Motivational Quotes

Science

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

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

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Asimov, Isaac

The microbe is so very small: You cannot take him out at all.

Belloc, Hilaire

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

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

Bronowski, Jacob

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

A clear conscience is a soft pillow.

Proverb, German

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

Bertrand Russell

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

Hobbes, Thomas

10.

Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural.

Barr, Amelia E.

11.

The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow.

Cowper, William

12.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

13.

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

14.

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

Gould, Stephen Jay

15.

When we say science we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect: or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science, the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon.

Lewis, Wyndham

16.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

17.

Science is a game we play with God, to find out what his rules are.

Krasel, Cornelius

18.

Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.

Marquis, Don

19.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

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

21.

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

Billings, Josh

22.

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

Lorenz, Konrad

23.

Science is what you know, philosophy what you don't know.

Russell, Bertrand

24.

Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it.

Herzen, Alexander

25.

Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.

Harrison Ford

26.

A seared conscience is one whose warning voice has been suppressed and perverted habitually, so that eventually instead of serving as a guide, it only confirms the person in his premeditatedly evil course.

Little, Robert J.

27.

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

Martin Luther King Jr.

28.

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

Lee, Harper

29.

Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

D'Avenant

30.

Conscience -- the only incorruptible thing about us.

Fielding, Henry

31.

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

32.

Science knows only one commandment -- contribute to science.

Brecht, Bertolt

33.

In science, all facts no matter how trivial, enjoy democratic equality.

Mccarthy, Mary

34.

The conscience is the most flexible material in the world. Today you cannot stretch it over a mole hill; while tomorrow it can hide a mountain.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

35.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Einstein, Albert

36.

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right.

Churchill, Winston

37.

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.

Teller, Edward

38.

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

Rostand, Jean

39.

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

40.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual sense of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtle than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

Powers, Richard

41.

If a superior give any order to one who is under him which is against that man's conscience, although he do not obey it yet he shall not be dismissed.

Francis of Assisi, St.

42.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Ingersoll, Robert Green

43.

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

44.

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.

Neumann, John Von

45.

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

Fitzgerald, Penelope

46.

Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

47.

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

Daumal, Rene

48.

The more we learn of science, the more we see that its wonderful mysteries are all explained by a few simple laws so connected together and so dependent upon each other, that we see the same mind animating them all.

Brown, Olympia

49.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Pope, Alexander

50.

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