Quotes from Paul Dirac

Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.

If there is a God, he's a great mathematician.

One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.

Scientific progress is measured in units of courage, not intelligence.

If we are honest - and scientists have to be - we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality.

I consider that I understand an equation when I can predict the properties of its solutions, without actually solving it.

The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.

Hopes are always accompanied by fears, and, in scientific research, the fears are liable to become dominant.

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 fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.

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.

As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.

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.

I admired Bohr very much. We had long talks together, long talks in which Bohr did practically all the talking.

There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.

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

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.

God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.

I should like to suggest to you that the cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an economic system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning as of unequal value.

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

A theory with mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental data.

It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.

A physical law must possess mathematical beauty.