Famous Quotes & Sayings

Galileo Galilei

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

Galileo Galilei

Science proceeds more by what it has learned to ignore than what it takes into account.

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

We see only the simple motion of descent, since that other circular one common to the Earth, the tower, and ourselves remains imperceptible. There remains perceptible to us only that of the stone, which is not shared by us; and, because of this, sense shows it as by a straight line, always parallel to the tower, which is built upright and perpendicular upon the terrestrial surface.

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.

Frederik Pohl

You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.

Frederick William Robertson

Poetry creates life; Science dissects death.

Freeman Dyson

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann's aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations.

Freeman Dyson

If the tools are bad, nature's voice is muffled. If the tools are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question.

Freeman Dyson

Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

Freeman Dyson

One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.

Freeman Dyson

Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.

Freeman Dyson

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.

Franz Kafka

All science is methodolgy with regard to the Absolute. Therefore, there need be no fear of the unequivocally methodological. It isa husk, but not more than everything except the One.

Enrico Fermi

Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.

Enrico Fermi

There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

James Gleick

I really don't think of myself as a science writer.

Alastair Reynolds

I prioritise story over science, but not at the expense of being really stupid about it.

J. G. Ballard

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

Ivar Giaever

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

Guy Kawasaki

Some things need to be believed to be seen.

Jonathan Miller

The thing about science is that it's an accurate picture of the world.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

They do not think, therefore they are not.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing.