Famous Quotes & Sayings

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Everything in science depends on what one calls an aperçu, on becoming aware of what is at the bottom of the phenomena. Such becoming aware is infinitely fertile.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.

Barbara Thompson

The long ones were just devastating. Science stopped.

James Surowiecki

Unfortunately, there is something of a flaw in this idealized picture of the way the scientific community discovers truth. And the flaw is that most scientific work never gets noticed. Study after study has shown that most scientific papers are read by almost no one, while a small number of papers are read by many people.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Go on, fair Science; soon to thee Shall Nature yield her idle boast; Her vulgar lingers formed a tree, But thou hast trained it to a post.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

Ellen Klages

I liked science. It was about the only thing that stayed the same wherever we moved.

Erasmus Darwin

The hypochondriac disease consists in indigestion and consequent flatulency, with anxiety or want of pleasurable sensation.

Emily Dickinson

The truth dazzles gradually, or else the world would be blind.

Emile Durkheim

Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

Ellsworth Huntington

The human organism inherits so delicate an adjustment to climate that, in spite of man's boasted ability to live anywhere, the strain of the frozen North eliminates the more nervous and active types of mind.

Ellsworth Huntington

Curiously enough man's body and his mind appear to differ in their climatic adaptations.

David Lee

The discovery of superfluidity opened up a new understanding in the science world.

Simone Weil

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

Simone Weil

Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.

Simone Weil

science has now been for a long time - and to an ever-increasing extent - a collective enterprise. Actually, new results are always, in fact, the work of specific individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past discoveries and possible future researches that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole.

Simone Weil

One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work ...

Simone Weil

A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.

Simone Weil

Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.

Simone Weil

The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty ...

Robert Andrews Millikan

There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom

Robert Andrews Millikan

The fact that Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment, is nowhere better illustrated than in the two fields for slight contributions to which you have done me the great honour of awarding the the Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 1923. Sometimes it is one foot that is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both-by theorizing and then testing, or by finding new relations in the process of experimenting and then bringing the theoretical foot up and pushing it on beyond, and so on in unending alterations.

Robert Andrews Millikan

Two erroneous impressions ... seem to be current among certain groups of uninformed persons. The first is that religion today stands for mediaeval theology; the second that science is materialistic and irreligious.

Robert A. Heinlein

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

Robert A. Heinlein

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.

Robert A. Heinlein

Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of themanly contemplation of the whole.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;" "reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.

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?