science quotes

Albert Einstein: 

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

Albert Einstein: 

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. 
Living Philosophies, 1931


Albert Einstein: 

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.

Albert Einstein: 

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein: 

Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.

Albert Einstein: 

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

Albert Einstein: 

How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

Albert Einstein: 

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.

Albert Einstein: 

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein: 

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Albert Einstein: 

Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.

Albert Einstein: 

Science can only determine what is, but not what shall be, and beyond its realm, value judgements remain indispensable. Religion, on the other hand, is concerned only with evaluating human thought and actions; it is not qualified to speak of real facts and the relationships between them.

Archimedes: 

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Arthur C. Clarke: 

The First Clarke Law states, 'If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.'

Arthur Eddington: 

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

Bertrand Russell: 

Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know.

Carl Jung: 

Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.

Carl Sagan: 

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

Carl Sagan: 

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Edward Abbey: 

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Francis Bacon: 

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy (science); for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and disgested. Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never been made), much may be hoped.

Galileo Galilei: 

The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.

Galileo Galilei: 

I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reasons, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

George Bernard Shaw: 

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Goethe: 

Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.

H. L. Mencken: 

The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

Harry Emerson Fosdick: 

The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth. The Living of These Days, 1956

Heinz Pagels: 

Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts. 
The Dreams of Reason, 1988


Helen Keller: 

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings.

Henri Poincare: 

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

Henrik Ibsen: 

It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.

Homer Simpson: 

In this house, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics!

Howard Nemerov: 

Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.

Immanuel Kant: 

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant: 

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Isaac Asimov: 

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, "hmm.... that's funny...."

Isaac Asimov: 

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

Isaac Asimov: 

[W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Isaac Asimov: 

Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

Isaac Asimov: 

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

Isaac Asimov: 

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

Isaac Newton: 

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Jacob Bronowski: 

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

Jean Rostand: 

When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.

John Dewey: 

In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy


John Dewey: 

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination. 
from The Quest For Certainty 


Jonas Salk: 

Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.

Jules H. Poincare: 

It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.

Marcel Proust: 

The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people.

Marcus Aurelius: 

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under your observation in life.

Margaret J. Wheatley: 

We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity.

Marie Curie: 

There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.

Mohandas Gandhi: 

The Roots of Violence: 
Wealth without work, 
Pleasure without conscience, 
Knowledge without character, 
Commerce without morality, 
Science without humanity, 
Worship without sacrifice, 
Politics without principles.

Noam Chomsky: 

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Omar N. Bradley: 

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.

Peter Senge: 

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static "snapshots." It is a set of general principles -- distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management.... During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility -- for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character.

Plotinus: 

Knowledge has three degrees -- opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

Ralph Sockman: 

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

Roger Bacon: 

The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.

Sir William Bragg: 

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

Stephen Jay Gould: 

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

Thomas Carlyle: 

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

Thomas Jefferson: 

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.

Unknown: 

- from the Institute for Stork Research and Science
Two different theories exist concerning the origin of children: the theory of Sexual reproduction, and the theory of the stork. Many people believe in the theory of sexual reproduction because they have been taught this theory at school. In reality, however, many of the world's leading scientists are in favor of the theory of the stork. If the theory of sexual reproduction is taught in schools, it must only be taught as a theory and not as the truth. Alternative theories, such as the theory of the stork, must also be taught.

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William Golding: 

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.