Scientific Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

Émile Durkheim

Laboratories are necessary, and though an artist without a studio or an evangelist without a church might conceivably find under the blue dome of heaven a substitute, a scientific man without a laboratory is a misnomer.

Frederick Soddy

In short, these fundamental elements of scientific knowledge assimilate and grow, coalesce and separate and recombine, shrink and wane, die and come to life again; and while they persist they are never more than probable.

Frederick L. Barry

Materialism in its literal sense is long since dead.... It is... belief in the universal dominance of scientific law which is nowadays generally meant by materialism.

Arthur Eddington

To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind.

Edward Thorndike

In scientific study also, as in other abstruse meditations, the mind soon becomes exhausted by intense thinking, but is usually relieved by preparing and making experiments.

The debate is over. The scientific community has spoken in a virtually unanimous voice. Climate change is real. It is caused by human activity...

The self-regulating mechanism of the market place cannot always be depended upon to produce adequate results in scientific research.

James Roy Newman

Knowledge is all scientific researchers are after — new knowledge and discovery.

Eden Phillpotts

As a mathematician, von Neumann was quick, brilliant, efficient, and enormously broad in scientific interests beyond mathematics itself. He knew his technical abilities; his virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and his insights were supreme; yet he lacked absolute self confidence.

The highest philosophy of the scientific investigator is precisely this toleration of an incomplete conception of the world and the preference for it rather than an apparently perfect, but inadequate conception.

For although there is not a single aspect of European growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the permanent distinctive force of the modern world, and the supreme source of its victory, natural science and the scientific spirit.

Robert Briffault

Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently... It is that which feels & discovers what is, the REAL which we see not, which exists not for our senses... Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things... Imagination too shows what is... Hence she is or should be especially cultivated by the truly Scientific, those who wish to enter into the worlds around us!

What is a scientific laboratory? It is a small world, a small corner of reality. And in this small corner man labors with his mind at the task of... knowing this reality in order correctly to predict what will happen... even to direct this reality according to his will, to command it, if this is within our technical means.

No scientific argument — by which I mean an argument drawn from the phenomena of nature — can ever have the slightest tendency either to prove or disprove the existence of God... science is irrelevant to religion.

Walter Terence Stace

In scientific information, then, we find that subjects - the themes and topics on which books and articles are written - cluster into fields, each of which can be analysed into its characteristic set of facets of terms.

Brian Campbell Vickery

In scientific as in other mundane questions there may often be two sides, and the truth may ultimately be found not to lie wholly with either.

Archibald Geikie

The Bible gives no hint that a Christian "belief system" might be isolated from the life of the Church, subjected to scientific analysis, and have its truth compared with competing "belief systems".

After a study of some forty years and more of the great religions of the world, I find none so perfect, none so scientific, none so philosophic, and none so spiritual as the great religion known by the name of Hinduism. The more you know it, the more you will love it; the more you try to understand it, the more deeply you will value it

A rational religion is a scientific impossibility...

I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard with some trepidation. Next to Nietzsche, or rather, prior to Nietzsche, I consider him to be the most important thinker of our post-Kantian age. With Goethe and Hegel, an epoch had reached its conclusion, and our prevalent way of thinking — that is, the positivistic, natural-scientific one — cannot really be considered as philosophy.

There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

From a scientific perspective there is some indication that a nuclear war could deplete the earth's ozone layer or, less likely, could bring on a new Ice Age - but there is no suggestion that either the created order or mankind would be destroyed in the process.

Search for facts which reach but to the ankle of this colossus in scientific interest and philosophical consequences, and you will find but pigmies crawling at the foot of a giant!

Martin Henry Fischer

It is true that the whole scientific inquiry starts from the familiar world and in the end it must return to the familiar world; but the part of the journey over which the physicist has charge is in foreign territory.

Arthur Eddington