Science Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts.

The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Thomas Henry Huxley

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

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

Stephen Leacock

Mark all mathematical heads which be only and wholly bent on these sciences, how solitary they be themselves, how unfit to live with others, and how unapt to serve the world.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification — the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? It counsels and corrects all the arts of mankind... it is the prince of mathematics, and the sciences founded on it are absolutely certain. It has measured the distances and sizes of the stars it has discovered the elements and their location... it has given birth to architecture and to perspective and to the divine art of painting.

Leonardo da Vinci

Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are... rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Henry David Thoreau

For the scientist, there is only "being," but no wishing, no valuing, no good, no evil — in short, no goal. As long as we remain within the realm of science proper, we can never encounter a sentence of the type: "Thou shalt not lie."

Albert Einstein

Science, ever since the time of the Arabs, has had two functions: (1) to enable us to know things, and (2) to enable us to do things.

Bertrand Russell

Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatical. The former like ants only heap up and use their store, the latter like spiders spin out their own webs. The bee, a mean between both, extracts matter from the flower of the garden and the field, but works and fashions it by its own efforts.

Mathematics and physics are the two theoretical sciences of reason, which have to determine their objects a priori.

Science is not indeed a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when it is taken as an end in itself.

Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.

Friedrich Engels

The positivist philosophy of Comte and the I doctrine deduced from it that humanity is an organism, and Darwin's doctrine of a law of the struggle for existence that is supposed to govern life, with the differentiation of various breeds of people which follows from it, and the anthropology, biology, and sociology of which people are now so fond-all have the same aim. These have all become favourite sciences because they serve to justify the way in which people free themselves from the human obligation to labour, while consuming the fruits of other people's labour.

All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings... We must run roughshod over all these ancient puerilities, overturn the barriers that reason never erected, give back to the arts and sciences the liberty that is so precious to them.

As free peoples, we recognize that democracy is the most effective form of government ever devised for delivering progress and opportunity and prosperity and freedom to people. And as two of the most innovative economies on Earth, we cherish that freedom that allows us to innovate and create, which is why we're leaders in science and research and development — those things that pioneers new industries and broaden our horizons.

Logic has borrowed, perhaps, the rules of geometry, without comprehending their force... it does not thence follow that they have entered into the spirit of geometry, and I should be greatly averse... to placing them on a level with that science that teaches the true method of directing reason.

The root of the plant is not unsightly to science...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The facts of science, as they appeared to him [Heraclitus], fed the flame in his soul, and in its light, he saw into the depths of the world.

Bertrand Russell

If there is anything that can bind the heavenly mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so than one can enjoy living, — then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.

Johannes Kepler

Science is angling in the mud — angling for immortality and for anything else that may happen to turn up.

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.