Layman Quotes - Page 2

• From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary.

  Victor Francis Hess

  Years, Might, Fields

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• Isolated, so-called "pretty theorems" have even less value in the eyes of a modern mathematician than the discovery of a new "pretty flower" has to the scientific botanist, though the layman finds in these the chief charm of the respective sciences.

  Hermann Hankel

  Flower, Eye, Discovery

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• The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.

  Oswald Spengler

  Art, Math, Imagination

  Oswald Spengler, Charles Francis Atkinson (1950). “Form and actuality”

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• All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

  Roger Bacon

  People, Brain, Facts

  1267 OpusMajus, pt.4, ch.1 (translated by Robert Belle Burke, 1928).

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• Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not whether they be clergymen or laymen, they alone will shake the gates of Hell and set up the kingdom of Heaven upon Earth.

  John Wesley

  Giving, Heaven, Desire

  John Wesley (1960). “The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley ...”

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• More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

  Simone Weil

  Inspirational, Motivational, Respect

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• One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

  Aldo Leopold

  Believe, Doctors, Land

  Aldo Leopold (1972). “Round River”, p.165, Oxford University Press

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• And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning - enemies of society, as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more!

  Georges Bernanos

  Men, Justice, Police

  Georges Bernanos, Rémy Rougeau (2002). “The Diary of a Country Priest”, p.163, Da Capo Press

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• There are some arts which to those that possess them are painful, but to those that use them are helpful, a common good to laymen, but to those that practise them grievous. Of such arts there is one which the Greeks call medicine. For the medical man sees terrible sights, touches unpleasant things, and the misfortunes of others bring a harvest of sorrows that are peculiarly his; but the sick by means of the art rid themselves of the worst of evils, disease, suffering, pain and death.

  Hippocrates

  Art, Pain, Mean

  Hippocrates, Paul Potter (1984). “Hippocrates”

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• Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.

  Amos Tversky

  Wisdom, Mistake, Fall

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• I'm a bit of a layman physics junkie. I don't really understand it, but I love trying to understand it.

  Laura San Giacomo

  Trying, Physics, Junkie

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.

  John Dryden

  Poetry, Checks, Priests

  John Dryden (2016). “The Works of John Dryden, Vol.2: Top English Literature”, p.292, VM eBooks

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• We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.

  Criss Jami

  Looks, Taught, Philosopher

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.84, Criss Jami

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• Evolution is a theory in a special philosophical sense of science, but in terms of ordinary laymen's use of language, it's a fact, .. Evolution is a fact in the same sense that it's a fact that the Earth is round and not flat, [that] the Earth goes round the Sun. Both those are also theories, but they're theories that have never been disproved and never will be disproved.

  Richard Dawkins

  Philosophical, Special, Sun

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• Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living.

  Rachel Carson

  Nature, Contentment, Earth

  Rachel Carson (2011). “The Sense of Wonder”, p.41, Open Road Media

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• The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional.

  Hugo Black

  Views, Society, Likes

  News conference, Washington, D.C., reported in The New York Times, p. 38, February 25, 1971.

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• The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman's alchemy. . . . The magic of everyday things.

  Joanne Harris

  Everyday Things, Magic, Warning

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• Although I am even now still a layman in the area of mathematics, and although I lack theoretical knowledge, the mathematicians, and in particular the crystallographers, have had considerable influence on my work of the last twenty years. The laws of the phenomena around us--order, regularity, cyclical repetition, and renewals--have assumed greater and greater importance for me. The awareness of their presence gives me peace and provides me with support. I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems.

  M. C. Escher

  Beautiful, Years, Law

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• Any man who is intelligent must, on considering that health is of the utmost value to human beings, have the personal understanding necessary to help himself in diseases, and be able to understand and to judge what physicians say and what they administer to his body, being versed in each of these matters to a degree reasonable for a layman.

  Hippocrates

  Health, Intelligent, Men

  Hippocrates (1979). “Hippocrates”

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• The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.

  Sigmund Freud

  Life, Long, Expectations

  Sigmund Freud (1965). “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis”

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• You should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist... . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Integrity, Lying, Responsibility

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• You simply collapsed, sir. In layman's terms, your body revoked its permission for you to continue heaping abuse upon it.

  Scott Lynch

  Abuse, Body, Permission

  Scott Lynch (2006). “The Lies of Locke Lamora”, p.363, Spectra

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• A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.

  Umberto Eco

  Book, Humility, Temptation

  Umberto Eco (1995). “Name of the Rose”, p.195, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where God wants him to be a pupil. What he wants from the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise- does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.

  C. S. Lewis

  Attitude, Humble, Men

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• The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Practice Of Medicine, Safety, Pleasure

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