
“[N]othing is too terrible to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature [...].”
" The Pinprick Argument https://www.utilitarianism.com/pinprick-argument.html", BLTC Research, 2005
Laboratory journal entry #10,040 (19 March 1849); published in The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870) Vol. II, edited by Henry Bence Jones https://archive.org/stream/lifelettersoffar02joneiala#page/248/mode/2up/search/wonderful,p.248.This has sometimes been quoted partially as "Nothing is too wonderful to be true," and can be seen engraved above the doorway of the south entrance to the Humanities Building at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. http://lit250v.library.ucla.edu/islandora/object/edu.ucla.library.universityArchives.historicPhotographs%3A67
Context: ALL THIS IS A DREAM. Still examine it by a few experiments. Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature; and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency.
“[N]othing is too terrible to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature [...].”
" The Pinprick Argument https://www.utilitarianism.com/pinprick-argument.html", BLTC Research, 2005
Il est faux que l’égalité soit une loi de la nature. La nature n’a rien fait d’égal; la loi souveraine est la subordination et la dépendance.
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 180.
"Wordsworth in the Tropics" in Do What You Will (1929)
Source: Do What You Will: Twelve Essays
Context: Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.
Familiar Talks on Science, Volume 1, 1899, p. V
(See Charles Babbage's for a similar commentary on miracles)
Nature's Miracles (1900)
“True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary.”
François de La Rochefoucauld
Misattributed
Anti-Dühring http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/quotes/index.htm (1878)
“God gives us intelligence to uncover the wonders of nature. Without the gift, nothing is possible.”
André Delambre
The Fly (1958)
In "How Little I Know", in Saturday Review (12 Nov 1966), 152. Excerpted in Buckminster Fuller and Answar Dil, Humans in Universe (1983), 31.
"The Comprehensive Man", Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (1963), 75-76.
1960s
Source: Writings, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), p. 113