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Abraham Pais Quotes

1918–2000 Netherlands

Abraham Pais (May 19, 1918 – July 28, 2000) was a Dutch-born American physicist and science historian. He served as an assistant to Niels Bohr in Denmark and was later a colleague of Albert Einstein at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.

Netherlands
Physicists

Random Abraham Pais quote

20 quotes

Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes — even in a scientific text.

A Tale of Two Continents (1997)

Progress leads to confusion leads to progress and on and on without respite.

Inward Bound : Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (1988)

The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don't know anything you don't need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out of you.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?

Subtle is the Lord (1982)

It is perhaps better to say that Bohr's strength lay in his formidable intuition and insight rather than erudition.

One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of complete coincidences.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

The first thing Bohr said to me was that it would only then be profitable to work with him if I understood that he was a dilettante.

I don't sit here conquering great resistance to talk. It is not my way.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

For several months I was incapable of feeling anything, completely inaccessible to my feelings — I did not laugh, I did not cry.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

A number of current theoretical explorations will turn out to be passing fancies...

Inward Bound : Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (1988)

Today we live in the midst of upheaval and crisis. We do not know where we are going, nor even where we ought to be going.

All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot. I learned, because there was no interruption. I had access to myself, to my thinking.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

I was lucky because the same week that I went to prison the Americans crossed the Rhine and cut off the northern part of Holland, so there was no longer any possibility of being shipped out to a concentration camp.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself killed. I was going to get out of it.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

A new man appears abruptly, the ‘suddenly famous Doctor Einstein.’ He carries the message of a new order in the universe. He is a new Moses come down from the mountain to bring the law and a new Joshua controlling the motion of heavenly bodies...

Subtle is the Lord (1982)

Most of my family was killed. All of my father's and mother's sisters and brothers and their children, my sister and my old grandfather, they're all gone. Four out of five Jews in Holland never came back after the war — 80 percent.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter.

To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Abraham Pais (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.