Facts are of not much use, considered as facts. They bewilder by their number and their apparent incoherency. Let them be digested into theory, however, and brought into mutual harmony, and it is another matter.

Facts are of not much use, considered as facts. They bewilder by their number and their apparent incoherency. Let them be digested into theory, however, and brought into mutual harmony, and it is another matter.

The best result of mathematics is to be able to do without it.

We do not dwell in the Palace of Truth. But, as was mentioned to me not long since, "There is a time coming when all things shall be found out." I am not so sanguine myself, believing that the well in which Truth is said to reside is really a bottomless pit.

...there is no absolute scale of size in nature, and the small may be as important, or more so than the great.

It is shocking that young people should be addling their brains over mere logical subtleties in Euclid's Elements, trying to understand the proof of one obvious fact in terms of something equally .. obvious.

Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.