42 Quotes by James Clerk Maxwell

Francis Galton, whose mission it seems to be to ride other men's hobbies to death, has invented the felicitous expression 'structureless germs'.

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 assimilated when it is in the nascent state...

It is a good thing to have two ways of looking at a subject, and to admit that there are two ways of looking at it.

Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.

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 has incorporated his own analysis of the problem with his general treatment of mechanics, and since his time M. Poinsot has brought the subject under the power of a more searching analysis than that of the calculus, in which ideas take the place of symbols, and intelligent propositions supersede equations.

That small word “Force,” they make a barber's block,Ready to put onMeanings most strange and various, fit to shockPupils of Newton....The phrases of last century in thisLinger to play tricks—Vis viva and Vis Mortua and Vis Acceleratrix:—Those long-nebbed words that to our text books stillCling by their titles,And from them creep, as entozoa will,Into our vitals.But see! Tait writes in lucid symbols clearOne small equation;And Force becomes of Energy a mereSpace-variation.

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 days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.

All the mathematical sciences are founded on the relations between physical laws and laws of numbers.

I have looked into the most philosophical systems and have found none that will not work without God.