Ernst Mach Quotes

We cannot sacrifice innocent human life now for vague and exaggerated promises of medical treatments thirty of forty years from now. There are ways to pursue this technology and respect life at the same time.

If I have one special memory, it was when we recreated the trial of the Chicago Seven - and I'd known about it before - but this was a pivotal moment in my life. If my father had been found guilty of conspiracy, I wouldn't be here.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

My life has ever been devoted to her service from my youth up, though never before in a cause like this - a cause for which I would most cheerfully risk and lay down my life.

It is better for aged diplomats to be bored than for young men to die.

You can't plan the kind of deep love that results in children. Fatherhood was not a conscious decision. It was part of the wonderful ride I was on. All the math finally worked.

The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics...the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word.

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

...from the time of Kepler to that of Newton, and from Newton to Hartley, not only all things in external nature, but the subtlest mysteries of life and organization, and even of the intellect and moral being, were conjured within the magic circle of mathematical formulae.

Mathematics is a logical method. . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.

In mathematical analysis we call x the undetermined part of line a: the rest we don't call y, as we do in common life, but a-x. Hence mathematical language has great advantages over the common language.

You ought to love all mankind; nay, every individual of mankind. You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circles less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and power will vanish; nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them, until all mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights.

This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it.

Human life is proverbially uncertain; few things are more certain than the solvency of a life-insurance company.

God is subtle but he is not malicious.

Your faith is very important. I have done the math, and you are going to be dead a whole lot longer that you will be alive.

There is nothing strange in the circle being the origin of any and every marvel.

In life two negatives don't make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.

As regards the celebrated struggle for life, it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved. It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality -- where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power.

Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.

Now I feel as if I should succeed in doing something in mathematics, although I cannot see why it is so very important. . . The knowledge doesn't make life any sweeter or happier, does it?

Yet what are all such gaieties to me whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

Life proceeds out of your intention. Your true intention is revealed by your actions, and your actions are determined by your true intention. As with everything in life (and life itself), it is a circle.

Life is full of circles