Famous Quotes & Sayings

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

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.

Marcus Aurelius

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

Joseph Butler

The only distinct meaning of the word "natural" is stated, fixed, or settled; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e. to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once.

Lindsay Wagner

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

Peter Sarnak

The Torus is my enemy!

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is.

Philip Pullman

But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

Queen Elizabeth II

This new power, which has proved itself to be such a terrifying weapon of destruction, is harnessed for the first time for the common good of our community.

Pythagoras

There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.

Ralph Richardson

I like talking to engineers best. They built bridges, they're very precise, very disciplined, yet I find they have roving minds.

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?

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.

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.

Joseph Wood Krutch

Poetry, mythology, and religion represent the world as man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it.