Top 35 James Clerk Maxwell Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “All the mathematical sciences are founded on the relations between physical laws and laws of numbers.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

Featured in: Quotes About Numbers

2. “I have looked into the most philosophical systems and have found none that will not work without God.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

3. “The true logic of this world is in the calculus of probabilities.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

4. “In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

5. “The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

6. “Ampere was the Newton of Electricity.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

7. “We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

8. “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

9. “In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of obtaining data.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

10. “The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust and which he dares not take to pieces.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

11. “Faraday is, and must always remain, the father of that enlarged science of electromagnetism.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

12. “It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

13. “The chief philosophical value of physics is that it gives the mind something distinct to lay hold of, which, if you don’t, Nature at once tells you you are wrong.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

14. “I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

15. “The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

16. “Almighty God, Who hast created man in Thine own image, and made him a living soul that he might seek after Thee, and have dominion over Thy creatures, teach us to study the works of Thy hands, that we may subdue the earth to our use, and strengthen the reason for Thy service;.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

17. “The mathematical difficulties of the theory of rotation arise chiefly from the want of geometrical illustrations and sensible images, by which we might fix the results of analysis in our minds.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

18. “Colour as perceived by us is a function of three independent variables at least three are I think sufficient, but time will show if I thrive.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

19. “I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

20. “All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

21. “An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

22. “Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

23. “Gases are distinguished from other forms of matter, not only by their power of indefinite expansion so as to fill any vessel, however large, and by the great effect heat has in dilating them, but by the uniformity and simplicity of the laws which regulate these changes.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

24. “What’s the go of that? What’s the particular go of that?”

— James Clerk Maxwell

25. “In speaking of the Energy of the field, however, I wish to be understood literally. All energy is the same as mechanical energy, whether it exists in the form of motion or in that of elasticity, or in any other form. The energy in electromagnetic phenomena is mechanical energy.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

26. “Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

27. “Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

28. “The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?”

— James Clerk Maxwell

29. “By the study of Boltzmann I have been unable to understand him. He could not understand me on account of my shortness, and his length was and is an equal stumbling block to me.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

30. “But though the professed aim of all scientific work is to unravel the secrets of nature, it has another effect, not less valuable, on the mind of the worker. It leaves him in possession of methods which nothing but scientific work could have led him to invent.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

31. “Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

32. “The equations at which we arrive must be such that a person of any nation, by substituting the numerical values of the quantities as measured by his own national units, would obtain a true result.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

33. “The vast interplanetary and interstellar regions will no longer be regarded as waste places in the universe, which the Creator has not seen fit to fill with the symbols of the manifold order of His kingdom. We shall find them to be already full of this wonderful medium; so full, that no human power can remove it from the smallest portion of space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

34. “It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe in the existence of a law, and yet have a mystery to move about in.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

35. “Heat may be generated and destroyed by certain processes, and this shows that heat is not a substance.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

36. “It is a good thing to have two ways of looking at a subject, and to admit that there are two ways of looking at it.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

37. “The dimmed outlines of phenomenal things all merge into one another unless we put on the focusing-glass of theory, and screw it up sometimes to one pitch of definition and sometimes to another, so as to see down into different depths through the great millstone of the world.”

— James Clerk Maxwell

38. “Thus number may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician.”

— James Clerk Maxwell