Motivational Quotes

Science

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

Best Quotes about Science

In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.

King Jr. Martin Luther

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.

Truth in science can best be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

Lorenz, Konrad

There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.

Chandler, Raymond

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

McDonough, Denny

Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound.

Einstein, Albert

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

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

Campbell, Thomas

10.

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

11.

Conscience is the dog that can't bite, but never stops barking.

Proverb

12.

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

13.

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

Proverb, Chinese

14.

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

Lamb, Charles

15.

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

16.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

Lewis Thomas

17.

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

Sir Francis Darwin

18.

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

19.

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

Rostand, Jean

20.

In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.

Russell, Bertrand

21.

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

Huxley, Thomas H.

22.

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

Rostand, Jean

23.

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

24.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

Kraus, Karl

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Nash, Ogden

28.

Science knows only one commandment -- contribute to science.

Brecht, Bertolt

29.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Ernest Rutherford

30.

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

Einstein, Albert

31.

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

32.

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

Byron, Lord

33.

If you look into your own heart, you find nothing wrong there, what is there to fear?

Confucius

34.

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

35.

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

Albert Einstein

36.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Koestler, Arthur

37.

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.

38.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

A clear conscience is a soft pillow.

Proverb, German

40.

Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.

Hoffer, Eric

41.

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

42.

Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

D'Avenant

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

Gould, Stephen Jay

46.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

47.

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

Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of

48.

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

Noam Chomsky

49.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

50.

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