26 Quotes by James Jeans

Kant, discussing the various modes of perception by which the human mind apprehends nature, concluded that it is specially prone to see nature through mathematical spectacles. Just as a man wearing blue spectacles would see only a blue world, so Kant thought that, with our mental bias, we tend to see only a mathematical world.

We may as well cut out group theory. That is a subject that will never be of any use in physics.

Humanity is at the very beginning of its existence-a new-born babe, with all the unexplored potentialities of babyhood; and until the last few moments its interest has been centred, absolutely and exclusively, on its cradle and feeding bottle.

The really happy person is the one who can enjoy the scenery, even when they have to take a detour.[make the best of what is necessary...if you can't have what you love, love what you have...as there are lovable or at least positive aspects in everything, because anything could be worse]

All discussion of the ultimate nature of things must necessarily be barren unless we have some extraneous standards against which to compare them.

One must stand stiller than still. On reverse time travel.

The motion of the stars over our heads is as much an illusion as that of the cows, trees and churches that flash past the windows of our train.

The plain fact is that there are no conclusions. If we must state a conclusion, it would be that many of the former conclusions of the nineteenth-century science on philosophical questions are once again in the melting-pot.

In this model, the sun is a very tiny speck of dust indeed-a speck less than a three-thousandth of an inch in diameter ... Think of the sun as something less than a speck of dust in a vast city, of the earth as less than a millionth part of such a speck of dust, and we have perhaps as vivid a picture as the mind can really grasp of the relation of our home in space to the rest of the universe.