Axioms Quotes

(quoted in Life magazine, 9 January 1950) The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.

Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.

It is this way that in mathematics speculative theorems and practical canons are reduced by analysis to definitions, axioms and postulates.

Finally there are simple ideas of which no definition can be given; there are also axioms or postulates, or in a word primary principles, which cannot be proved and have no need of proof.

I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.

Experimental syntax, of a mathematical type, geared to referential axioms, may help further along these lines - or others not imagined as yet.

We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned