Enduring Concepts Quotes

Classical thermodynamics ... is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced ... will never be overthrown.

In the same way as the tree bears the same fruit year after year, but each time new fruit, all lastingly valuable ideas in thinking must always be reborn.

Metaphysics keeps surviving its obituaries.

It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.

Principles don't die. They aren't here one day and gone the next. They can't be destroyed by fire, earthquake or theft. Principles are deep, fundamental truths, classic truths.

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not.

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If you have bought one of those T-shirts with Maxwell's equations on the front, you may have to worry about its going out of style, but not about its becoming false. We will go on teaching Maxwellian electrodynamics as long as there are scientists.

Time is of no account with great thoughts, which are as fresh to -day as when they first passed through their authors' minds ages ago.

Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.

I like ... what I characterize as more built-to-last ideas rather than built-to-flip ideas.

The simplest subjects are the immortal ones.

The answer I have is, you know, there a lot of things you can try to build to last. And what we try to do in our work is to come up with ideas that will last. Ideas that will stand the test of time.

It is not difficult to grasp and express thoughts that float on the stream of current opinion: but to think and rightly utter what is permanently true and interesting, what shall appeal to the best minds a thousand years hence, as it appeals to them to-day, this is the work of genius.

I think people try to make the most of their time on earth and also to fix their time on earth. They try to fix external verities, things that are true for all time, ideas that are true for all time: Rome will last forever! America will last forever! Beauty, as defined by the fashion industry, is one of those things—this is beautiful. This will always be beautiful—and hold it in a way that has some sense of permanence about it, and absoluteness. And yet it’s not.