Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jerome Lawrence

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

There was wildlife, untouched, a jungle at the border of the sea, never seen by those who floated on the opaque roof. Describing his early experience, in 1936, when a fellow naval officer, Philippe Tailliez, gave him goggles to see below the Mediterranean Sea surface.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

Jack Vance

I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.

Jack Vance

But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.

Gaston Bachelard

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

Gary Zukav

...physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.

Hippocrates

And if this were so in all cases, the principle would be established, that sometimes conditions can be treated by things opposite to those from which they arose, and sometimes by things like to those from which they arose.

Hippocrates

Correct is to recognize what diseases are and whence they come; which are long and which are short; which are mortal and which are not; which are in the process of changing into others; which are increasing and which are diminishing; which are major and which are minor; to treat the diseases that can be treated, but to recognize the ones that cannot be, and to know why they cannot be; by treating patients with the former, to give them the benefit of treatment as far as it is possible.

Hippocrates

I have clearly recorded this: for one can learn good lessons also from what has been tried but clearly has not succeeded, when it is clear why it has not succeeded.

Evelyn Waugh

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be

Evan Esar

[Statistics] The science that can prove everything except the usefulness of statistics.

Evan Esar

A bacteriologist is a man whose conversation always start with the germ of an idea.

Evan Esar

[Statistics] Fiction in its most uninteresting form.

Evan Esar

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.

Ernst Haeckel

Phylogeny and ontogeny are, therefore, the two coordinated branches of morphology. Phylogeny is the developmental history [Entwickelungsgeschichte] of the abstract, genealogical individual; ontogeny, on the other hand, is the developmental history of the concrete, morphological individual.

Francis Bacon

There is nothing more certain in nature than that it is impossible for any body to be utterly annihilated.

Francis Bacon

...those experiments be not only esteemed which have an immediate and present use, but those principally which are of most universal consequence for invention of other experiments, and those which give more light to the invention of causes; for the invention of the mariner's needle, which giveth the direction, is of no less benefit for navigation than the invention of the sails, which give the motion.

Francis Bacon

It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works, since the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument. But axioms duly and orderly formed from particulars easily discover the way to new particulars, and thus render sciences active.

Francis Bacon

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

G. H. Hardy

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

G. H. Hardy

A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities has to distinguish two different questions. The first is whether the work which he does is worth doing; and the second is why he does it (whatever its value may be).

Form may be of more account than substance. A lens of ice will focus a solar beam to a blaze.

In systemic searches for embryonic lethal mutants of Drosophila melanogaster we have identified 15 loci which when mutated alter the segmental patterns of the larva. These loci probably represent the majority of such genes in Drosophila. The phenotypes of the mutant embryos indicate that the process of segmentation involves at least three levels of spatial organization: the entire egg as developmental unit, a repeat unit with the length of two segments, and the individual segment.

Isaac Newton

Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

Isaac Newton

Against filling the Heavens with fluid Mediums, unless they be exceeding rare, a great Objection arises from the regular and very lasting Motions of the Planets and Comets in all manner of Courses through the Heavens.

Isaac Newton

The Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discovered and established as Principles, and by them explaining the Phænomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.

Isaac Newton

I do not think that this [the universe] can be explained only by natural causes, and are forced to impute to the wisdom and ingenuity of an intelligent.

Galileo Galilei

The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.

Galileo Galilei

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.

Galileo Galilei

The vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never having understood anything. For anyone who had ever experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished, would recognize that of the infinity of other truths he understands nothing.

Carl Sagan

Science is a way to not fool ourselves.