Quotes About Formulae

#1. I have always felt that I understood a phenomenon only to the extent that I could visualise it. Much of the charm organic chemical research has for me derives from structural formulae. When reading chemical journals, I look for formulae first.

Donald Cram

#2. Bob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse.

Allen Ginsberg

#3. Life cannot be captured in a few axioms. And that is just what I keep trying to do. But it won't work, for life is full of endless nuances and cannot be captured in just a few formulae.

Etty Hillesum

#4. The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip; to avoid this, the warrior treats each situation as if it were unique and never resorts to formulae, recipes or other people's opinions.

Paulo Coelho

#5. I visualized myself pulling on my mental thinking cap, jamming it down around my ears as I had taught myself to do. It was a tall, conical wizard's model, covered with chemical equations and formulae: a cornucopia of ideas.

Alan Bradley

#6. Is it possible that that insanity called love and jealousy does exist, and not only in the idiotic books of the ancients? What seems most strange is that I, I! ... Equations, formulae, figures, and suddenly this! I can't understand it, I can't!

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#7. Because if the Romans, the Greeks, the Hebrew scholars, and the Christians all describe the same entities, and issue the same warnings and formulae for controlling them, then surely that is something not to be dismissed.

Anne Rice

#8. They [formulae 1.10 - 1.12 of Ramanujan] must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them.

G.H. Hardy

#9. We need no science of formulae, but a science of forms.

Viktor Schauberger

#10. I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.

Max Frisch

#11. Neither concepts nor mathematical formulae can explain the infinite.

Eckhart Tolle

#12. Formulae are the anaesthetics of thought, not its stimulants and to make any one think is far better worth while than cramming him with ill-considered, and therefore indigestible, learning.

Percival Lowell

#13. 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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#14. Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

Milan Kundera

#15. We liked to be known as the clever girls. When we decorated our hands with henna for holidays and weddings, we drew calculus and chemical formulae instead of flowers and butterflies.

Malala Yousafzai

#16. The French are a tremendously verbal race: they kill you with their assurances, their repetitions, their reasons, their platitudes, their formulae, their propositions, their solutions.

Christina Stead

#17. The artistic formulae wear thin quickly and yet daily the artist - when developing his own foundation - must enter his own time and the problems of other contemporary artists. Paths cross and the soil of time is starting to be turned.

Asger Jorn

#18. For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.

Barbara Brown Taylor

#19. Words were numbers were codes were formulae. Words held secret maps, the measuring of paces, the patterns of mortal minds, of histories, of cities, of continents and warrens.

Steven Erikson

#20. I am going to produce a movie of my own. I am not going to stick to the time-tested formulae of Hindi cinema. I want to make a film for the present generation. So there will be a lot of new faces in the film.

Kabir Bedi

#21. There is no such thing as a 'real' representation of 'reality.' Except, perhaps, in algebraic formulae.

Claude Simon

#22. One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.

Daniel Bell

#23. For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye become the footprints of history. One ought to watch one' s every word.

Franz Kafka

#24. Religious faith may very well be considered a science, for it responds invariably to certain formulae. Perform the technique of faith according to the laws which have been proved workable in human experience and you will always get a result of power.

Norman Vincent Peale

#25. There is always more in one of Ramanujan's formulae than meets the eye, as anyone who sets to work to verify those which look the easiest will soon discover. In some the interest lies very deep, in others comparatively near the surface; but there is not one which is not curious and entertaining.

G.H. Hardy

#26. If one could only discover the unwritten bases of black magic and apply formulae to them, we would find that they were merely another form of science ... perhaps less advance, perhaps more.

Charles Beaumont

#27. I am afraid I shall have to give up my trade; I am far too inert to keep up with organic chemistry, it is becoming too much for me, though I may boast of having contributed something to its development. The modern system of formulae is to me quite repulsive.

Friedrich Wohler

#28. The usual duty of the "intellectual" is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae.

Christopher Hitchens

#29. In the matter of physics, the first lessons should contain nothing but what is experimental and interesting to see. A pretty experiment is in itself often more valuable than twenty formulae extracted from our minds.

Albert Einstein

#30. Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

Anthony Hecht

#31. My life isn't theories and formulae. It's part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I've absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone ... from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.

Audrey Hepburn

#32. Old formulas don't give new solutions.

Israelmore Ayivor