Science Quotes

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One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one makes us know less than we thought we did

Bertrand Russell

As for earthquakes, though they were still formidable, they were so interesting that men of science could hardly regret them.

Bertrand Russell

Physics is essentially an intuitive and concrete science. Mathematics is only a means for expressing the laws that govern phenomena.

Albert Einstein

All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.

G. K. Chesterton

But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this — that men despair and think things impossible.

Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking, observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science. If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, we are engaged in science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively as meaningful, then we are engaged in art. Common to both is love and devotion to that which transcends personal concerns and volition.

Albert Einstein

Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.

No transcendent ability is required in order to make useful discoveries in science; the edifice of science needs its masons, bricklayers, and common labourers as well as its foremen, master-builders, and architects.

Bertrand Russell

Sarcastic Science, she would like to know, In her complacent ministry of fear, How we propose to get away from here When she has made things so we have to go Or be wiped out.

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

Our privacy... has been slowly and steadily and increasingly invaded until now our very dream of civilization is in danger. Who will save us but the scientist and the humanitarian? Yes, the humanitarian in science, and the scientist in the humanity of man.

William Faulkner

When I was seventeen I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and Van Vogt — all the people who appeared in Astounding Science Fiction — but my big science-fiction influences are H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. I've found that I'm a lot like Verne — a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo — who in a way is the flip side of Melville's madman, Ahab — goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace.

There has not been any science so much esteemed and honored as this of mathematics, nor with so much industry and vigilance become the care of great men, and labored in by the potentates of the world, viz... emperors, kings, princes, etc.

Benjamin Franklin

Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections...science is a ladder...poetry is a winged flight...An artistic masterpiece exists for all time...Dante does not efface Homer.

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.

All definite knowledge - so I should contend - belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack by both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy.

Bertrand Russell

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.

Albert Einstein

Philosophy is that part of science which at present people chose to have opinions about, but which they have no knowledge about. Therefore every advance in knowledge robs philosophy of some problems which formerly it had...and will belong to science.

Bertrand Russell

All the measurements in the world do not balance one theorem by which the science of eternal truths is actually advanced.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Cowardice is unscientific; for there cannot be a science of ignorance. There may be a science of bravery, for that advances; but a retreat is rarely well conducted; if it is, then is it an orderly advance in the face of circumstances.

Henry David Thoreau

I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it's really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us.

Ahimsa is a science. The word 'failure' has no place in the vocabulary of science.

Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances.

It is my inner conviction that the development of science seeks in the main to satisfy the longing for pure knowledge.

Albert Einstein