Top 100 First Principles Quotes
#1. The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.
Democritus
#2. We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them.
Blaise Pascal
#3. As an entrepreneur making decisions for your company, always go back to your first principles of what's important to you and why you started in the first place.
Matt Mullenweg
#4. One of the first principles of decorative art is that in all manufactures ornament must hold a place subordinate to that of utility; and when, by its exuberance, ornament interferes with utility, it is misplaced and vulgar.
George Mason
#5. A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#6. Love and esteem are the first principles of friendship; it is always imperfect if either of these two are wanting.
Eustace Budgell
#7. We start with first principles. The Constitution creates a Federal Government of enumerated powers.
William Rehnquist
#8. The data stream has been corrupted, return to first principles.
Terence McKenna
#10. Bills of attainder, ex-post facto laws and laws impairing the obligation of contracts are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation.
James Madison
#11. HE WORKED IT OUT FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES ON THE WHITEBOARD
Neal Stephenson
#12. Every government is perpetually degenerating towards corruption, from which it must be rescued at certain periods by the resuscitation of its first principles, and the re-establishment of its original constitution.
Samuel Johnson
#13. Logic is always applicable to the real world," Miyasi said dismissively, "but only a novice would think the real world can be applied to logic. Ideals must be first principles. Not the mundane world.
Robert Jordan
#15. Conscientious and careful physicians allocate causes of disease to natural laws, while the ablest scientists go back to medicine for their first principles.
Aristotle.
#16. No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent.
G.K. Chesterton
#17. It is my firm belief that all successful languages are grown and not merely designed from first principles
Bjarne Stroustrup
#18. Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.
David Whyte
#20. The man who has not learned the secret of taking the drudgery out of his task by flinging his whole soul into it, has not learned the first principles of success or happiness.
Orison Swett Marden
#21. one of the first principles that any believer in any phase of his life must enforce is to honor God as the center of his daily living and to make communion with God the foundation for all his other activities.
Vincent Cheung
#22. When success begins to slip from your fingers - for whatever reason - the response isn't to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It's to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.
Ryan Holiday
#23. Don't just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it's good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles. Which is, rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.
Elon Musk
#24. The things best to know are first principles and causes, but these things are perhaps the most difficult for men to grasp, for they are farthest removed from the senses ...
Aristotle.
#25. Biology has tended to be an observational science, and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past, but I hate to predict the future on that.
Jeremiah P. Ostriker
#27. To doubt one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. Don't defend past actions; what is right today may be wrong tomorrow. Don't be consistent; consistency is the refuge of fools.
Hyman Rickover
#28. For a truly effective social campaign, a brand needs to embrace the first principles of marketing, which involves brand definition and consistent storytelling.
Simon Mainwaring
#29. One of the first principles of perseverance is to know when to stop persevering.
Carolyn Wells
#30. 'Think simple' as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#31. Our own poor poets, I am afraid, have been so intimidated by our clinics and laboratories that they have abandoned the first principles of beginning, that of the festival; and the heart of the festival has always been the atmosphere of myth, of delight.
Joseph Campbell
#32. It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air; and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin; and about as valuable.
Edmund Burke
#33. Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations ... may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be.
Roger Cotes
#34. Republicans should simply focus on first principles and give the American people what they want - an honest party dedicated to common sense, fiscal responsibility and limited government. If we govern to save the country, we'll do well as a party.
Tom Coburn
#35. Various religious systems have been given to humanity at different times, each suited to meet the spiritual needs of the people among whom it was promulgated, and, coming from the same divine source: - God, all religions exhibit similar fundamentals or first principles.
Max Heindel
#36. Now there cannot be first principles for men, unless the Divinity has revealed them; all the rest
beginning, middle, and end
isnothing but dreams and smoke.
Michel De Montaigne
#37. I enjoyed mathematics from a very young age. At the beginning of college, I had this illusion, which was kind of silly in retrospect, that if I just understood math and physics and philosophy, I could figure out everything else from first principles.
Erez Lieberman Aiden
#38. In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.
Alexander Hamilton
#39. Unless we take care to clear the first principles of knowledge from the incumbrance and delusion of words, we may make infinite reasonings upon them to no purpose. We may deduce consequences, and never be the wiser.
