Motivational Quotes

Science

Science is Christian, not when it condemns itself to the letter of things, but when, in the infinitely little, it discovers as many mysteries and as much depth and power as in the infinitely great.

- Quinet, Edgar

Best Quotes about Science

Isn't it marvelous how those scientists know the names of all those stars?

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

Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids -- without any social relevance or human responsibility at all.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

A man's conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn't do -- but it does not keep him from doing it.

Clark, Frank A.

What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

Men never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.

Pascal, Blaise

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Ernest Rutherford

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

Richard Feynman

10.

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

Proverb, Chinese

11.

Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions of the body.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

12.

Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise.

Ivan Pavlov

13.

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

14.

Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Huxley, Thomas H.

15.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

George Santayana

16.

The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Huxley, Thomas H.

17.

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

Einstein, Albert

18.

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

Huxley, Thomas H.

19.

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.

20.

Science is but an image of the truth.

Bacon, Francis

21.

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs.

Sir Francis Darwin

22.

Conscience is a man's compass.

Gogh, Vincent Van

23.

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

24.

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

Lippmann, Walter

25.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

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

Einstein, Albert

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

Science is but the exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance.

Byron, Lord

32.

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

Ingersoll, Robert Green

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

D'Avenant

36.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

37.

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

38.

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

Barr, Amelia E.

39.

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

40.

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

Churchill, Winston

41.

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

Asimov, Isaac

42.

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

43.

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

44.

While conscience is our friend, all is at peace; however once it is offended, farewell to a tranquil mind.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

45.

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled Science Fiction and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

46.

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

47.

Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.

Sir Arthur Eddington

48.

Nevertheless, in order to imbue civilization with sound principles and enliven it with the spirit of the gospel, it is not enough to be illumined with the gift of faith and enkindled with the desire of forwarding a good cause. For this end it is necessary to take an active part in the various organizations and influence them from within. And since our present age is one of outstanding scientific and technical progress and excellence, one will not be able to enter these organizations and work effectively from within unless he is scientifically competent, technically capable and skilled in the practice of his own profession.

Pope John XXIII

49.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

Ballard, J. G.

50.

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

Belloc, Hilaire