Motivational Quotes

Science

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

- Marquis, Don

Best Quotes about Science

It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him.

Rostand, Jean

The puritanical potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion, hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of decency. The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to.

Lewis, Wyndham

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Huxley, Aldous

The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Everywhere you look in science, the harder it becomes to understand the universe without God.

Herrman, Robert

Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with me, why plowing, building, ruling and the rest, or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest, by cursed Cain's race invented be, and blest Seth vexed us with Astronomy.

Donne, John

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

Eliot, George

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

Bertrand Russell

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

10.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Connolly, Cyril

11.

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

12.

The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced -- by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.

Fromm, Erich

13.

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

Klee, Paul

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

The chief prerequisite for a escort is to have a flexible conscience and an inflexible politeness.

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

17.

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

Lessing, Doris

18.

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

Weil, Simone

19.

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

Ruskin, John

20.

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

Marquis, Don

21.

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

22.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

James, Henry

23.

There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.

Sophocles

24.

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.

Artaud, Antonin

25.

O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!

Dante Alighieri

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer.

Mead, Margaret

29.

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

30.

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

Pope, Alexander

31.

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

Martin Luther King Jr.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.

Swift, Jonathan

35.

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

36.

I think remorse ought to stop biting the consciences that feed it.

Nash, Ogden

37.

Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.

Harrison Ford

38.

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.

Cronenberg, David

39.

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

Washington, George

40.

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

41.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

Krasel, Cornelius

45.

Conscience is our magnetic compass; reason our chart.

Cook, Joseph

46.

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

47.

Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.

Braque, Georges

48.

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

Rostand, Jean

49.

Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thorough-going an association as possible.

Einstein, Albert

50.

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

Galbraith, John Kenneth