Motivational Quotes

Science

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.

Best Quotes about Science

Conscience does make cowards of us all.

Shakespeare, William

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

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

Santayana, George

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not'Eureka!'(I found it!) but'That's funny ...'

Isaac Asimov

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

Russell, Bertrand

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.

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

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

10.

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

Lamb, Charles

11.

Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.

Froude, James A.

12.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

13.

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

14.

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

Lee, Harper

15.

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

16.

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

Sir Francis Darwin

17.

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

Ruskin, John

18.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

19.

Science is but an image of the truth.

Bacon, Francis

20.

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

Albert Einstein

21.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

Frayn, Michael

22.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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.

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.

25.

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

26.

Since we are assured that the all-wise Creator has observed the most exact proportions of number, weight and measure in the make of all things, the most likely way therefore to get any insight into the nature of those parts of the Creation which come within our observation must in all reason be to number, weigh and measure.

Hales, Stephen

27.

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

Ashley Montague

28.

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

Roux, Joseph

29.

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

Myles, Allanah

30.

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

31.

Conscience is the sentinel of virtue.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

32.

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

Floyd, Keith

33.

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

Nash, Ogden

34.

Conscience is a man's compass.

Gogh, Vincent Van

35.

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

36.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Ernest Rutherford

37.

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought - particularly for people who can never remember where they left things.

Allen, Woody

38.

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

Connolly, Cyril

39.

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life.

Collingwood, Robin G.

40.

Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

D'Avenant

41.

A clear conscience is a soft pillow.

Proverb, German

42.

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

43.

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

44.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

Faulkner, William

45.

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

46.

Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence.

Franklin, Benjamin

47.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions -- largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.

Kipling, Rudyard

49.

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

Noam Chomsky

50.

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

Carlyle, Thomas