Science Quotes

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Science must not be viewed as a mysterious black box out of which came toys and goodies, for that way laymen would view scientists as a kind of lab-coated priesthood — and, eventually, fear and hate them.

There are not a few problems in the natural sciences of which a man cannot speak justly without calling metaphysics to his aid; not technical words about knowing and being, such as make a show in the schools, but that wisdom of thought which was before all physics, lives with it, and will endure after it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

Etymology is a science where vowels count for nothing and consonants for very little.

Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky.... These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The notion that therapeutics or hygiene or surgery is any more or less scientific than making or cleaning boots is entertained only by people to whom a man of science is still a magician who can cure diseases, transmute metals, and enable us to live forever.

George Bernard Shaw

A man estimable for his learning, amiable for his life, and venerable for his piety. Arbuthnot was a man of great comprehension, skilful in his profession, versed in the sciences, acquainted with ancient literature, and able to animate his mass of knowledge by a bright and active imagination; a scholar with great brilliance of wit; a wit who, in the crowd of life, retained and discovered a noble ardour of religious zeal.

Life is short, science is long; opportunity is elusive, experiment is dangerous, judgement is difficult.

Science, that nameless being, declared that the weakest must go to the wall; especially in Wall Street.

G. K. Chesterton

My experience — and it is somewhat considerable — is that in these matters when the need is clearly explained by military and political authorities, science is always able to provide something. "Seek and ye shall find" has been borne out.

Winston Churchill

In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.

George Bernard Shaw

Only science can tell you where and when you are likely to meet an elm: only poetry can tell you what meeting an elm is like.

Science, great, mighty and in the end unerring... science has fallen into many errors — errors which have been fortunate and useful rather than otherwise, for they have been the stepping stones to truth.

Time was, when she [metaphysics] was the queen of all the sciences; and, if we take the will for the deed, she certainly deserves, so far as regards the high importance of her object-matter, this title of honor. Now, it is the fashion of the time to heap contempt and scorn upon her.

I could have never have known so well how paltry men are, and how little they care for really high aims, if I had not tested them by my scientific researches. Thus I saw that most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a substance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.

The priests of the different religious sects, who dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of day-light; and scowl on it the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies on which they live. In this the Presbyterian clergy take the lead. the tocsin is sounded in all their pulpits, and the first alarm denounced is against the particular creed of Doctr. Cooper; and as impudently denounced as if they really knew what it is.

Thomas Jefferson

The unlimited capacity of the plant world to sustain man at his highest is a region as yet unexplored by modern science.

The fine thread, which wafts and woofs through the web of knowledge, through the sciences in all periods, even through the darkest and most confusing ones, is drawn by individuals.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

And how much longer a story has science Before she must put out the light on the children And tell them the rest of the story is dreaming?

All science is based upon an act of faith — faith in the validity of the mind's logical processes, faith in the ultimate explicability of the world, faith that the laws of thought are laws of things.

If thou sayest that sciences which begin and end in the mind are true, this cannot be conceded, but must be denied for many reasons, and firstly because in such mental discourses experience is eliminated, and without experience there can be no certainty.

Leonardo da Vinci

The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Arts and Sciences, essential to the prosperity of the State and to the ornament of human life, have a primary claim to the encouragement of every lover of his country and mankind.

George Washington