Physical Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.

If we recognize, following the materialist theories, that only the physical nature exist, and that man contain no higher essence, divine, which, by one side of his being, raise him above his animal nature, it would be a question neither of obligation, nor of moral responsibility; then the supreme good would consist for him, indeed, to satisfy his appetites and his natural inclinations, to look for the pleasure and flee from pain. In this case, there could be neither religion nor moral, since religion is precisely what raise man above vulgar reality, and that moral is the very negation of selfishness.

The brain is the source of thought. The brain is matter and thought is matter. Can the brain — with all its reactions and its immediate responses to every challenge and demand — can the brain be very still? It is not a question of ending thought, but of whether the brain can be completely still? This stillness is not physical death. See what happens when the brain is completely still.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

I cannot conceive curved lines of force without the conditions of a physical existence in that intermediate space.

Michael Faraday

The most ordinary everyday living is as delicate, as breath-taking, as difficult, takes as terrific physical and mental control and effort, as walking a tightrope.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess.... We found our refuge in science.... We learned that science is a revenge of victims against oppressors, that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred.

An essential distinction exists between two stages in the process of advancing our knowledge of the laws of physical phenomena; the first stage consists in observing the relations of phenomena, whether of such as occur in the ordinary course of nature, or of such as are artificially produced in experimental investigations, and in expressing the relations so observed by propositions called formal laws. The second stage consists in reducing the formal laws of an entire class of phenomena to the form of a science; that is to say, in discovering the most simple system of principles, from which all the formal laws of the class of phenomena can be deduced as consequences.

William John Macquorn Rankine

As long as we are focusing on the breath we do not feed our mental, emotional, and physical patterns. By returning to the breath again and again we start to dissolve their power. We develop a space between experience and our identification with it, thereby weakening the process that creates habits in the first place.

Martine Batchelor

They say, man is the microcosm... but the man of science finds every worm and beetle a microcosm in its way. It exemplifies, directly or indirectly, every physical law in the universe, though it may not be two lines long. It is not only a part, but a mirror, of the great whole.

Charles Kingsley

Physical chemistry is all very well, but it does not apply to organic substances.

William Henry Perkin, Jr.

The physical universe never has any choice — it must inevitably move along a single road to a predestined end. Contributions to a British Association Discussion on the Evolution of the Universe

A meaningful physical discussion always requires an operational background. Either this is provided by an existing theory, or you have to give it yourself by the sufficiently explicit description of an experiment that can, at least in principle, be performed.

I think time will show that the new approach, emphasizing emergent "macro" control, is equally valid in all the physical sciences, and that the behavioral and cognitive disciplines are leading the way to a more valid framework for all science. Although the theoretic changes make little difference in physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and so on, they are crucial for the behavioral, social, and human sciences. They don't change the analytic, reductive methodology, just the interpretations and conclusions. There seems little to lose, and much to gain.

Roger Wolcott Sperry

I would love to do more comedy! [...] I just loved the physical humor with the subtlety of my character [in 'Knock Knock']. Like, that whole musical chairs deal during the seduction scene. It was just a real fun element to it.

There is One God. He created all beings, and He exists beyond the beyond of religions, beyond the separations of race, religion, and philosophies. He is beyond mind, desire, and physical vision. He is beyond the world, lust, torpor, and illusion. God resides in that spotlessly pure place known as the heart and sees and knows everything. He sees each and every heart and mind and understands all things.

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself

Pain nourishes courage. You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you. Pain is inevitable. Misery is optional. Physical pain is a fact that comes with living, just as illness or financial woes or broken relationships are facts. But misery is a state of mind, a reaction to the facts, that can be controlled or altered by an act of will....

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.... The unfamiliar and the strange - these are the domain of all children and scientists.

But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.

It behooves us, who are examining the power and function of the imagination, to keep constantly before us the physical images which underlie our terms.

The detrimental effects of infant physical affectional deprivation seem to be compensated for later in life by sexual body pleasure experiences during adolescence.

James W. Prescott

Attraction, as gravitation, is the muscle and tendon of the universe, by which its mass is held together and its huge limbs are wielded. As cohesion and adhesion, it determines the multitude of physical features of its different parts. As chemical or interatomic action, it is the final source to which we trace all material changes.

I have discovered that I cannot enhance anybody's performance without getting them not only to live with the butterflies that come with high-pressure jobs but to embrace that kind of physical response, enjoy it, get into it. That's the first real ticket to being a performer who thinks exceptionally.

All this, the positive and physical essence of mechanics, which makes its chief and highest interest for a student of nature, is in existing treatises completely buried and concealed beneath a mass of technical considerations.