Motivational Quotes

Science

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

Best Quotes about Science

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

James, P. D.

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

Neurophysiologists will not likely find what they are looking for, for that which they are looking for is that which is looking.

Floyd, Keith

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.

Vannevar Bush

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

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

Science is all metaphor.

Leary, Timothy

10.

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

Mencken, H. L.

11.

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

Clarke, Arthur C.

12.

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

Fitzgerald, Penelope

13.

Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

D'Avenant

14.

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

15.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 -- 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

Pirsig, Robert M.

16.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Asimov, Isaac

17.

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.

18.

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

Bancroft, George

19.

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

Eliot, George

20.

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

21.

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

Hobbes, Thomas

22.

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

23.

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

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

24.

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

25.

We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.

Huxley, Aldous

26.

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

Bertrand Russell

27.

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

Krasel, Cornelius

28.

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

Richard Feynman

29.

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

30.

It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

Rostand, Jean

31.

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

Russell, Bertrand

32.

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

Mccarthy, Mary

33.

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

Russell, Bertrand

34.

Conscience does make cowards of us all.

Shakespeare, William

35.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

36.

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

Marquis, Don

37.

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

38.

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

Nash, Ogden

39.

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

40.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

41.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

42.

There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.

Hobsbawm, E. J.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.

Ehrlich, Paul

46.

O Star-eyed Science! hast thou wandered there, to waft us home the message of despair?

Campbell, Thomas

47.

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

48.

A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.

Rostand, Jean

49.

No ear can hear nor tongue can tell the tortures of the inward hell!

Byron, Lord

50.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon