Motivational Quotes

Science

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

Best Quotes about Science

Conscience: self-esteem with a halo.

Layton, Irving

There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.

Pasteur, Louis

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

Barr, Amelia E.

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

Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.

Roux, Joseph

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Einstein, Albert

The true science and study of man, is man himself.

Charron, Pierre

10.

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

Eliot, George

11.

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

Washington, George

12.

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.

13.

Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!

Nietzsche, Friedrich

14.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

15.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

16.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Foucault, Michel

17.

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

18.

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

19.

If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

Bohr, Niels

20.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

21.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Koestler, Arthur

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Faith is a fine invention when Gentleman can see -- but microscopes are prudent in an emergency

Dickinson, Emily

25.

I know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.

Huxley, Thomas H.

26.

Man has to awaken to wonder -- and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

27.

Conscience -- the only incorruptible thing about us.

Fielding, Henry

28.

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

Byron, Lord

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

Conscience does make cowards of us all.

Shakespeare, William

32.

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

33.

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

Klee, Paul

34.

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

35.

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

Albert Einstein

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.

Diderot, Denis

40.

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

Guin, Ursula K. Le

41.

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

Krasel, Cornelius

42.

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

43.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

Valery, Paul

44.

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.

45.

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

Richard Feynman

46.

There's not a whole lot of new atoms out there.

McDonough, Denny

47.

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

48.

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

Rostand, Jean

49.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

50.

Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.

Harrison Ford