Erwin Chargaff Quotes

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Great scientific concepts often have an entirely noninductive, dream-like quality.

Erwin Chargaff
Unappreciated geniuses in the natural sciences remain unrecognized; for them there is no posterity.

Erwin Chargaff
In science we always know much less than we believe we do.

Erwin Chargaff
What makes the study of nature so magnificent is its very giveness; it is because it is; it is as it is; and tolle, lege! (pick up and read!) remains its eternal admonition.

Erwin Chargaff
The kind of questions we ask is conditioned by the kind of answers we expect.

Erwin Chargaff
Knowledge and wisdom are far from being communicating vessels, and the level of one has no bearing on that of the other.

Erwin Chargaff
Science is the attempt to learn the truth about those parts of nature that are explorable.

Erwin Chargaff
Often the regularities in the "laws of nature" are only the reflection of the regularity of the method employed in their formulation!

Erwin Chargaff
I am not sure whether one can say that man - just as he possesses an almost instinctive sense of symmetry - is governed by an equally elemental desire for simplicity.

Erwin Chargaff
An observer of our biological sciences today sees dark figures moving over a bridge of glass. We are faced with an ever expanding universe of light and darkness. The greater the circle of understanding becomes, the greater is the circumference of surrounding ignorance.

Erwin Chargaff
Many adults, whether consciously or unconsciously, find it beneath their adult dignity to do anything as childish as read a book, think a thought, or get an idea. Adults are rarely embarrassed at having forgotten what little algebra or geography they once learned.

Erwin Chargaff
The practitioner of a science must know much more than he can know. Ignorance is no handicap in the arts - Renoir did not have to have seen all the nudes that were painted before him.

Erwin Chargaff
The initial incommunicability of truth, scientific or otherwise, shows that we think in grooves, and that it is painful for us to be torn away from the womblike security of accepted concepts.

Erwin Chargaff
I prefer the search for the truth to its possession.

Erwin Chargaff
The scientific professions began to develop a momentum of their own, thereby creating a vested interest in always having more science, bigger science, better-endowed science. This is, incidentally, quite in contrast, for instance, to orchestra musicians whose influence on the number of orchestra pieces being written is minimal.

Erwin Chargaff
I thought it was the task of the natural sciences to discover the facts of nature, not to create them.

Erwin Chargaff
The so-called exact sciences often are not as exact as is commonly believed. How often they infer the existence of a hat from the emergence of a rabbit!

Erwin Chargaff
Biochemistry is helpless before life, having to kill the organism before investigating it. Biochemistry is, in fact, much more successful in practicing the second part of its composite name than in following the prefix.

Erwin Chargaff
No scientist's lifework is really continued when he is dead.

Erwin Chargaff
A balance that does not tremble cannot weigh.

Erwin Chargaff
Science is a way to investigate, not to define, reality.

Erwin Chargaff
The sciences, like other professions, cannot endure if their practitioners are unable to know more than an ever smaller portion of what they must know in order to function properly.

Erwin Chargaff
What counts, however, in science is to be not so much the first as the last.

Erwin Chargaff
Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question "How?" But it gets terribly confused when you ask it the question "Why?"

Erwin Chargaff
Great scientists are particularly worth listening to when they speak about something of which they know little; in their own specialty they are usually great and dull.

Erwin Chargaff
The manner in which questions are asked, i.e., experiments designed, is either completely random or conditioned by our ideas of a preestablished harmony, a harmony that we seldom recognize as a contract with God that He has never signed.

Erwin Chargaff
Thus, astronomy was probably the first exact science, practiced long before the concept of science as such had been formulated. (Mathematics may have been earlier, but I do not consider it a natural science: the mother of many kings is not necessarily a queen.)

Erwin Chargaff
The sciences are extremely pedigree-conscious, and the road to the top of Mount Olympus is paved with letters of recommendation, friendly whispers at meetings, telephone calls at night.

Erwin Chargaff
In science you don't ask why, you ask how much.

Erwin Chargaff
In the end, we know nearly everything about nearly nothing.

Erwin Chargaff