Famous Quotes & Sayings

C. S. Lewis

No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'.

William Shakespeare

There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently

Djuna Barnes

Only the impossible lasts forever.

David Mitchell

I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.

Carl Sagan

There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity

Bryce Dallas Howard

The greatest sci-fis, in my mind, are two things: They're what-ifs - what if this happened, and you get to see it - but they're also these philosophical cautionary tales. They deal with the underlying themes beneath the what-if.

Charles Dickens

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!

Charles Dickens

I know nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know what I have seen, and what I have looked in the face in this world here, where I find myself. And I tell you this, my friend, that there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them-none. That there are people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of the way.

Charles Baudelaire

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.

Ralph W. Sockman

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

Bernard Beckett

A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.

Bertrand Russell

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then suchand such another proposition is true of that thing.... Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Bertrand Russell

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

Bertrand Russell

History is valuable, to begin with, because it is true; and this, though not the whole of its value, is the foundation and condition of all the rest. That all knowledge, as such, is in some degree good, would appear to be at least probable; and the knowledge of every historical fact possesses this element of goodness, even if it posses no other.

Bertrand Russell

All that passes for knowledge can be arranged in a hierarchy of degrees of certainty, with arithmetic and the facts of perception at the top.

Andrew Carnegie

the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.

David Turangal

We have the knowledge and want to help. As soon as you walk in the door, we'll get to know you.

Henry David Thoreau

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Ivar Giaever

Science is to find something unknown, while invention is to make something new out of the known theory.

Ivar Giaever

'Incontrovertible' is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.

David Hanson

I was always into science fiction as a kid. I loved science and tinkering with things.

William Gibson

Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.

Carl Sagan

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole.

Carl Sagan

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

Carl Sagan

When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive.

Carl Sagan

The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown'.

Carl Sagan

I'd like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn't even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. And I'd like people who are prepared to do some thinking to be really stimulated.