Famous Quotes & Sayings

Peter Medawar

Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.

Peter Medawar

You have ... been told that science grows like an organism. You have been told that, if we today see further than our predecessors, it is only because we stand on their shoulders. But this [Nobel Prize Presentation] is an occasion on which I should prefer to remember, not the giants upon whose shoulders we stood, but the friends with whom we stood arm in arm ... colleagues in so much of my work.

Peter Medawar

Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

Peter Medawar

Any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not not enough that a problem should be "interesting." ... The problem must be such that it matters what the answer is-whether to science generally or to mankind.

Peter Medawar

For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.

Peter Abelard

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.

Rachel Carson

There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life - we are never bored.

Pliny the Elder

It [the earth] alone remains immoveable, whilst all things revolve round it.

Maria Mitchell

In my younger days, when I was painted by the half-educated, loose and inaccurate ways women had, I used to say, "How much women need exact science" But since I have known some workers in science, I have now said, "How much science needs women"

Paul Tillich

Culture (science) is the form of religion; Religion is the substance of culture (science).

Paul Dirac

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it is the exact opposite.

Paul Dirac

Well, in the first place, it leads to great anxiety as to whether it's going to be correct or not ... I expect that's the dominating feeling. It gets to be rather a fever... At age 60, when asked about his feelings on discovering the Dirac equation.

Paul Dirac

I admired Bohr very much. We had long talks together, long talks in which Bohr did practically all the talking.

Paul Dirac

I consider that I understand an equation when I can predict the properties of its solutions, without actually solving it.

Paul Dirac

When [Erwin Schrödinger] went to the Solvay conferences in Brussels, he would walk from the station to the hotel where the delegates stayed, carrying all his luggage in a rucksack and looking so like a tramp that it needed a great deal of argument at the reception desk before he could claim a room.

Ovid

Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky Were made, in the whole world the countenance Of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, Naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds Of ill-joined elements compressed together.

Paul Valery

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

Paul Valery

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

James M. Barrie

The man of science appears to be the only man who has something to say just now, and the only man who does not know how to say it.

John Harvey Kellogg

Alcoholism, the opium habit and tobaccoism are a trio of poison habits which have been weighty handicaps to human progress during the last three centuries. In the United States, the subtle spell of opium has been broken by restrictive legislation; the grip of the rum demon has been loosened by the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution, but the tobacco habit still maintains its strangle-hold and more than one hundred million victims of tobaccoism daily burn incense to the smoke god.

John Harvey Kellogg

Tobacco, in its various forms, is one of the most mischievous of all drugs. There is perhaps no other drug which injures the body in so many ways and so universally as does tobacco. Some drugs offer a small degree of compensation for the evil effects which they produce; but tobacco has not a single redeeming feature and gives nothing in return.

John Harvey Kellogg

All the inventions and devices ever constructed by the human hand or conceived by the human mind, no matter how delicate, how intricate and complicated, are simple, childish toys compared with that most marvelously wrought mechanism, the human body. Its parts are far more delicate, and their mutual adjustments infinitely more accurate, than are those of the most perfect chronometer ever made.

John Harvey Kellogg

Tobacco has not yet been fully tried before the bar of science. But the tribunal has been prepared and the gathering of evidence has begun and when the final verdict is rendered, it will appear that tobacco is evil and only evil; that as a drug it is far more deadly than alcohol, killing in a dose a thousand times smaller, and that it does not possess a single one of the quasi merits of alcohol.

John Henry Newman

To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.

John Henry Newman

Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history.

John Desmond Bernal

The region of the mysterious is rapidly shrinking.

John Desmond Bernal

We are still too close to the birth of the universe to be certain about its death.

John Desmond Bernal

Her [Rosalind Franklin] devotion to research showed itself at its finest in the last months of her life. Although stricken with an illness which she knew would be fatal, she continued to work right up to the end.

John Desmond Bernal

The greater the man, the more he is soaked in the atmosphere of his time; only thus can he get a wide enough grasp of it to be able to change substantially the pattern of knowledge and action.

John Desmond Bernal

It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.

John Dewey

Man is merely a frequent effect, a monstrosity is a rare one, but both are equally natural, equally inevitable, equally part of the universal and general order. And what is strange about that? All creatures are involved in the life of all others, consequently every species... all nature is in a perpetual state of flux. Every animal is more or less a human being, every mineral more or less a plant, every plant more or less an animal... There is nothing clearly defined in nature.

Leo Tolstoy

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

Lewis Carroll

'What's the use of their having names the Gnat said, 'if they won't answer to them?' 'No use to them,' said Alice; 'but it's useful to the people who name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?' 'I can't say,' the Gnat replied.