Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Thomas A. Edison

To Monsieur Eiffel the Engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original a specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu.

Thomas A. Edison

I told [Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted "Mary had a little lamb," etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. On first words spoken on a phonograph.

Thomas Aquinas

It must be understood that prime matter, and form as well, is neither generated nor corrupted, because every generation is from something to something. Now that from which generation proceeds is matter, and that to which it proceeds is form. So that, if matter or form were generated, there would be a matter for matter and a form for form, endlessly. Whence, there is generation only of the composite, properly speaking.

Talcott Parsons

Sociology should... be thought of as a science of action-of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action.

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.

Leland Stanford

Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth; and second, to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.

John D. Barrow

What cannot be known is more revealing than what can.

Linus Pauling

Science is the search for truth.

Linus Pauling

There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed.

Linus Pauling

I try to identify myself with the atoms ... I ask what I would do If I were a carbon atom or a sodium atom.

Linus Pauling

Science is the search for truth - it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others.

Lindsay Wagner

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

Leo Tolstoy

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

Penelope Fitzgerald

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

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.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.

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.

Philip Pullman

Imagination is a form of seeing

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.

Plato

Perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it, and having seen it, to find one in himself.

Plato

But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine. If he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal.

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 universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of themanly contemplation of the whole.

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.