Lord Kelvin Quotes

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

Arithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.

What's important is that twice two is four and all the rest's nonsense.

Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.

The only roads of enquiry there are to think of: one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, this is the path of persuasion (for truth is its companion); the other, that it is not and that it must not be - this I say to you is a path wholly unknowable.

Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.

All reasoning ends in an appeal to self-evidence.

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

You can't criticize geometry. It's never wrong.

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

Mathematics is the music of reason.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.

You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Math is my favorite subject. It's the universal language. I like the fact that wherever you go in the whole world, two plus two will still be four.

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment.

In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth. A man would perish of hunger and thirst, if he refused to eat or drink, till he had obtained positive proof that food and drink would be good for him. But in philosophic reflection this is not so. On the contrary, we must take care not to admit as true anything, which is only probable. For when one falsity has been let in, infinite others follow.

There are areas of philosophy that are important, but I think of them as being subsumed by other fields. In the case of descriptive philosophy, you have literature or logic, which, in my view, is really mathematics.

Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'

I believe only in the mathematics.

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational

Validity is the touchstone of inference, and truth of judgment: the fact that vichyssoise is cold ratifies the judgment that vichyssoise is, indeed, cold, and the judgment that vichyssoise is cold expresses the fact that vichyssoise is cold.