Murray Gell-Mann Quotes

Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty and perfection.

A physical law must possess mathematical beauty.

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

All results of the profoundest mathematical investigation must ultimately be expressible in the simple form of properties of the integers.

Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical reasoning involved and contrast it with the complex and far-reaching physical consequences, a deep sense of respect for the power of the symmetry laws never fails to develop.

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.

I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.

We expect the states to show us whether or not we're achieving simple objectives-like literacy, literacy in math, the ability to read and write.

But in the garden of simple, where all of us are nameless, you were never anything but beautiful to me.

I started with wanting to think about witches, about strong women who have special powers - who are often misunderstood. Then I found some beautiful blue fabric, so I made Blue Witches. My creative process is always like that. Organic, text, theme, subtext, each day evolving and trying to make strong, beautiful clothes. It's that simple.

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.

I love Judy Garland, I love Doris Day, I love Marilyn Monroe. I love everything that comes from that era. The music is just beautiful and powerful - and simple. That's what makes it so great.

To me the gospel is not a great mass of theological jargon. It is a simple and beautiful and logical thing, with one quiet truth following another in orderly sequence. I do not fret over the mysteries. I do not worry whether the heavenly gates swing or slide. I am only concerned that they open.

It's quite simple: If someone says UR beautiful, believe them. If someone says UR ugly, don't believe them.

We need a childlike trust that God is good... ultimately we are OK. That is a simple, beautiful pure thing that can be complicated ferociously by all sorts of intellectual categories.

Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyous words in the language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying.

I claim that relativity and the rest of modern physics is not complicated. It can be explained very simply. It is only unusual or, put another way, it is contrary to common sense.

When you’re O.C.D., you want the most beautiful animals.

For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general sense that the world can be expressed in closely-reasoned arguments, in interlocking axioms and theorems.

A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical.

The good, of course, is always beautiful, and the beautiful never lacks proportion.

Happy is the person who has learned the secret of being content with whatever life brings him, and has learned to rejoice in the simple and beautiful things around him.