Motivational Quotes

Science

The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow.

- Cowper, William

Best Quotes about Science

Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the moral law within.

Kant, Immanuel

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Arthur C. Clarke

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

Pascal, Blaise

Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.

Bancroft, George

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

Freud, Sigmund

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain.

Shakespeare, William

Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.

Thomas H. Huxley

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

10.

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

11.

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.

M. Cartmill

12.

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

13.

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

Russell, Bertrand

14.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

Hobbes, Thomas

15.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

Frayn, Michael

16.

If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.

Fitzgerald, Penelope

17.

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.

Stephen Jay Gould

18.

Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound.

Einstein, Albert

19.

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.

Teller, Edward

20.

If it can't be expressed in figures, it's not science it's opinion.

Long, Lazarus

21.

A clear conscience is a soft pillow.

Proverb, German

22.

Rules of society are nothing; ones conscience is the umpire.

Dudevant, Madame

23.

Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut [Animals] up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph... Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

24.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Luther King Jr.

25.

Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.

Gourmont, Remy De

26.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.

Bronowski, Jacob

27.

There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.

Chandler, Raymond

28.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Didion, Joan

29.

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

30.

The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.

Churchill, Winston

31.

Conscience is the window of our spirit, evil is the curtain.

Horton, Doug

32.

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

Albert Einstein

33.

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

34.

I hate science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast. It is far easier for a Hitler or a Stalin to find a mock-scientific excuse for persecution than it was for Dominic to find a mock-Christian one.

Bunting, Basil

35.

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

Mencken, H. L.

36.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

37.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

38.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

Richard Feynman

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.

Russell, Bertrand

42.

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.

Rostand, Jean

43.

Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific.

Gill, Eric

44.

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails.

Einstein, Albert

45.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

46.

In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory -- horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene -- and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

47.

For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions -- largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.

Kipling, Rudyard

48.

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.

49.

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

Rostand, Jean

50.

In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.

Lamb, Charles