Motivational Quotes

Science

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

Best Quotes about Science

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

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

Weil, Simone

What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

Faulkner, William

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

Confucius

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

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

10.

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

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

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.

To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.

Hubbard, Ruth

13.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

Hobbes, Thomas

14.

Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

Einstein, Albert

15.

Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science

Einstein, Albert

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Sir Francis Darwin

19.

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

Clarke, Arthur C.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Euripides

23.

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

24.

Conscience is the window of our spirit, evil is the curtain.

Horton, Doug

25.

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

26.

I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.

Marie Curie

27.

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

28.

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

Ingersoll, Robert Green

29.

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

Lucretius

30.

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

31.

Science has not solved problems, only shifted the points of problems.

Parkhurst, Charles H.

32.

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

Rostand, Jean

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Conscience is our magnetic compass; reason our chart.

Cook, Joseph

36.

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

Sontag, Susan

37.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Foucault, Michel

38.

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

Louis Pasteur

39.

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

Richard Feynman

40.

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

41.

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

Einstein, Albert

42.

Conscience is a man's compass.

Gogh, Vincent Van

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain.

Shakespeare, William

47.

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

48.

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

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

49.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Pope, Alexander

50.

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

Lee, Harper