Famous Quotes & Sayings

Peter Abelard

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.

Rachel Carson

There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life - we are never bored.

Pliny the Elder

It [the earth] alone remains immoveable, whilst all things revolve round it.

Pearl S. Buck

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

Peace Pilgrim

You might say that science operates pragmatically and religion by divine guidance. If valid, they would reach the same conclusions but science would take a lot longer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All successful men have agreed in one thing -- they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A day is a miniature eternity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Something is wanting to science until it has been humanised.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science, Nature,-O, I've yearned to open some page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science finds it methods.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment that was older and awaited expectant these larger insights.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Lewis Thomas

The body of science is not, as it is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to the next by a logical string. In truth, whenever we discover a new fact it involves the elimination of old ones. We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally in error.

Marcus Aurelius

The man who doesn't know what the universe is doesn't know where he lives.

Philip Pullman

But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

People seem sheathed in their tough organization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky. ... These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth.

Thomas Aquinas

Practical sciences proceed by building up; theoretical science by resolving into components.

Joseph Wood Krutch

If only the fit survive and if the fitter they are the longer they survive, then Volvox must have demonstrated its superb fitness more conclusively than any higher animal ever has.

Joseph Wood Krutch

Electronic calculators can solve problems which the man who made them cannot solve; but no government-subsidized commission of engineers and physicists could create a worm.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

There are three kinds of explanation in science: explanations which throw a light upon, or give a hint at a matter; explanations which do not explain anything; and explanations which obscure everything.

Karl Popper

Almost everyone... seems to be quite sure that the differences between the methodologies of history and of the natural sciences are vast. For, we are assured, it is well known that in the natural sciences we start from observation and proceed by induction to theory. And is it not obvious that in history we proceed very differently? Yes, I agree that we proceed very differently. But we do so in the natural sciences as well.

Karl Popper

There can be no ultimate statements science: there can be no statements in science which can not be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them.

Karl Popper

But it is certainly not possible to insist on one hand that the formalism is complete and to insist on the other hand that its application to 'the actual' actually demands a step which cannot be derived from it.

Karl Popper

It is the rule which says that the other rules of scientific procedure must be designed in such a way that they do not protect any statement in science against falsification.

Karl Popper

But some of these theories are so bold that they can clash with reality: they are the testable theories of science. And when they clash, then we know that there is a reality; something that can inform us that our ideas are mistaken.

Karl Popper

It is not intuitive ease I am after, but rather a point of view which is sufficiently definite to clear up some difficulties, and to be criticized in rational terms. (Bohr's complementarity cannot be so criticized, I fear; it can only be accepted or denounced - perhaps as being ad hoc, or as being irrational, or as being hopelessly vague.)