Jean le Rond d'Alembert famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

There are only two kinds of certain knowledge: Awareness of our own existence and the truths of mathematics.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Two #Kind #Awareness
A philosopher is a fool who torments himself while he is alive, to be talked of after he is dead.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Alive #Fool #Philosopher
High office, is like a pyramid; only two kinds of animals reach the summit â€” reptiles and eagles.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Animal #Eagles #Two
Just go on..and faith will soon return.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Math #Goes On #Return
Algebra is generous; she often gives more than is asked of her.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Math #Giving #Algebra
The more wit we have, the less satisfied we are with it.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Wit #Satisfied
The true system of the World has been recognized, developed and perfected...Everything has been discussed and analysed, or at least mentioned.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Book #World #Has Beens
Music that paints nothing is only noise.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Noise #Paint
Push on and faith will catch up with you.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#
To someone who could grasp the Universe from a unified standpoint the entire creation would appear as a unique truth and necessity.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Science #Unique #Mystery
If one looks at all closely at the middle of our own century, the events that occupy us, our customs, our achievements and even our topics of conversation, it is difficult not to see that a very remarkable change in several respects has come into our ideas; a change which, by its rapidity, seems to us to foreshadow another still greater. Time alone will tell the aim, the nature and limits of this revolution, whose inconveniences and advantages our posterity will recognize better than we can.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Ideas #Achievement #Events
Gaming is the destruction of all decorum; the prince forgets at it his dignity, and the lady her modesty.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Gambling #Modesty #Dignity
Thus metaphysics and mathematics are, among all the sciences that belong to reason, those in which imagination has the greatest role. I beg pardon of those delicate spirits who are detractors of mathematics for saying this . . . . The imagination in a mathematician who creates makes no less difference than in a poet who invents. . . . Of all the great men of antiquity, Archimedes may be the one who most deserves to be placed beside Homer.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Math #Men #Differences
In England it was enough that Newton was the greatest mathematican of his century; in France he would have been expected to be agreeable too.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#France #England #Newton
I am worn out by the insults and vexations that this work brings down on us.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Vexation #Insult #Worn
Geometry, which should only obey Physics, when united with it sometimes commands it. If it happens that the question which we wish to examine is too complicated for all the elements to be able to enter into the analytical comparison we wish to make, we separate the more inconvenient [elements], we substitute others for them, less troublesome but also less real, and we are surprised to arrive, notwithstanding a painful labour, only at a result contradicted by nature; as if after having disguised it, cut it short or altered it, a purely mechanical combination could give it back to us.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Real #Cutting #Giving
One magnitude is said to be the limit of another magnitude when the second may approach the first within any given magnitude, however small, though the second may never exceed the magnitude it approaches.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#May #Limits #Firsts
D'Alembert was always surrounded by controversy. ... he was the lightning rod which drew sparks from all the foes of the philosophes. ... Unfortunately he carried this... pugnacity into his scientific research and once he had entered a controversy, he argued his cause with vigour and stubbornness. He closed his mind to the possibility that he might be wrong.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Mind #Lightning #Research
Just go on . . . and faith will soon return. To a friend hesitant with respect to infinitesimals.
-- Jean le Rond d'Alembert

#Friendship #Faith #Goes On

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