Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Shakespeare

It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover.

Leonard Susskind

Science to me is sufficiently weird and interesting, and stranger than fiction.

Charles Lederer

There are no enemies in science, professor, only phenomena to study.

Charles Lyell

When the aggregate amount of solid matter transported by rivers in a given number of centuries from a large continent, shall be reduced to arithmetical computation, the result will appear most astonishing to those...not in the habit of reflecting how many of the mightiest of operations in nature are effected insensibly, without noise or disorder.

Charles Lyell

Probably there was a beginning-it is a metaphysical question, worthy a theologian-species have begun and ended-but the analogy is faint and distant.

Charles Lyell

Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion.

Charles Lindbergh

We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow.

Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.

Jared Diamond

We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.

Janet Suzman

But now I've got a young son and his interest is in science and now when I talk to him, I see that in the science sphere of our lives there is new, there is progress.

Calvin Coolidge

It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new.

Celia Green

The chief difficulty of modern theoretical physics resides not in the fact that it expresses itself almost exclusively in mathematical symbols, but in the psychological difficulty of supposing that complete nonsense can be seriously promulgated and transmitted by persons who have sufficient intelligence of some kind to perform operations in differential and integral calculus ...

Although the way ahead [for immunology] is full of pitfalls and difficulties, this is indeed an exhilarating prospect. There is no danger of a shortage of forthcoming excitement in the subject. Yet, as always, the highlights of tomorrow are the unpredictabilities of today.

We are at the beginning of a new era of immunochemistry, namely the production of "antibody based" molecules.

Alan Lightman

In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

Charles Kettering

People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.

Charles Kettering

People see the wrongness in an idea much quicker that the rightness.

Charles Kettering

Every honest researcher I know admits he's just a professional amateur. He's doing whatever he's doing for the first time. That makes him an amateur. He has sense enough to know that he's going to have a lot of trouble, so that makes him a professional.

Charles Kettering

We are just in the kindergarten of uncovering things; there is no downcurve in science.

Charles Kettering

Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.

Charles Kingsley

In the light of fuller day, Of purer science, holier laws.

Charles Kingsley

For science is ... like virtue, its own exceeding great reward.

Charles Kingsley

[A]ll the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the fanciful men, in the world,... could never invent, if all their wits were boiled into one, anything so curious and so ridiculous as a lobster.

Charles Kingsley

I can conceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom, panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life under the tropic forest, Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil, and show him, once and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of; some law, or even mere hint of a law, explaining one fact; but explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till order and meaning shoots through some old Chaos of scattered observations.

Charles Kingsley

Mathematical knowledge is not-as all Cambridge men are surely aware-the result of any special gift. It is merely the development of those conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses; and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematician if he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, think enough about the subject.

Charles Darwin

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could have ever been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.

Charles Darwin

Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd [should] be forestalled ... I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.

Charles Darwin

The man who walks with Henslow.

Charles Darwin

If every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.

Charles Darwin

The Times is getting more detestable (but that is too weak word) than ever.

Charles Darwin

Formerly Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.

Charles Darwin

A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily-against which a law ought to be passed.

Charles Darwin

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.