Simon Newcomb Quotes

Whenever a total eclipse of the sun was visible in an accessible region parties were sent out to observe it.

In 1860 a total eclipse of the sun was visible in British America.

My father was the most rational and the most dispassionate of men.

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.

Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.

We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.

Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird.

What we now call school training, the pursuit of fixed studies at stated hours under the constant guidance of a teacher, I could scarcely be said to have enjoyed.

So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution.

If my impressions are correct, our educational planing mill cuts down all the knots of genius, and reduces the best of the men who go through it to much the same standard.

Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope.

My first undertaking in the way of scientific experiment was in the field of economics and psychology.

My father followed, during most of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher.

In 1858 I received the degree of D. S. from the Lawrence Scientific School, and thereafter remained on the rolls of the university as a resident graduate.

I had not yet gotten into the world of light. But I felt as one who, standing outside, could knock against the wall and hear an answering knock from within.

I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account.

Though born in Nova Scotia, I am of almost pure New England descent.

Until I was four years old I lived in the house of my paternal grandfather, about two miles from the pretty little village of Wallace, at the mouth of the river of that name.

James Edward Oliver might have been one of the great mathematicians of his time had he not been absolutely wanting in the power of continuous work.

A few years later the Naval Academy was founded at Annapolis, and a similar course was pursued to provide it with a corps of instructors.

I was taught the alphabet by my aunts before I was four years old, and I was reading the Bible in class and beginning geography when I was six.

One of the most beautiful hypotheses ever propounded in physics is ... the Dynamical Theory of Gases

The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war.

All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint.