Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, or spirit, or poetry,--a narrow belt.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use.

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

Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the Chancellors of God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned tomorrow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Lee De Forest

[Man will never reach the Moon] regardless of all future scientific advances.

Thomas Aquinas

For it is necessary in every practical science to proceed in a composite (i.e. deductive) manner. On the contrary in speculative science, it is necessary to proceed in an analytical manner by breaking down the complex into elementary principles.

Thomas Aquinas

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

Thomas Aquinas

It is not possible to be ignorant of the end of things if we know their beginning.

Theophrastus

Anaximenes ... also says that the underlying nature is one and infinite ... but not undefined as Anaximander said but definite, for he identifies it as air; and it differs in its substantial nature by rarity and density. Being made finer it becomes fire; being made thicker it becomes wind, then cloud, then (when thickened still more) water, then earth, then stones; and the rest come into being from these.

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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.

Lewis Thomas

It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity, filled to overbrimming as we are with questions, and naturally talented as we are for the asking of clear questions, and then for us to do nothing about, or worse, to try to suppress the questions...

Lewis Thomas

We do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang" , all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead.

Lewis Thomas

Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.

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.

Lewis Thomas

Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.

Lewis Thomas

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

Marcus Aurelius

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

Penelope Fitzgerald

If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.