Motivational Quotes

Science

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

Best Quotes about Science

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Ernest Rutherford

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

Dante Alighieri

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.

Swift, Jonathan

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

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

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

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Luther King Jr.

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

10.

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

Guin, Ursula K. Le

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

Freud, Sigmund

14.

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

Russell, Bertrand

15.

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

16.

Rules of society are nothing; ones conscience is the umpire.

Dudevant, Madame

17.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Foucault, Michel

18.

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.

19.

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

Huxley, Thomas H.

20.

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

Campbell, Thomas

21.

Conscience is the sentinel of virtue.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

22.

Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

D'Avenant

23.

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

Santayana, George

24.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

Popper, Karl

25.

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

26.

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.

Butler, Samuel

27.

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

Noam Chomsky

28.

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

Huxley, Thomas H.

29.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Einstein, Albert

30.

The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer.

Mead, Margaret

31.

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

32.

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

33.

If it can't be expressed in figures, it's not science it's opinion.

Long, Lazarus

34.

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

Lee, Harper

35.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

36.

Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut [Animals] up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph... Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

37.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

George Santayana

38.

The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

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

Russell, Bertrand

40.

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

McDonough, Denny

41.

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

42.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

43.

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

44.

There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.

Louis Pasteur

45.

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

Lessing, Doris

46.

If politicians and scientist were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

Waugh, Evelyn

47.

There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.

Sophocles

48.

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

Euripides

49.

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

50.

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

Proverb, Chinese