Motivational Quotes

Science

The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

- Huxley, Thomas H.

Best Quotes about Science

Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.

Thomas H. Huxley

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.

Cronenberg, David

Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other -- only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.

Parsons, Talcott

The conscience is the most flexible material in the world. Today you cannot stretch it over a mole hill; while tomorrow it can hide a mountain.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.

Swift, Jonathan

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

Huxley, Thomas H.

There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.

Hobsbawm, E. J.

Science is but an image of the truth.

Bacon, Francis

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Dewey, John

10.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Noam Chomsky

11.

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails.

Einstein, Albert

12.

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.

Nash, Ogden

13.

The microbe is so very small: You cannot take him out at all.

Belloc, Hilaire

14.

Truth in science can best be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

Lorenz, Konrad

15.

Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.

Joad, C. E. M.

16.

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

Daumal, Rene

17.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Richard Feynman

18.

What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

19.

Man lives for science as well as bread.

James, William

20.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

Richard Feynman

21.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Didion, Joan

22.

Science is Christian, not when it condemns itself to the letter of things, but when, in the infinitely little, it discovers as many mysteries and as much depth and power as in the infinitely great.

Quinet, Edgar

23.

Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the moral law within.

Kant, Immanuel

24.

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

Billings, Josh

25.

O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!

Dante Alighieri

26.

I know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.

Huxley, Thomas H.

27.

In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

28.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

Konrad Lorenz

29.

Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be -- and the non-necessity of it.

Hardy, Thomas

30.

From man or angel the great Architect did wisely to conceal, and not divulge his secrets to be scanned by them who ought rather admire; or if they list to try conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens left to their disputes, perhaps to move his laughter at their quaint opinions wide hereafter, when they come to model heaven calculate the stars, how they will wield the mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive to save appearances, how gird the sphere with centric and eccentric scribbled o'er, and epicycle, orb in orb.

Milton, John

31.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

Valery, Paul

32.

There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.

Pasteur, Louis

33.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Sontag, Susan

34.

Rules of society are nothing; ones conscience is the umpire.

Dudevant, Madame

35.

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right.

Churchill, Winston

36.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

Lewis Thomas

37.

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.

M. Cartmill

38.

A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.

Rostand, Jean

39.

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.

Vannevar Bush

40.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

Marie Curie

41.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

Hobbes, Thomas

42.

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

Rostand, Jean

43.

God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won t.

44.

The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.

Walton, Izaak

45.

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.

Artaud, Antonin

46.

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

Mencken, H. L.

47.

Conscience is the sentinel of virtue.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

48.

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

Bronowski, Jacob

49.

We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.

King Jr. Martin Luther

50.

The more we learn of science, the more we see that its wonderful mysteries are all explained by a few simple laws so connected together and so dependent upon each other, that we see the same mind animating them all.

Brown, Olympia