Science Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

Erwin Schrödinger

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

George Henry Lewes

Imagination is as vital to any advance in science as learning and precision are essential for starting points.

Percival Lowell

To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.

No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.

Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves

Werner Heisenberg

Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of — heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can't explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales.

Charles de Lint

We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.

Most achievements in science are to a certain degree group efforts.

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.

Theodore Sturgeon

The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes. Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health. And because health and sickness and their causes are sometimes manifest, and sometimes hidden and not to be comprehended except by the study of symptoms, we must also study the symptoms of health and disease. Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials. Of these causes there are four kinds: material, efficient, formal, and final.

The time has come when advertising in some hands has reached the status of a science.

Claude C. Hopkins

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science.

Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.

Benjamin Jowett

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor.
Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives.
I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.

The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert; that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent.

Clarke's Law of Revolutionary Ideas:

Every revolutionary idea — in science, politics, art, or whatever — seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:
(1) "It's completely impossible — don't waste my time";
(2) "It's possible, but it's not worth doing";
(3) "I said it was a good idea all along."

Arthur C. Clarke

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Ernest Rutherford

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

Eric Temple Bell

Science may eventually explain the world of How. The ultimate world of Why may remain for contemplation, philosophy, religion.

Liberty Hyde Bailey

To will what God doth will, that is the only science
That gives us any rest.

François de Malherbe

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

Willard van Orman Quine