19th-century Scientist Quotes

The phenomenon of the production of motion by heat has not been considered in a sufficiently general way... It is necessary to establish proofs applicable not only to steam engines but to all other heat-engines, irrespective of the working substance and the manner in which it acts.

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

Science aims at a vigorous adult, intelligent, serpentlike wisdom, and active interference with the course of nature; religion aims at a meek, receptive, child-hearted attitude of dovelike resignation to the Divine will.

As chemists, we must rename [our] scheme and insert the symbols Ba, La, Ce in place of Ra, Ac, Th. As nuclear chemists closely associated with physics, we cannot yet convince ourselves to make this leap, which contradicts all previous experience in nuclear physics.

Much testing; accuracy and precision in experiment; no guesswork or self-deception.

Everybody is pathological to a certain degree...the more so the elevated his standing...only myth and cliche have that a person must be either sane or crazy.

Paul Julius Möbius

A single substantive term is a better instrument of thought than a paraphrase.

The trouble is that all the investigators proceeded in exactly the same spirit, the spirit that is of scientific curiosity, and with no possibility of telling whether the issue of their work would prove them to be fiends, or dreamers, or angels.

Robert Strutt, 4th Baron Rayleigh

At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with Kirchhoff which does not allow us to sleep. Kirchhoff has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the dark lines in the solar spectrum and can produce these lines artificially intensified both in the solar spectrum...

Many thanks for the sending me the book Biology of the Striped Skunk...Frankly, I doubt whether I shall read it or not, unless I happen to have some intimate contact with a skunk which may induce me to learn more about him.

The Darwinian process of continued interplay of a random and a selective process is not intermediate between pure chance and pure determinism, but qualitatively utterly different from either in its consequences.

There is no more elevating spectacle than to contemplate the sky with its thousands of stars on a clear night. When we send our thoughts to those lights glittering in infinite distance, the question forces itself upon us, whether there are not out there planets like our own that will sustain organic life.

Svante Arrhenius

It is the care we bestow on apparently trifling, unattractive and very troublesome minutiae which determines the results.

No one can predict how far we shall be enabled by means of our limited intelligence to penetrate into the mysteries of a universe immeasurably vast and wonderful; nevertheless, each step in advance is certain to bring new blessings to humanity and new inspiration to greater endeavor.

Theodore William Richards

We look to medical research to discover remedial measures to insure better health and more happiness for mankind.

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Scientists are in fact imaginers and artists; they are not free with their ideas; they can work well and hard only at what their thinking accepts and what their feelings are drawn to. Ideas alternate; impossible and often mad ones appear; they swarm and whirl, fuse and sparkle. Scientists live among these ideas and work for them.

Vladimir Vernadsky

I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reducing division as indicated above may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity.

Developmental mechanics...is the doctrine of the causes of organic forms.

Physical chemistry is all very well, but it does not apply to organic substances.

William Henry Perkin, Jr.

It is not easy to be sure whether the crucial idea is really one's own or has been unconsciously assimilated in talks with others.

William Lawrence Bragg

Life proceeds from life, and from nothing but life.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

A child of the new generation Refused to learn multiplication. He said 'Don't conclude That I'm stupid or rude; I am simply without motivation.'

Joel Henry Hildebrand

The highest object to which the natural sciences are constrained to aim, but which they will never reach, is the determination of the forces, which are present in nature, and of the state of matter at any given moment - that is, the reduction of all the phenomena of nature to mechanics.

Gustav Kirchhoff

Emil Fischer represents a symbol of Germany's greatness.

Man's intellectual development has extended for a period of at least 5,000 years. However, it has been only during the past three centuries that scientists have realized their real objectives and have learned to use what we designate the scientific method.

As an investigator he was great, as a teacher he was greater, as a man and friend he was greatest.

Of Robert Bunsen

Henry Enfield Roscoe