Top 35 Paul A.M. Dirac Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

2. “If there is a God, he’s a great mathematician.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

3. “A theory with mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental data.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

4. “A physical law must possess mathematical beauty.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

5. “I consider that I understand an equation when I can predict the properties of its solutions, without actually solving it.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

6. “Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

7. “Scientific progress is measured in units of courage, not intelligence.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

8. “One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

9. “The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

10. “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

11. “Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

12. “Quantum mechanics has explained all of chemistry and most of physics.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

13. “As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

14. “The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

15. “The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

16. “I admired Bohr very much. We had long talks together, long talks in which Bohr did practically all the talking.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

17. “There are always more people who prefer to speak than to listen.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

18. “If we are honest – and scientists have to be – we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

19. “I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

20. “Hopes are always accompanied by fears, and, in scientific research, the fears are liable to become dominant.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

21. “I learnt to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one’s trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

22. “In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it is the exact opposite.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

23. “I should like to suggest to you that the cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an economic system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning as of unequal value.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

24. “A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

25. “Living is worthwhile if one can contribute in some small way to this endless chain of progress.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

26. “The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

27. “The mathematician plays a game in which he himself invents the rules while the physicist plays a game in which the rules are provided by nature, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which nature has chosen.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

28. “A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

29. “There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

30. “No. I had successfully solved the difficulty of finding a description of the electron which was consistent with both relativity and quantum mechanics. Of course, when you solve one difficulty, other new difficulties arise. You then try to sove them. You can never solve all difficulties at once.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

31. “The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a regular income in exchange for those goods.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

32. “It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

33. “The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

34. “If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand. Again and again, when I have been at a loss how to proceed, I have just had to wait until I have felt the mathematics led me by the hand. It has led me along an unexpected path, a path where new vistas open up, a path leading to new territory, where one can set up a base of operations, from which one can survey the surroundings and plan future progress.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac

35. “In the absence of experimental evidence, basic beliefs of theoretical physicists may initially have almost a religious flavor, guided by faith and aesthetics. Fortunately unlike religion, these beliefs soon face the hard test of experiment.”

— Paul A.M. Dirac