Humorous Sayings

If an idea does not appear bizarre, there is no hope for it.

I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Eve…

If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.

We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture.

If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men — and cowards.

Needless to say, taken literally, this is just as absurd. For an adult organism the energy content is as stationary as the material content. Since, surely, any calorie is worth as much as any other calorie, one cannot see how a mere exchange could he…

Even if I should be right in this, I do not know whether my way of approach is really the best and simplest. But, in short, it was mine.

We are told such a number as the square root of 2 worried Pythagoras and his school almost to exhaustion. Being used to such queer numbers from early childhood, we must be careful not to form a low idea of the mathematical intuition of these ancient …

By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were.

I was scared because of this same thing I was talking about — I'm not so good at this. “The Dean's tea” — it sounded so silly, you know, and high class.

By the way, Professor, you know that paper in which you say those quantities are analogous... Did you know they're proportional?

Oh. That's interesting. (This entire scene is very typical of Dirac. In fact, that is comparatively a lot of words for him to have said to a stranger.)

Fiddling is the answer. Experimenting is fiddling around. It's not an organized program, elegance — it's impossible. I noticed it.

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.

You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.

God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out. ... But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him…

This dying is boring.

I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring.