Motivational Quotes

Science

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.

Best Quotes about Science

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

Lessing, Doris

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.

Neumann, John Von

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.

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

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

Huxley, Thomas H.

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

O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!

Dante Alighieri

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

Barr, Amelia E.

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

Valery, Paul

10.

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

Rostand, Jean

11.

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

Floyd, Keith

12.

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

Huxley, Thomas H.

13.

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

Lewes, George Henry

14.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

Frayn, Michael

15.

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

16.

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

17.

In science,'fact'can only mean'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Stephen Jay Gould

18.

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.

19.

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

Einstein, Albert

20.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

Bronowski, Jacob

21.

Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

23.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

24.

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

25.

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

26.

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.

Artaud, Antonin

27.

The puritanical potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion, hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of decency. The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to.

Lewis, Wyndham

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.

Adams, Mike

31.

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

Clarke, Arthur C.

32.

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

33.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

34.

Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Dewey, John

36.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

Kraus, Karl

37.

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

38.

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

Campbell, Thomas

39.

Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.

Einstein, Albert

40.

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

Byron, Lord

41.

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

42.

Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

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

McDonough, Denny

44.

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

45.

There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its length: a quiet conscience.

Euripides

46.

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

47.

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

48.

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

Bertrand Russell

49.

The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.

Walton, Izaak

50.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Dick, Philip K.