Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alfred North Whitehead

Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

Alfred Korzybski

If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Science grows and Beauty dwindles.

Aldous Huxley

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

Albert Einstein

What distinguishes the language of science from language as we ordinarily understand the word? ... What science strives for is an utmost acuteness and clarity of concepts as regards their mutual relation and their correspondence to sensory data.

Albert Einstein

The aim of science is, on the one hand, as complete a comprehension as possible of the connection between perceptible experiences in their totality, and, on the other hand, the achievement of this aim by employing a minimum of primary concepts and relations.

Albert Einstein

Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

Albert Einstein

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it. One should earn one's living by work of which one is sure one is capable. Only when we do not have to be accountable to anybody can we find joy in scientific endeavor.

Albert Einstein

Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.

Albert Einstein

But in physics I soon learned to scent out the paths that led to the depths, and to disregard everything else, all the many things that clutter up the mind, and divert it from the essential. The hitch in this was, of course, the fact that one had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examination, whether one liked it or not.

Albert Einstein

If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

Albert Einstein

The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket.

Albert Einstein

Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary.

Albert Einstein

...the physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical contemplation of the theoretical foundations; for, he himself knows best, and feels more surely where the shoe pinches...Physical conceptions are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.

Albert Einstein

No scientist thinks in formulae.

Albert Einstein

The creative scientist studies nature with the rapt gaze of the lover, and is guided as often by aesthetics as by rational considerations in guessing how nature works.

Albert Einstein

Of all the communities available to us, there is not one I would want to devote myself to except for the society of the true seekers, which has very few living members at any one time.

Albert Einstein

The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibility of application to which any discovery may lead.

Albert Einstein

The sceptic will say, 'It may well be true that this system of equations is reasonable from a logical standpoint, but this does not prove that it corresponds to nature.' You are right, dear sceptic. Experience alone can decide on truth.

Albert Einstein

It is certainly true that principles cannot be more securely founded than on experience and consciously clear thinking.

Albert Einstein

The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me.

Albert Einstein

The most fundamental question we can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is friendly or hostile.

Albert Einstein

The best that Gauss has given us was likewise an exclusive production. If he had not created his geometry of surfaces, which served Riemann as a basis, it is scarcely conceivable that anyone else would have discovered it. I do not hesitate to confess that to a certain extent a similar pleasure may be found by absorbing ourselves in questions of pure geometry.

Alexander Pope

To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th' observer's sake.

Alexander Pope

To teach vain Wits that Science little known, T' admire Superior Sense, and doubt their own!

Alexander Pope

New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise: So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,...

Alexander Pope

Index-learning turns no student pale, Yet holds the eel of Science by the tail. Index-learning is a term used to mock pretenders who acquire superficial knowledge merely by consulting indexes.

Alexander Pope

How index-learning turns no student pale, Yet holds the eel of science by the tail!

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Science has helped us to understand and master ourselves, creating an elevated new form of human life, the wealth and beauty of which cannot be pictured today by the keenest imagination.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.

E. O. Wilson

It may be argued that to know one kind of beetle is to know them all. But a species is not like a molecule in a cloud of molecules-it is a unique population.

E. O. Wilson

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.