“Why nature is mathematical is, again, a mystery.”

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

I think nature’s imagination Is so much greater than man’s, she’s never going to let us relax

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

We are lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries.

Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile.

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?

I love to think. I once considered taking drugs as an attempt to better understand an altered state of mind; however, I decided not to. I didn’t want to chance ruining the machine.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

You have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.

Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.

I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.

I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.

The laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics.

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans– everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

I was rather foolish in saying that I did not like arithmetic and to learn figures when I did – I was not thinking quite what I was about. The sums can be done better, if I tried, than they are.

Understand well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation.