Quotes About Logic

Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not.

The introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.

Pure mathematics is in its way the poetry of logical ideas.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn around and speak of the scientific foundations of morality.

The theory must not contradict empirical facts

Logic will get you from point A to point B. Imagination and hard work will take you everywhere else.

Development of Western science is based on two great achievements: the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (during the Renaissance). In my opinion, one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

For any one who is pervaded with the sense of causal law in all that happens, who accepts in real earnest the assumption of causality, the idea of a Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible. Neither the religion of fear nor the social-moral religion can have any hold on him.

All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.

there are no arbitrary constants ... nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally determined constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose numerical value could be changed without destroying the theory).

Mathematics is the poetry of logic and the music of reason.

Science without epistemology is – insofar as it is thinkable at all – primitive and muddled.

Logik bringt dich von A nach B, deine Vorstellungskraft bringt dich überall hin.

Random quotes don't constitute an argument.

Every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist.

The creative principle [of science] resides in mathematics.

La théorie, c'est quand on sait tout et que rien ne fonctionne. La pratique, c'est quand tout fonctionne et que personne ne sait pourquoi. Ici, nous avons réuni théorie et pratique : Rien ne fonctionne… et personne ne sait pourquoi

A truly rational theory would allow us to deduce the elementary particles (electron, etc.) and not be forced to state them a priori.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Make things as simple as possible but no simpler

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world. All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.

The trouble with fiction, said John Rivers, is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.