Émile Borel Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

It the only worthy aim of human activity is the conquest of truth, we can hope to come near this inaccessible goal only by means of constantly widening syntheses.

Émile Borel
My optimistic enthusiasm about the disinterested search for truth has been severely shaken..

Émile Borel
Truth is what the scientist aims at. He finds nothing at rest, nothing enduring, in the universe. Not everything is knowable, still less is predictable. But the mind of man is capable of grasping and understanding at least a part of Creation; amid the flight of phenomena stands the immutable pole of law.

Émile Borel
The search for truth is the most noble aim of science, and there are no degrees between truth and error; the insignificance and smallness of a phenomenon will perhaps diminish its practical interest, but not its scientific value.

Émile Borel
We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.

Émile Borel
Mathematicians call this combination [space and time] a quadratic form of the differentials of four variables, but we may call it more briefly, with Minkowski, "the Universe."

Émile Borel
Can there be laws of chance? The answer, it would seem... should be negative, since chance is in fact defined as the characteristic of the phenomena which follow no law, phenomena whose causes are too complex to permit prediction.

Émile Borel
All of mathematics can be deduced from the sole notion of an integer; here we have a fact universally acknowledged today.

Émile Borel
Events with a sufficiently small probability never occur, or at least we must act, in all circumstances, as if they were impossible.

Émile Borel
The problem of error has preoccupied philosophers since the earliest antiquity. According to the subtle remark made by a famous Greek philosopher, the man who makes a mistake is twice ignorant, for he does not know the correct answer, and he does not know that he does not know it.

Émile Borel
Incomplete knowledge must be considered as perfectly normal in probability theory; we might even say that, if we knew all the circumstances of a phenomenon, there would be no place for probability, and we would know the outcome with certainty.

Émile Borel
Probabilities must be regarded as analogous to the measurement of physical magnitudes; that is to say, they can never be known exactly, but only within certain approximation.

Émile Borel
Number knows no limitations, either from the side of the infinitely great or from the side of the infinitely small, and the facility it offers for generalization is too great for us not to be tempted by it.

Émile Borel
The principles on which the calculus of probabilities is based are extremely simple and as intuitive as the reasonings which lead an accountant through his operations.

Émile Borel
The goal of geometry is to study those properties of bodies which can be considered independent of their matter, but only with respect to their dimensions and their forms. Geometry measures the surface of a field without bothering to find out whether the soil is good or bad.

Émile Borel
We find that the difficulties of measuring time are as great as - if not greater than - the difficulties of measuring space; chronology, in the absolute sense of the word, is as difficult as geometry.

Émile Borel
Just as price is not the sole element of our decision when we make a purchase, probability alone must not dictate our decision in the matters of a risk.

Émile Borel
Numbers are the landmarks which enable us to speak in a language common to all men, of successive moments of duration.

Émile Borel