David Berman
#40. Fine scholar though he was, he was an even better teacher; and it may truly be said of him...that in turning men's minds to the Middle Ages he 'stimulated their mental thirst...silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles'.
Jocelyn Gibb
#41. We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.
David Mamet
#42. The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.
Henry Bolingbroke
#43. It appears necessary to go back to first principles in search of the most simple truths, and to dispute with some prevailing prejudice every inch of ground.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#44. No science ever defends its first principles.
Aristotle.
#45. I study much, and the more I study, the oftener I go back to those first principles which are so simple that childhood itself can lisp them.
Sophie Swetchine
#46. It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way, even by death, and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.
Bram Stoker
#47. I have an ethics background. It doesn't mean you're perfect. But I tried to set an entirely different bar for politics in D.C. that's based on ethics and first principles and political philosophy, and not this constant bickering of, 'Are you Right or Left?'
Dave Brat
#49. He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this; had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.
Martin Amis
#50. Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.
Confucius
#51. Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.
Thom Mayne
#52. the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.
Peter Thiel
#53. Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
Chris Cleave
#54. I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
Elon Musk
#55. Tektology was the first attempt in the history of science to arrive at a systematic formulation of the principles of organization operating in living and nonliving systems.
Fritjof Capra
#56. I don't consider myself a moral man. I do not philosophize about life or bother with laws and principles that govern most people. I do not pretend to know the difference between right and wrong. But I do live by a certain kind of code. And somethimes, I think, you have how to shoot first.
Tahereh Mafi
#57. There's a misconception about Barack Obama as a former constitutional law professor. First of all, there are plenty of professors who are 'legal relativists.' They tend to view legal principles as relative to whatever they're trying to achieve.
Jonathan Turley
#58. In a speedy and aggressive culture, we need different principles to live by-bravery and insight. The first moment of bravery is building trust in the mind, which we do in meditation. When we know how to create peace in our own mind, we can transform the world.
Sakyong Mipham
#59. In the progressive narrative, America is to blame, and the first offenders were the Founders themselves. The progressive conclusion is that the founding was "defective," setting up the progressive agenda to replace and move away from founding principles, what Obama called the "remaking" of America.
Dinesh D'Souza
#60. Constancy of purpose is the first principle of success.
Napoleon Hill
#61. The first thing to do after you get fired is to discover God
Sunday Adelaja
#62. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.
William Shakespeare
#63. Turning every business into an environmental industry will involve applying new principles ... first, we need to make more with less ... second, we need to design out waste ... third, we must begin to decarbonise our energy supply
David Miliband
#64. Temporary deviations from fundamental principles are always more or less dangerous. When the first pretext fails, those who become interested in prolonging the evil will rarely be at a loss for other pretexts.
James Madison
#65. At one point I took a copy of Berkeley's Principles from my father's library. That was the first philosophy book I read. I found it fascinating and wanted to read more philosophy.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
#66. The first issue of The Register was printed in London, and gave a glowing account of the province that was to be - its climate, its resources, the sound principles on which it was founded.
Catherine Helen Spence
#67. I appeal to all Britishers to answer this call to arms for the defence of all the principles that we Englishmen have been the first to proclaim in the world.
John Amery
#68. The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#69. A great deal has been written about personal power by Carlos Casteneda, and I find his first four books valuable. Of the experiences themselves, who knows? But the principles that are presented are quite valuable for one who seeks power.
Frederick Lenz
#70. Be thou incapable of change in that which is right, and men will rely upon thee. Establish unto thyself principles of action; and see that thou ever act according to them. First know that thy principles are just, and then be thou.
Akhenaton
#71. Home is the first and most important school of character. It is there that every human being receives his best moral training, or his worst; for it is there that he imbibes those principles of conduct which endure through manhood, and cease only with life.
Samuel Smiles
#72. My object has been, first to discover correct principles and then to suggest their practical development.
James Prescott Joule
#73. A principle is not merely a fundamental truth, but principles must serve as the very first source of every decision we make along the road to success.
