Motivational Quotes

Science

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

- Lorenz, Konrad

Best Quotes about Science

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

From man or angel the great Architect did wisely to conceal, and not divulge his secrets to be scanned by them who ought rather admire; or if they list to try conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens left to their disputes, perhaps to move his laughter at their quaint opinions wide hereafter, when they come to model heaven calculate the stars, how they will wield the mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive to save appearances, how gird the sphere with centric and eccentric scribbled o'er, and epicycle, orb in orb.

Milton, John

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.

Lucretius

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

Rostand, Jean

Isn't it marvelous how those scientists know the names of all those stars?

If the study of all these sciences which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.

Plato

A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Adams, Mike

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

10.

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

Carl Sagan

11.

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

Proverb, Chinese

12.

Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.

Harrison Ford

13.

A bad conscience has a very good memory

14.

Conscience is the sentinel of virtue.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

15.

The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow.

Cowper, William

16.

Conscience is our magnetic compass; reason our chart.

Cook, Joseph

17.

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

18.

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

Louis Pasteur

19.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Ingersoll, Robert Green

20.

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

Henri Poincare

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

Science is all metaphor.

Leary, Timothy

24.

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

Richard Feynman

25.

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

26.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Koestler, Arthur

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Byron, Lord

30.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

32.

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

Froude, James A.

33.

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

Ruskin, John

34.

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

35.

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.

Cronenberg, David

36.

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

Hoffer, Eric

37.

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

Bronowski, Jacob

38.

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

39.

The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.

Churchill, Winston

40.

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

Mencken, H. L.

41.

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

Charron, Pierre

42.

Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Huxley, Thomas H.

43.

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

Einstein, Albert

44.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Sontag, Susan

45.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Huxley, Aldous

46.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

Frayn, Michael

47.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Lee, Harper