Famous Quotes & Sayings

Werner Heisenberg

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Samuel Butler

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth.

Samuel Horsley

The sciences are said, and they are truly said, to have a mutual connection, that any one of them may be the better understood, for an insight into the rest.

Samuel Beckett

Mysterious affair, electricity.

W. H. Auden

Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!

W. H. Auden

Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.

William Cobbett

Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to [money management]; for. ... want of attention to pecuniary matters ... has impeded the progress of science and of genius itself.

William Congreve

I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.

William Cowper

To trace in Nature's most minute design The signature and stamp of power divine. ... The Invisible in things scarce seen revealed, To whom an atom is an ample field.

William Cowper

Some drill and bore The solid earth, and from the strata there Extract a register, by which we learn, That he who made it, and reveal'd its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Scientific truth will out, you can't hide the sun under a stone.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Little mirrors were attached to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress.

Robertson Davies

But as a skeptic I am dubious about science as about everything else, unless the scientist is himself a skeptic, and few of them are. The stench of formaldehyde may be as potent as the whiff of incense in stimulating a naturally idolatrous understanding.

Robertson Davies

Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense; they're men of technique.

Robertson Davies

I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is [the doctors'] symbol.

Robert Mayer

Truly I say to you, a single number has more genuine and permanent value than an expensive library full of hypotheses.

Robert M. Pirsig

Science values static patterns.

Robert M. Pirsig

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

Robert M. Pirsig

The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.

Robert M. Pirsig

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The greatest engineering is the engineering of men.

Walt Whitman

I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes - but is that all?

Walt Whitman

O amazement of things-even the least particle!

Saul Bellow

From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.

William Faulkner

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Willard Van Orman Quine

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.

Ronald Reagan

[A woman waiting for him in the Kremlin asked Gobachev] "Was communism invented by a politician or a scientist?" [He replied] "Well, a politician." She said, "That explains it. The scientist would have tried it on mice first."

Saint Augustine

Then assuredly the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.

Xenophanes

All things that come into being and grow are earth and water.

Xenophanes

For we are all sprung from earth and water

Xenophanes

Truly the gods have not from the beginning revealed all things to mortals, but by long seeking, mortals discover what is better.