George Wald Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

George Wald
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a world without physicists. And physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

George Wald
An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that one has only to listen.

George Wald
A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.

George Wald
A scientist is in a sense a learned small boy. There is something of the scientist in every small boy. Others must outgrow it. Scientists can stay that way all their lives.

George Wald
Never try to teach what you do not yourself know and know well.

George Wald
A scientist should be the happiest of men. Not that science isn't serious; but as everyone knows, being serious is one way of being happy...

George Wald
Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader, the answers are seen to be more limited.

George Wald
The most important thing about a name, after all, is that it remain attached to the thing it designates. One wishes that once a name had come into common use for an organism, it could be stabilized for the use of busy persons who want nothing but that each animal have a name.

George Wald