Richie Norton
#74. You must learn to overcome your cowardice, and put God, His principles and the things of His kingdom, that you are called to establish, first in your life
Sunday Adelaja
#76. When I think of civil liberties I think of the founding principles of the country. The freedoms that are in the First Amendment. But also the fundamental right to privacy.
Tim Cook
#77. Consequently, the first thing to be done in any search after philosophic principles is to travel over the special sciences with a view to extracting from them such information as is relevant to our purpose.
Hugh Elliot
#78. The stronger you stand on your principles, the easier it is to fight. The first time, it's tough, but the second time, it's always easier. You just have to push for your rights.
Shaffi Mather
#79. Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.
Clement Greenberg
#80. You would have thought that our first priority would be to ask what the ecologists are finding out, because we have to live within the conditions and principles they define. Instead, we've elevated the economy above ecology.
David Suzuki
#81. I also helped write the five-page statement of principles that Civic Forum issued in late November. That was the first public expression of what the new government wanted to do.
Vaclav Klaus
#82. The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use.
Gustave Eiffel
#83. For an American to be patriotic is to be loyal to the principles of our Constitution, and the First Amendment. The truth is that the policies of the government is sometimes in conflict with that. In our country, patriotism should not be defined as obedience to an authority.
Daniel Ellsberg
#84. It was Steinitz who was the first to establish the basic principles of general chess strategy. He was a pioneer and one of the most profound researchers into the thruth of the game, which was hidden from his contemporaries.
Jose Raul Capablanca
#85. There are four principles we need to maintain: First, read the Word of God. Second, consume the Word of God until it consumes you. Third believe the Word of God. Fourth, act on the Word.
Smith Wigglesworth
#86. The Independent or Congregational theory includes two principles; first, that the governing and executive power in the Church is in the brotherhood; and secondly, that the Church organization is complete in each worshipping assembly, which is independent of every other.
Charles Hodge
#87. The first principle of economic symmetry: building the economic power to consume simultaneously with the industrial power to produce.
Louis O. Kelso
#88. Ask Robespierre. Ask the man with the conscience which is more important, your friend or your country - ask him how he weighs an individual in the scheme of things. Ask him which comes first, his old pals or his new principles. You ask him, Camille.
Hilary Mantel
#89. First to those universal principles I have spoken of: these you must keep at command, and without them neither sleep nor rise, drink nor eat nor deal with men: the principle that no one can control another's will, and that the will alone is the sphere of good and evil.
Epictetus
#90. I have only two rules which I regard as principles of conduct. The first is: Have no rules. The second is: Be independent of the opinion of others.
Albert Einstein
#91. The Chancellor looked down at the empty table for a minute. Then he shrugged, looked up, and gave a surprisingly jaunty smile. All in favor of admitting first-term Kvothe's reckless use of sympathy as proof of mastery of basic principles of sympathy vote by show of hands.
Patrick Rothfuss
#92. The Third Reich is the first power which not only recognizes, but puts into practice, the high principles of the Papacy.
Avro Manhattan
#93. I have never lived on principles. When I have had to act, I never first asked myself on what principles I was going to act, but I went at it and did what I thought fit. I have often reproached myself for my want of principle.
Otto Von Bismarck
#94. The First Amendment has created a wall of separation between the church and the State. But that wall is one directional. It is to keep the government from running the Church. But it is not to keep Christian principles out of the government.
Thomas Jefferson
#95. Throughout my first year in office, I have stood up for principles that will guide our country back toward the path of freedom and prosperity.
Jason Chaffetz
#96. An architect, to be a true exponent of his time, must possess first, last and always the sympathy, the intuition of a poet ... this is the one real, vital principle that survives through all places and all times.
Louis Sullivan
#97. My father taught me many important giving lessons, but two stand out. First, always give as much as you possibly can. And second, give equally from among your resources - your time, your mind and your capital. These are principles I live by.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#98. The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.
Aristotle.
#99. Biology sometimes reveals its fundamental principles through what may seem at first to be arcane and bizarre.
Elizabeth Blackburn
#100. two well-recognized economic principles. First, the firmer the monopolistic controls in a given market, the higher the prices. Second, monopoly prices are discriminatory prices. "Charging all the traffic will bear" does not mean that all the traffic will bear the same charge! In fact, it will not.
George W. Stocking
