Motivational Quotes

Science

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

- Bronowski, Jacob

Best Quotes about Science

Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.

Einstein, Albert

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

Frayn, Michael

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Dewey, John

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

Valery, Paul

If the study of all these sciences which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.

Plato

He who sacrifices his conscience to ambition burns a picture to obtain the ashes.

Proverb, Chinese

It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

Rostand, Jean

Science has not solved problems, only shifted the points of problems.

Parkhurst, Charles H.

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.

Burroughs, William S.

10.

A bad conscience has a very good memory

11.

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

Bronowski, Jacob

12.

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

13.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

Ruskin, John

14.

There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

15.

A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

16.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

Marie Curie

17.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

Bronowski, Jacob

19.

Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

From man or angel the great Architect did wisely to conceal, and not divulge his secrets to be scanned by them who ought rather admire; or if they list to try conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens left to their disputes, perhaps to move his laughter at their quaint opinions wide hereafter, when they come to model heaven calculate the stars, how they will wield the mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive to save appearances, how gird the sphere with centric and eccentric scribbled o'er, and epicycle, orb in orb.

Milton, John

21.

God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won t.

22.

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

Auden, W. H.

23.

Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.

Joad, C. E. M.

24.

Truth in science can best be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

Lorenz, Konrad

25.

If politicians and scientist were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

Waugh, Evelyn

26.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Richard Feynman

27.

Man has to awaken to wonder -- and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

28.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

Freud, Sigmund

29.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

Lessing, Doris

30.

Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be -- and the non-necessity of it.

Hardy, Thomas

31.

O Star-eyed Science! hast thou wandered there, to waft us home the message of despair?

Campbell, Thomas

32.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Einstein, Albert

33.

Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

Einstein, Albert

34.

There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its length: a quiet conscience.

Euripides

35.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

Eliot, George

36.

The mythology of science asserts that with many different scientists all asking their own questions and evaluating the answers independently, whatever personal bias creeps into their individual answers is cancelled out when the large picture is put together. This might conceivably be so if scientists were women and men from all sorts of different cultural and social backgrounds who came to science with very different ideologies and interests. But since, in fact, they have been predominantly university-trained white males from privileged social backgrounds, the bias has been narrow and the product often reveals more about the investigator than about the subject being researched.

Hubbard, Ruth

37.

Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

D'Avenant

38.

Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.

Valery, Paul

39.

Conscience does make cowards of us all.

Shakespeare, William

40.

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

Albert Einstein

41.

A clear conscience is a soft pillow.

Proverb, German

42.

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

Connolly, Cyril

43.

I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.

Marie Curie

44.

The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.

Stael, Germaine De

45.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

Konrad Lorenz

46.

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience

Washington, George

47.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.