Philip Pullman Quotes

All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has ever escaped from their hands alive.

The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.

It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.

Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.

At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space - abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms.

I think what really stays with me is the idea that you can write music about the texture of a wall, and everything is in some way connected.

Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space.

Magnitudes are algebraically represented by letter, men by men of letters, and so on.

But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.

Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

We need useless theory more than ever today.

One should not be too distracted by definitions. Ideas transcend definitions.

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.

Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

Scientists often invent words to fill the holes in their understanding.These words are meant as conveniences until real understanding can be found. ... Words such as dimension and field and infinity ... are not descriptions of reality, yet we accept them as such because everyone is sure someone else knows what the words mean.

When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.

Mass, time , magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.

The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.

Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed. That is the tragedy of language my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.

Never mind. Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us aas real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.

As a kid you learn that there are thinkers and there are philosophers and there are theologian, and I'd hear little bits of the ideas that these people pursued or developed or created and I'd be really excited. Then I'll start to read it and I think, "Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn't a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself."

Some persons have contended that mathematics ought to be taught by making the illustrations obvious to the senses. Nothing can be more absurd or injurious: it ought to be our never-ceasing effort to make people think, not feel.