Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.

Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

Figure skating is theatrical. It's artistic. It's elegant. It's extremely athletic. And there's a very specific audience for that.

How can there be so vast a difference of opinion in an age so intelligent and educated as ours? Is half the world struck blind to-day, and is sight given to the other half alone? No, there is neither incurable blindness, nor is sight vouchsafed only to a few. The sole reason for the confusion is that men employ different standards in measuring the same thing, and for this reason find it impossible to understand each other.

I am never satisfied until I can make a mathematical model of what I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. If I cannot, I do not understand.

My purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things.

When I was in New York, I put together a show; I put together this really great band and performed at this place called Littlefield in Brooklyn. It was really fun. I did, like, 10 standards, and then I just hopped around different bars like Mona's and different jazz clubs in New York just singing because I know all the standards so well.

In math, you're either right or you're wrong.

Mathematicians are stiff abstract guys. They'll tell you they don't need the physical world. But then when I show them my bubbles they're like little children.

You have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty of math.

In the future, as in the past, the great ideas [of mathematics] must be simplifying ideas, the creator must always be one who clarifies, for himself, and for others, the most complicated issues of formulas and concepts.

And what are these fluxions? The velocities of evanescent increments. And what are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities...?

Simplicity before understanding is simplistic; simplicity after understanding is simple.

I just set the bar, niggas fall under it like a limbo

Once you understand what excellence is all about... you see how that excellence manifests itself in any discipline.

That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.

To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.

Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science... In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it.

The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; as a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.

It is not money that makes you well dressed: it is understanding.

Knowledge is the only elegance.

Once in a rare while, somebody comes along who doesn't just raise the bar, they create an entirely new standard of measurement.