British Scientist Quotes

It is from long experience chiefly that we are to expect the most certain rules of practice, yet it is withal to be remembered, that observations, and to put us upon the most probable means of improving any art, is to get the best insight we can into the nature and properties of those things which we are desirous to cultivate and improve.

To build and strengthen new connections, the brain needs the challenge of fresh and unusual stimuli..... There's a lot of evidence to suggest that repetition is bad for brain health, and novelty is good.

Wait, then, my soul! submissive wait,
Prostrate before His awful seat;
And mid the terrors of His rod,
Trust in a wise and gracious God!

Richard Henry Beddome

The spirit of a country, if it is to be true to itself, needs continually to draw great breaths of inspiration from the simple realities of the country; from the smell of its soil, the pattern of its fields, the beauty of its scenery and from the men and women who dwell and toil in the rural areas

George Stapledon

Clinical science has as good a claim to the name and rights and self-subsistence of a science as any other department of biology.

This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live.

According to the common law of nature, deficiency of power is supplied by duration of time.

Indeed the intellectual basis of all empirical knowledge may be said to be a matter of probability, expressible only in terms of a bet.

William Cecil Dampier

This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments.... For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of the Earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15180 calories.... The energy of our most violent explosive - nitroglycerine - is less than 1500 calories per grammer. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one tenth of the energy to escape the Earth … hence the proposition appears to be basically unsound.

The question of how the ebb and flow of a highly developed mind can be catered to by a physical brain, and the related question of how the one impacts the other, are the hardest-ever challenges to human ingenuity and imagination.

Susan Greenfield, Baroness Greenfield

I prefer to use the term "theory," with the above understood qualification, viz... a theory in its hypothetical stage.

A physicist studying geology is by definition a geologist.

William Johnson Sollas

Light, properly so called, is only a narrowly defined part of a far greater phenomenon, that of radiation in general.... The lengths of [visible] light waves fall between close limits; but the rules of wave motion apply to the infinitesimal waves of X-rays on one hand and to the long radio waves on the other.

William Henry Bragg

The skeletal striated muscle cell of amphibia therefore resembles the cardiac striated muscle cell in the property of 'all or none' contraction.

Keith Lucas (scientist)

The difficulty, as in all this work, is to find a notation which is both concise and intelligible to at least two people of whom one may be the author.

Paul Taunton Matthews

Whatever notions people may entertain respecting the dignity of the human race, there is no gainsaying the fact that we share with the lower animals the rather humiliating privilege and prerogative of entertaining a great variety of parasites.

Thomas Spencer Cobbold

Those young people of today, who will be the leaders of thought and of action tomorrow, are faced with the problem of enduring that, in gaining control over Nature, man does not lose his own soul.

E. John Russell

No arrangement can pretend to define and separate those objects which the hand of nature has neither defined nor separated.

John MacCulloch

To suppose that the Omnipotent God made a world, found it a failure, and broke it up, and then made it again, and again broke it up, as the Geologists say, is all fiddle faddle. Describing Species of birds and shells, & c., is all fiddle faddle.

Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope