Science Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cheerfully... let us advance together, men of letters and men of science, further and further into the ever-expanding regions of the unknown.

Who science has and art
He has religion too
Who neither of them owns
Religion is his due.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In Geometry, (which is the only Science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind,) men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call Definitions; and place them in the beginning of their reckoning.

No Science demonstrates its own subject, but presupposes it.

Dante Alighieri

Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.

Bertrand Russell

To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized — perhaps too much for our own good — in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality — for that, much is lacking.

It is unreasonable to expect science to produce a system of ethics-ethics are a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind-and the fact that in physics atoms which were yesterday assumed to be square are now assumed to be round is exploited with unjustified tendentiousness by all who are hungry for faith; so long as physics extends our dominion over nature, these changes ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you.

The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.

Henry David Thoreau

The way to teach in this world is to pretend you're not teaching. Science fiction offers the chance to pretend to look the other way while teaching. Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them.

What drops of all the sea of our science are baled up! and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Four epochs of science: childlike, poetic, superstitious; empirical, searching, curious; dogmatic, didactic, pedantic; ideal, methodical, mystical.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I could not employ my life better than in adding a little to Natural Science. This I have done to the best of my abilities, and critics may say what they like, but they cannot destroy this conviction.

The triumph of science has been mainly due to its practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the world. The penetration of this point of view to philosophers is very recent.

Bertrand Russell

Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If there's good, strong evidence from science that such and such is the case and this is contrary to Buddhism, then we will change.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Science seeks perpetual motion. She has found it: it is Science herself.

He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behaviour as well as application.

Henry David Thoreau

Science helps us before all things in this, that it somewhat lightens the feeling of wonder with which Nature fills us; then, however, as life becomes more and more complex, it creates new facilities for the avoidance of what would do us harm and the promotion of what will do us good.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common cure-mongering witchcraft

George Bernard Shaw

Modern science is necessarily a double-edged tool, a tool that cuts both ways.... There is no doubt that a Zeppelin is a wonderful thing; but that did not prevent it from becoming a horrible thing.

G. K. Chesterton

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. You are very fond, sir, of talking about the consideration we owe to the community; it seems to me, however, that the community has its duties too. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.

We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be contemplated from two sides, it can be divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.

Fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science maybe; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.