When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a n — Paul Dirac

"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation."

"Perhaps the most distinguished of why botherers has been Dirac (1963 Sci. American 208 May 45). He divided the difficulties of quantum mechanics into two classes, those of the first class and those of the second. The second-class difficulties were essentially the infinities of relativistic quantum field theory. Dirac was very disturbed by these, and was not impressed by the renormalisation procedures by which they are circumvented. Dirac tried hard to eliminate these second-class difficulties, and urged others to do likewise. The first-class difficulties concerned the role of the observer, measurement, and so on. Dirac thought that these problems were not ripe for solution, and should be left for later. He expected developments in the theory which would make these problems look quite different. It would be a waste of effort to worry overmuch about them now, especially since we get along very well in practice without solving them."

"Dirac has done more than anyone this century, with the exception of Einstein, to advance physics and change our picture of the universe. He is surely worthy of the memorial in Westminster Abbey. It is just a scandal that it has taken so long."

"My research work was based in pictures. I needed to visualise things and projective geometry was often most useful e.g. in figuring out how a particular quantity transforms under Lorentz transf[ormation]. When I came to publish the results I suppressed the projective geometry as the results could be expressed more concisely in analytic form."

"A good deal of my research work in physics has consisted in not setting out to solve some particular problems, but simply examining mathematical quantities of a kind that physicists use and trying to get them together in an interesting way regardless of any application that the work may have. It is simply a search for pretty mathematics. It may turn out later that the work does have an application. Then one has had good luck."

"I dont suppose that applies so much to other physicists; I think it’s a peculiarity of myself that I like to play about with equations, just looking for beautiful mathematical relations which maybe don’t have any physical meaning at all. Sometimes they do."