English Scientist Quotes

Michael Faraday

Richard Dawkins

James Chadwick

James Prescott Joule

John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh

Thomas Henry Huxley

Humphry Davy

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

William Henry Perkin, Jr.

It must be confessed that the new quantum mechanics is far from satisfying the requirements of the layman who seeks to clothe his conceptions in figurative language. Indeed, its originators probably hold that such symbolic representation is inherently impossible. It is earnestly to be hoped that this is not their last word on the subject, and that they may yet be successful in expressing the quantum postulate in picturesque form.

H. Stanley Allen

The influence of science on men's lives comes in two rather different ways — one through the ideas themselves, and the other through their material consequences.

George Paget Thomson

Neither physical science nor psychology can ever 'explain' human consciousness. To me then, human consciousness lies outside science, and it is here that I seek the relationship between God and man.

Nevill Francis Mott

I shall lose no time in repeating and extending these experiments, being satisfied that the grand agents of nature are by the Creator's fiat indestructible, and that whatever mechanical force is expended an exact equivalent of heat is always obtained.

James Prescott Joule

The history of science has proved that fundamental research is the lifeblood of individual progress and that the ideas which lead to spectacular advances spring from it.

Edward Appleton

I am much puzzled by some recent results as to the density of nitrogen, and shall be obliged if any of your chemical readers can offer suggestions as to the cause. According to two methods of preparation I obtain quite distinct values.

John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh

The question whether our elementary atoms are in their nature indivisible, or whether they are built up of smaller particles, is one upon which I, as a chemist, have no hold whatever, and I may say that in chemistry the question is not raised by any evidence whatever.

Alexander William Williamson

Deeper understanding confers that most precious thing - wonder.

As in common life he who best knows how to meet the many difficulties and to utilise the various opportunities which life presents is the successful man, so in scientific discovery he is successful who is able to seize upon and rightly understand the meaning of the phenomena which all eyes witness but only those of the seer can interpret.

Henry Roscoe (chemist)

Avogadro's hypothesis affords a bridge by which we can pass from large volumes of gases, which we can handle, to the minuter molecules, which individually are invisible and intangible.

William Ashwell Shenstone

To cross the seas, to traverse the roads, and to work machinery by galvanism, or rather electro-magnetism, will certainly, if executed, be the most noble achievement ever performed by man.

Nature has endowed radium alone of all the elements with incurable suicidal monomania.

Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection.

Richard Dawkins

When I look back on my life and consider all the way I have been led, above all I thank God to Whom I owe everything, for all His goodness to me and ascribe to Him all the praise and honour.

William Henry Perkin

Some brains are barren grounds, that will not bring seed or fruit forth, unless they are well manured with the old wit which is raked from other writers and speakers.

Margaret Cavendish

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

The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to an inferior order of things. Counter-claims are made that they are the only living and dynamic studies... Both contentions are wrong. Language, Literature and Philosophy express, reflect and contemplate the world. But it is a world in which men will never be content to stay at rest, and so these disciplines cannot be cut off from the great searching into the nature of things without being deprived of life-blood.

Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

[Hypotheses were] part of the scaffolding of the building of science [rather] than as belonging either to its foundations, materials, or ornaments.

Winds have ever been considered, with reason, as having a principal share in producing changes of weather, and therefore they demand a particular regard in meteorology.

Science, with technology, is the only way we have to avoid starvation, disease, and premature death. The misapplication of science and technology is due to the fact that the politics are wrong. Now my own view is that the politics are indeed wrong; but politics and science are so closely interrelated that they can hardly be separated.

Maurice Wilkins

Force is as absolutely inscrutable as mind. Force can never be known in itself; it is known by its manifestations. It is not a phenomenon; it produces phenomena. We cannot know it; but we know nothing without it.

William Dallinger

The study of that which is thus common to all things, is the study of mathematics; and therefore mathematics, or the science of number, is and must be the most fundamental of all sciences, since it pertains to every other, and no other can be pursued without it.

St. George Jackson Mivart

Facts are plentiful enough, but we know not how to class them; many are overlooked because they seem uninteresting: but remember that what led Newton to pursue and discover the law of gravity, and ultimately the laws by which worlds revolve, was - the fall of an apple.

Michael Faraday

Mr. S. had a letter to Brigham Young, and took us to interview him, horrid old wretch! My hand felt dirty for a week after shaking hands with him.