"Theorem" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... problems, this is one: Two figures being given, to describe a third, which shall be equal to one and similar to the other. And it is reported that Pythagoras, upon the discovery of this problem, offered a sacrifice to the gods; for this is a much more exquisite theorem than that which lays down, that the square of the hypothenuse in a right-angled triangle is equal to the squares of the two sides. Right, said Diogenianus, but what is this to the present question? You will easily understand, I replied, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... easy, and was thrown aside, but the Descartes baffled him for a time. However, he set to it again and again and before long mastered it. He threw himself heart and soul into mathematics, and very soon made some remarkable discoveries. First he discovered the binomial theorem: familiar now to all who have done any algebra, unintelligible to others, and therefore I say nothing about it. By the age of twenty-one or two he had begun his great mathematical discovery of infinite series and fluxions—now ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... Dawn? How if it never break? How if this West by other Wests is pierced. And these by vacant Wests and Wests increased— One pain of space, with hollow ache on ache, Throbbing and ceasing not for Christ's own sake? Big, perilous theorem, hard for king and priest; 'Pursue the West but long enough, 'tis East!' Oh, if this watery world no turning take; Oh, if for all my logic, all my dreams, Provings of that which is by that which seems, ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... complimented by Ptolemy, who, however, after much thought and research, decided that he could not accept it as final. His own theory was that the Milky Way was an emigration of lightning bugs; and he supported and reinforced this theorem by the well-known fact that the locusts ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Horace literally sat by the plough and sang of farm and city. It was there that Livy told his old-world stories by lamplight or at the noon-hour. It was there that Pythagoras explained his ancient theorem. ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... of this even among his earliest sketches. In his account of "Sunday at Home" he says: "Time—where a man lives not—what is it but Eternity?" Does he not recognize in this condensed statement Kant's theorem that time is a mental condition, which only exists in man, and for man, and has no place in the external world? In fact, it only exists by divisions of time, and it is man who makes the divisions. The rising of the sun does not constitute ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... and profound; it may be light, as light as the fall of a leaf or a bird's song on the shore; it may be the thought of Plato when he discourses of the character necessary in a perfect state, or of Socrates, who, out of the theorem of an absolute beauty, goodness, greatness, and the like, deduces the immortality of the soul; or it may be the lovesong of a Scotch plowman: but it has this one quality of answering to a need in human nature higher than a need for ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... perfectly at home. He fathomed the meaning of every ditch, and formed an entire plan of the fortress from its half-obliterated lines. His description of Ticonderoga would be as accurate as a geometrical theorem, and as barren of the poetry that has clustered round its decay. I viewed Ticonderoga as a place of ancient strength, in ruins for half a century: where the flags of three nations had successively waved, and none waved now; where armies had struggled, so long ago ...
— Old Ticonderoga, A Picture of The Past - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of imagination than Milton's Paradise Lost. But it spurns the tests of experimental science, and is entitled to rank only among the splendid curiosities of philosophy; a brilliant and plausible theorem, not a sober and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life. Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fact is, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive writers generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time to time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading—a theorem no longer, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer's spirit, to think with him, if one can or will—an expression no longer of fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world, prospective, or ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... mean is the conception of a form embodying the most general propositions that can be affirmed respecting the Cephalous Mollusca, standing in the same relation to them as the diagram to a geometrical theorem, and like it, at once imaginary and true" (i., p. 176). Again, in his Croonian lecture on the theory of the vertebrate skull, he remarks that a general diagram of the skull could easily be given. "There is no harm," he continues, "in calling such a convenient diagram the ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... cynic meditation and self-contemptuous mournfulness: and the reader who turns from these magnificent samples to the complete play must expect to find yet another and a yet unknown masterpiece of English tragedy. He will find a crowning example of the famous theorem, that "the plot is of no use except to bring in the fine things." The plot is in this instance absurd to a degree so far beyond the most preposterous conception of confused and distracting extravagance that the reader's attention may at times be withdrawn from the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the velocity of every atom of matter in the universe (including cerebral matter, i.e., the brain, which is a material thing) are strictly determined, it would not at all follow from the acceptance of this theorem that our mental life is subject to the same necessity. For that to be the case, we should have to show absolutely that a strictly determined psychical state corresponds to a definite cerebral state. This, as we have ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... unnoticed. It is true that Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey, but even in 1882, twenty-three years after the publication of the "Origin of Species," evolution was regarded as a somewhat dubious theorem which respectable ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... Vice, when they see These to have the very same reality, in Nature as their Happiness and Misery have; than when (tho' ever so pompously set out) Vertue appears founded only upon nice, or subtle Speculations. But some Men there are so far from approving of any Notion or Theorem being advanc'd with respect to Deists whereby, as such, they may be induc'd to the love of Vertue (which is the best predisposition to the entertainment of Christianity) that they are ready to treat as not being themselves Christians ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... that doctrinal terminology is too hard for a child to understand. Is this not absurd, when the same child can come home from school and talk glibly of a parallelepipedon, a rhombus, rhomboid, polyhedral angle, archipelago, law of primogeniture, the binomial theorem, and of a dicotyledon! He also learns French, German, Latin, Greek, and the argot of the ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... impossible. The conclusion of a geometrical theorem is a truth for all time. There is no difference here between a complicated theorem, having many conditions, and a simpler theorem with fewer. It is indeed easier for a few than for many conditions ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J. |
