First Principles Quotes

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

Don’t just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it’s good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles. Which is, rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.

Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.

For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

I think that Apple has revolutionized every other consumer industry; why not television? The complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated. So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple.

Life is infinite energy coupled with limitless creative imagination. It is the invisible essence and substance of every visible form. Its nature is goodness, truth, wisdom and beauty, as well as energy and imagination. Our highest satisfaction comes from a sense of conscious union with this invisible Life. All human endeavor is an attempt to get back to first principles, to find such an inward wholeness that all sense of fear, doubt and uncertainty vanishes.

I enjoyed mathematics from a very young age. At the beginning of college, I had this illusion, which was kind of silly in retrospect, that if I just understood math and physics and philosophy, I could figure out everything else from first principles.

The data stream has been corrupted, return to first principles.

Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

There are in America from fifteen to twenty million religious fundamentalists who are dedicated to doctrines incompatible with democracy in that they insist on their prerogatives as first principles. An even larger group feebly follows the trail of fire breathed by those fundamentalists. They are the most dangerous minority we have because they categorically eschew the reasoned judgments of the majority. Democracy properly allows them the right to worship as they choose. It should never have conceded them the right to establish schools. Education is not a function of any church—-or even of a city—-or a state; it is a function of all mankind.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

The soul has two parts, one rational and the other irrational. Let us now similarly divide the rational part, and let it be assumed that there are two rational faculties, one whereby we contemplate those things whose first principles are invariable, and one whereby we contemplate those things which admit of variation.

The things best to know are first principles and causes, but these things are perhaps the most difficult for men to grasp, for they are farthest removed from the senses.

Love and esteem are the first principles of friendship; it is always imperfect if either of these two are wanting.

The Act by which most of us hold our estates was an Act of violence—an Act subverting the first principles of the Common Law in England and Ireland …. Every acre of land is held by title derived under the Act of Settlement …. Consider how far it may be prudent to pursue the successive claims of dignified and unequivocal independence made for Ireland by the right honorable gentlemen.

We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.

I have an ethics background. It doesn't mean you're perfect. But I tried to set an entirely different bar for politics in D.C. that's based on ethics and first principles and political philosophy, and not this constant bickering of, 'Are you Right or Left?'

Biology has tended to be an observational science, and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past, but I hate to predict the future on that.

Republicans should simply focus on first principles and give the American people what they want - an honest party dedicated to common sense, fiscal responsibility and limited government. If we govern to save the country, we'll do well as a party.

We start with first principles. The Constitution creates a Federal Government of enumerated powers.

There are certain catchwords which have a marvelous charm to calm the breast political, a magic power to levitate the mind captivated by them, out of the regions of mere argument and recognition of facts. Such a hold do these words and the deified abstractions they cover have on the average man of the nineteenth century, that they and they alone are worshipped as the ultimate manifestation of goodness, beauty, and truth. To be opposed to these abstractions is to be condemned as blasphemous against the first principles of rectitude, moral and political.

I study much, and the more I study, the oftener I go back to those first principles which are so simple that childhood itself can lisp them.

We need bold leadership to bring America back to its first principles of diversity inclusion and opportunity for everyone in every ZIP Code, and music is that vehicle to summon our better angels. Music is that vehicle and always has been a vehicle to challenge us to build a better America.