D Alembert Quotes & Sayings

Algebra is generous; she often gives more than is asked of her. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

High office, is like a pyramid; only two kinds of animals reach the summit - reptiles and eagles. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

Just go on..and faith will soon return. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

I am worn out by the insults and vexations that this work brings down on us. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

Accordingly, we find Euler and D'Alembert devoting their talent and their patience to the establishment of the laws of rotation of the solid bodies. Lagrange has incorporated his own analysis of the problem with his general treatment of mechanics, and since his time M. Poinsot has brought the subject under the power of a more searching analysis than that of the calculus, in which ideas take the place of symbols, and intelligent propositions supersede equations. — James Clerk Maxwell

As is well known the principle of virtual velocities transforms all statics into a mathematical assignment, and by D'Alembert's principle for dynamics, the latter is again reduced to statics. Although it is is very much in order that in gradual training of science and in the instruction of the individual the easier precedes the more difficult, the simple precedes the more complicated, the special precedes the general, yet the min, once it has arrived at the higher standpoint, demands the reverse process whereby all statics appears only as a very special case of mechanics. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

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. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

The more wit we have, the less satisfied we are with it. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

A philosopher is a fool who torments himself while he is alive, to be talked of after he is dead. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

The true system of the World has been recognized, developed and perfected ... Everything has been discussed and analysed, or at least mentioned. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

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. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

There are only two kinds of certain knowledge: Awareness of our own existence and the truths of mathematics. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

Music that paints nothing is only noise. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

To someone who could grasp the Universe from a unified standpoint the entire creation would appear as a unique truth and necessity. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

Every age, and especially our own, stands in need of a Diogenes; but the difficulty is in finding men who have the courage to be one, and men who have the patience to endure one. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

Push on and faith will catch up with you. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

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. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

Gaming is the destruction of all decorum; the prince forgets at it his dignity, and the lady her modesty. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

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. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

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 ... — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

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. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert