Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Caleb Colton

In science, reason is the guide; in poetry, taste. The object of the one is truth, which is uniform and indivisible; the object of the other is beauty, which is multiform and varied.

Charles Caleb Colton

No disorders have employed so many quacks, as those that have no cure; and no sciences have exercised so many quills, as those that have no certainty.

Charles Caleb Colton

The acquirements of science may be termed the armour of the mind; but that armour would be worse than useless, that cost us all we had, and left us nothing to defend.

Alan Watts

We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.

Edward Gibbon

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

David Hilbert

Geometry is the most complete science.

David Hilbert

He who seeks for methods without having a definite problem in mind seeks in the most part in vain.

David Hume

We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have always conjoin'd together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable. We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. We only observe the thing itself, and always find that from the constant conjunction the objects acquire an union in the imagination.

Building intelligent machines can teach us about our minds - about who we are - and those lessons will make our world a better place. To win that knowledge, though, our species will have to trade in another piece of its vanity.

Nicolas Roeg

There's no one 'right' way of making a science fiction movie; there's no one way of making any kind of movie, really!

Kurt Vonnegut

Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.

Kurt Vonnegut

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

Bertolt Brecht

Science knows only one commandment - contribute to science.

Benjamin Jowett

Research ! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.

Bertrand Russell

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.

Bertrand Russell

One of the chief triumphs of modern mathematics consists in having discovered what mathematics really is.

Bertrand Russell

You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.

Bertrand Russell

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Bernard Haisch

Advances are Made by Answering Questions. Discoveries are Made by Questioning Answers.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

I have the vagary of taking a lively interest in mathematical subjects only where I may anticipate ingenious association of ideas and results recommending themselves by elegance or generality.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

It may be true that people who are merely mathematicians have certain specific shortcomings; however that is not the fault of mathematics, but is true of every exclusive occupation. Likewise a mere linguist, a mere jurist, a mere soldier, a mere merchant, and so forth. One could add such idle chatter that when a certain exclusive occupation is often connected with certain specific shortcomings, it is on the other hand always free of certain other shortcomings.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.

Alan Stern

We're just learning that a lot of planets are small planets, and we didn't know that before, fact is, in planetary science, objects such as Pluto and the other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt are considered planets and called planets in everyday discourse in scientific meetings.

Alan Turing

These disturbing phenomena [Extra Sensory Perception] seem to deny all our scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.

Alan Turing

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

Alan Shepard

Why don't you light that candle ?

Charles Lamb

In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.

Charles Scott Sherrington

That our being should consist of two fundamental elements [physical and psychical] offers I suppose no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only.

Charles Sanders Peirce

The one [the logician] studies the science of drawing conclusions, the other [the mathematician] the science which draws necessary conclusions.

Charles Sanders Peirce

We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truthunless we can trust to the human mind's having such a powerof guessing right that before very many hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined.

Charles M. Schulz

No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it.

Charles Hermite

Abel has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years.

Charles Henry Parkhurst

Science has not solved difficulties, only shifted the points of difficulty.