Scientific Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

When you die, they can make you into diamonds now. It's scientific. That's how I want to be remembered. I want to shine.

Take care not to fancy that you are physicians as soon as you have mastered scientific facts; they only afford to your understanding an opportunity of bringing forth fruit, and of elevating you to the high position as a man of art.

Armand Trousseau

I have no doubt, as will emerge later, that this loss of faith in Christian religion and my growing attachment to science plays a dominant part in my scientific career, not so much on a day-to-day basis but in the choice of what I have considered interesting and important.

Minds trained to scientific methods are less likely to be led by mere appeal to the passions or by blind emotional excitement to sanction acts which in the end may lead to social disaster.

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

Walter Lippmann

I can now rejoice even in the falsification of a cherished theory, because even this is a scientific success.

John Carew Eccles

By contrast with diamonds or asbestos or granite or the minerals we burn for fuel, the lowly agate is the victim of scientific disinterest, the same kinds of structured apathy I have elsewhere called 'the social construction of ignorance.' Agates seem to fall outside the orbit of geological knowledge, and therefore tend to be regarded — if at all — as geological accidents or oddities not really deserving systematic study.

Robert N. Proctor

He didn't like religion, hadn't liked it for years, but he adored churches, loved them like old scientific instruments whose time is long past but are nevertheless fascinating and strange.

This book is intended as an exploratory sketch of a revolutionary scientific perspective and conceptual framework as it might be applied to sociocultural systems. This point of view and still developing framework, as interpreted here, stems from the General Systems Research movement and the now closely allied fields of Cybernetics and information or communication theory.

Walter F. Buckley

Little by little his conversation, always instructive and animated, gave a special direction to my tastes, which would have led me by preference towards letters. I resolved to complete my scientific studies and followed the courses in advanced mathematics given by M. [Jean Guillaume] Gamier. It was at the same time agreed by us that, in order to relieve him in his work, I should give some of the other courses with which he was charged. I thus found myself his pupil and his colleague.

Adolphe Quetelet

Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

All of creation, in the biblical view, was to ultimately prepare the way for the creation of man. But one does not need the Bible alone to hold this view. A purely scientific reading of the universe is in keeping with this view. Everything - every natural and physical law - is exquisitely tuned to produce life, and ultimately man, on earth.

At this point in history when all things which concern man and the structure and elements of history itself are suddenly revealed to us in a new light, it behooves us in our scientific thinking to become masters of the situation, for it is not inconceivable that sooner than we suspect, as has often been the case before in history, this vision may disappear, the opportunity may be lost, and the world will once again present a static, uniform, and inflexible countenance.

Scientific Law is [a] description, not a prescription.

A system such as classical mechanics may be 'scientific' to any degree you like; but those who uphold it dogmatically - believing, perhaps, that it is their business to defend such a successful system against criticism as long as it is not conclusively disproved - are adopting the very reverse of that critical attitude which in my view is the proper one for the scientist.

In the accelerating pace of scientific advance, perspective is often a casualty.

It is not too much to say that the more deference men of science have paid to Logic, the worse it has been for the scientific value of their reasoning... Fortunately for the world, however, the great men of science have usually been kept in salutary ignorance of the logical tradition.

F. C. S. Schiller

I cannot help remembering the dingy little military hospital, the old cracked microscope, and the medicine bottles which constituted all the laboratory and apparatus which I possessed for the purpose of attacking one of the most redoubtable of scientific problems.

Now the history of scientific advance has shown us clearly that any appeal to Divine Purpose or any supernatural agency, to explain any phenomenon, is in fact only a concealed confession of ignorance, and a bar to genuine research.

John Desmond Bernal

There is a tendency to forget that all science is bound up with human culture in general, and that scientific findings, even those which at the moment appear the most advanced and esoteric and difficult to grasp, are meaningless outside their cultural context.

Erwin Schrödinger

A discourse, a way of speaking, is considered less scientific, or even rendered 'unscientific' exactly to the extent that it includes elements either of the language of feeling or of the language of action and values.

Until a scientific theory yields confident forecasts you know it is unsound and tentative; it is mere theorizing, as evanescent as art talk or the phantoms politicians talk about.

[Microsoft] must be testing the outer limits of what a customer will put up with before bolting to Linux, certainly a valuable scientific study from my point of view.

The scientific spirit, when applied to historical research, is - like chemistry applied to agriculture - valuable, but good crops have been and can be grown without it.

Scientific power is like inherited wealth; attained without discipline. You read about what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast.

Michael Crichton