Motivational Quotes

Science

My conscience aches but it's going to lose the fight.

- Myles, Allanah

Best Quotes about Science

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

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

Hobbes, Thomas

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

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

The conscience is the sacred haven of the liberty of man.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Dick, Philip K.

A clear conscience is a soft pillow.

Proverb, German

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.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

Kraus, Karl

12.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

13.

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

Churchill, Winston

14.

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

Lamb, Charles

15.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

Popper, Karl

16.

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

Lessing, Doris

17.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

18.

Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

19.

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

20.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

Huxley, Thomas H.

21.

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

22.

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

Huxley, Aldous

23.

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

Fitzgerald, Penelope

24.

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.

Henri Poincare

25.

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

Martin Luther King Jr.

26.

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

Euripides

27.

Science knows only one commandment -- contribute to science.

Brecht, Bertolt

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

Bertrand Russell

31.

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.

32.

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

Einstein, Albert

33.

Conscience is the sentinel of virtue.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

34.

Man lives for science as well as bread.

James, William

35.

What we call conscience in many instances, is only a wholesome fear of the law.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

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

Albert Einstein

37.

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

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.

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

40.

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

Proverb, Chinese

41.

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

Horton, Doug

42.

There are no better terms available to describe [The] difference between the approach of the natural and the social sciences than to call the former objective and the latter subjective. ... While for the natural scientist the contrast between objective facts and subjective opinions is a simple one, the distinction cannot as readily be applied to the object of the social sciences. The reason for this is that the object, the facts of the social sciences are also opinions -- not opinions of the student of the social phenomena, of course, but opinions of those whose actions produce the object of the social scientist.

Hayek, Friedrich August Von

43.

Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science

Einstein, Albert

44.

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

45.

Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.

Bush, Vannevar

46.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Clarke, Arthur C.

47.

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

Noam Chomsky

48.

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

49.

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

Sophocles

50.

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