Motivational Quotes

Science

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

- Marie Curie

Best Quotes about Science

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

Charron, Pierre

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

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.

Levi, Primo

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

Klee, Paul

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

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

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

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

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

Ruskin, John

10.

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

Lee, Harper

11.

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

12.

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

Popper, Karl

13.

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

14.

There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.

Pasteur, Louis

15.

Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it.

Herzen, Alexander

16.

The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow.

Cowper, William

17.

Conscience is a man's compass.

Gogh, Vincent Van

18.

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

19.

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

George Santayana

20.

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

21.

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

Santayana, George

22.

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

23.

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.

Ehrlich, Paul

24.

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

25.

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

Adams, Mike

26.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Einstein, Albert

27.

While conscience is our friend, all is at peace; however once it is offended, farewell to a tranquil mind.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

28.

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.

29.

The product of mental labor -- science -- always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

Marx, Karl

30.

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

31.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

32.

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

Belloc, Hilaire

33.

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

34.

Conscience does make cowards of us all.

Shakespeare, William

35.

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

36.

Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other -- only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.

Parsons, Talcott

37.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Lorenz, Konrad

41.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

Kraus, Karl

42.

Men never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.

Pascal, Blaise

43.

Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.

Gourmont, Remy De

44.

Science is all metaphor.

Leary, Timothy

45.

The conscience is the most flexible material in the world. Today you cannot stretch it over a mole hill; while tomorrow it can hide a mountain.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

46.

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

47.

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