Science Quotes

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For when it is the good that is under consideration, and the ethical object is predominant, truth must be considered more in reference to art than science, if, that is, unity is to be preserved in the work generally.

Friedrich Schleiermacher

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

Werner Heisenberg

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Any particular advance has been preceded by the contributions of those from many lands who have set firm foundations for further developments. The Nobel awards should be regarded as giving recognition to this general scientific progress as well as to the individuals involved.
Further, science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.

He that desireth to acquire any art or science seeketh first those means by which that art or science is obtained. If we ought to do so in things natural and earthly, how much more then in spiritual?

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

Eric Temple Bell

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Ernest Rutherford

Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.

Johannes V. Jensen

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

It is often claimed that knowledge multiplies so rapidly that nobody can follow it. I believe this is incorrect. At least in science it is not true. The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler. This, of course, goes contrary to what everyone accepts.

Now, everybody, I suppose, is aware that in recent years the silly business of divination by dreams has ceased to be a joke and has become a very serious science.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

Michael Shermer

I always felt that a scientist owes the world only one thing, and that is the truth as he sees it. If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that is too bad. Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts.

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though different traditions may emphasize different aspects, it is only the interplay of these antithetic forces and the struggle for their synthesis that constitute the life, usefulness, and supreme value of mathematical science.

Richard Courant

The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

William Irwin Thompson

Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth; some of its rivals do. That science is in some respects inhuman may be the secret of its success in alleviating human misery and mitigating human stupidity.

Eric Temple Bell

Science has made us gods before we are even worthy of being men.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

Jacob Bronowski

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

Norman O. Brown

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

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

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term.

Maurice Maeterlinck

I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.