Quotes from Jonathan Miller

Now, that is in a way also what scientists are trying to do they're trying to get people to see that the world can be represented in an alternative way and that it's right.

As we know from the work of certain fundamental physicists, people like Einstein were very dependent upon conjuring up visual images in order to imagine things which otherwise were not easily formulated.

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

The thing about science is that it's an accurate picture of the world.

I'm not really a Jew just Jew-ish not the whole hog.

It's not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people's costumes and pretending to be people that they're not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?

People are already self-selected by the time they've decided to become scientists.

Errors of taste are very often the outward sign of a deep fault of sensibility.

What people want is not what some would call imaginative and often austere productions but very lavish productions which cast back into the auditorium an image of their affluence.

I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn't make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.

I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.

I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.

I'm not a Jew. I'm Jew-ish. I don't go the whole hog.

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

The thing about science is that it's an accurate picture of the world.

Holidays are an expensive trial of strength. The only satisfaction comes from survival.

I'm not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.

On David Hume] Although he never admitted to being an atheist as such, he was clearly and unquestionably the most vividly elegant skeptic of them all.

I was just rather fascinated by certain what seemed to me insoluble paradoxes about reflection, about what it was like to look in one direction and see in another. I was struck by the strange capability we have to look through the front window of a motor car and at the same time look through the driving mirror and not to confuse the view that one saw inside one frame with the view that surrounded it in another frame.

I never go to the theatre. I'm just not interested in going to it. I'm interested only in doing it.

I was trained as a neurologist, and then I went into the theater, and if you're brought up to think of yourself as a biological scientist of some sort, pretty well everything else seems frivolous by comparison.

I was trained as a neurologist, and then I went into the theater, and if you're brought up to think of yourself as a biological scientist of some sort, pretty well everything else seems frivolous by comparison.

You spend ten years of your life being trained to do one thing, and you're being taught to think that it's the most serious thing that anyone could possibly do, and then suddenly you find yourself doing something that in some respects is the epitome of frivolity.

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.