"Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture, as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle-sized are alone entangled in." (William Shenstone, "Works in Verse and Prose", 1764)
"The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules." (Thomas Reid, "Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man", 1785)
"[...] law is the expression of the will of God." (Agnes M Clerke, "Problems in Astrophysics", 1903)
"[...] laws are only approximations." (William James, "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking", 1914)
"Scientific laws, when we have reason to think them accurate, are different in form from the common-sense rules which have exceptions: they are always, at least in physics, either differential equations, or statistical averages." (Bertrand A Russell, "The Analysis of Matter", 1927)
"Natural law is not applicable to the unseen world behind the symbols, because it is unadapted to anything except symbols, and its perfection is a perfection of symbolic linkage." (Arthur S Eddington, "Science and the Unseen World", 1929)
"Being built on concepts, hypotheses, and experiments, laws are no more accurate or trustworthy than the wording of the definitions and the accuracy and extent of the supporting experiments." (Gerald Holton, "Introduction to Concepts and Theories in Physical Science", 1952)
"It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it." (Paul Dirac, "The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature", 1963)
"A law is a permanent cause-and-effect relation of phenomena or processes. A law is a necessary, essential, stable and repetitive relation among phenomena." (Dmitry A Novikov, "Cybernetics: From Past to Future", 2016)
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