Skip to content

The elegance of rich, complex, and diverse phenomena emerging from a simple set of universal laws is at least part of what physicists mean when they invoke the term "beautiful."

— Brian Greene The Elegant Universe (1999)

Another quote →

Topics

Beauty

More quotes by Brian Greene

Superstring theory starts off by proposing a new answer to an old question: what are the smallest, indivisible constituents of matter?

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules and brush the edge of acceptability in the search for solutions.

All species of particles are unified in superstring theory since each arises from a different vibrational pattern executed by the same underlying entity.

The real question is whether all your pondering and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That's what it all comes down to.

Like modern and classical music, it’s not that one approach is right and the other wrong – the methods one chooses to use are largely a matter of taste and training.

All Brian Greene quotes →

You may also like

Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Brian Greene (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.