Jean le Rond d'Alembert Quotes

A philosopher is a fool who torments himself while he is alive, to be talked of after he is dead.

There are only two kinds of certain knowledge: Awareness of our own existence and the truths of mathematics.

High office, is like a pyramid; only two kinds of animals reach the summit — reptiles and eagles.

Just go on..and faith will soon return.

The true system of the World has been recognized, developed and perfected...Everything has been discussed and analysed, or at least mentioned.

Music that paints nothing is only noise.

Algebra is generous; she often gives more than is asked of her.

Push on and faith will catch up with you.

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.

The more wit we have, the less satisfied we are with it.

To someone who could grasp the Universe from a unified standpoint the entire creation would appear as a unique truth and necessity.

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.

Gaming is the destruction of all decorum; the prince forgets at it his dignity, and the lady her modesty.

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.

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.

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.

I am worn out by the insults and vexations that this work brings down on us.

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.

Just go on . . . and faith will soon return. To a friend hesitant with respect to infinitesimals.