules of math, because they are so inevitable and so harmonious -…

— Lydia Davis

This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms…

— Hans Christian von Baeyer