57 Quotes by Paul Dirac

It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress

Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it is the exact opposite.

The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a regular income in exchange for those goods.

The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say ... something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand. Commenting to him about the poetry J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote.

In such a theory a bare electron would be inconceivable, since one cannot imagine the end of a piece of string without having the string.

The electric field in this picture from discrete Faraday lines of force, which are to be treated as physical things, like strings.

A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical.