SCIENCE QUOTES VIII

quotations about science

On entering upon any scientific pursuit, one of the student's first endeavors should be to prepare his mind for the reception of the truth, by dismissing or at least loosening his hold on all such crude and hastily adopted notions respecting the objects and relations he is about to examine, as may tend to embarrass or mislead him.

SIR JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM HERSCHEL

attributed, Day's Collacon


Science does not reveal anything beyond this life.

PIERRE FORESTIER

attributed, Day's Collacon


What has science to offer? This: that we are ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed. No longer an absentee God; no longer a Great First Cause, setting in motion secondary causes which frame the world; no longer a divine mechanic, who has built the world, stored it with forces, launched it upon its course, and now and again interferes with its operation if it goes not right; but one great, eternal, underlying Cause, as truly operative to-day as he was in that first day when the morning stars sang together -- every day a creative day. That is the word of science.

LYMAN ABBOTT

Seeking After God

Tags: Lyman Abbott


The distinctive feature of science is that it is both broad and deep: broad in the way it tackles all physical phenomena and deep in the way it weaves them, economically, into a common explanatory scheme requiring fewer and fewer assumptions. No other system of thought can match its breadth and depth.

PAUL DAVIES

Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life


Let science, by cultivating man's intellect, elevate him to nobler and more spiritual views of God's wisdom and power.

JOSIAH P. COOKE

Religion and Chemistry


The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Why Still Philosophy?


A connecting principle
Linked to the invisible
Almost imperceptible
Something inexpressible
Science insusceptible
Logic so inflexible
Causally connectable
Nothing is invincible
If we share this nightmare
We can dream
Spiritus mundi

THE POLICE

"Synchronicity I"


It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is sure of.

JEAN ROSTAND

"A Biologist's Thoughts", The Substance of Man

Tags: Jean Rostand


Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.

RICHARD FEYNMAN

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Tags: Richard Feynman


Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.

ISAAC ASIMOV

interview, Bill Moyers' World of Ideas, October 21, 1988


To make reason the arbiter and supreme guide of public opinion; that is the essential goal of the sciences; that is how science will contribute to the advancement of civilization.

GEORGES CUVIER

Rapport historique sur les progrès des sciences naturelles


The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.

ISAAC ASIMOV

"The Three Numbers", Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September 1974

Tags: Isaac Asimov


Science is the only religion of mankind.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Childhood's End

Tags: Arthur C. Clarke


Science: The creation of dilemmas by the solution of mysteries.

BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON

The Butlerian Jihad

Tags: Brian Herbert


Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world--a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious--surely never again to set.

WALT WHITMAN

"Democratic Vistas", Two Rivulets

Tags: Walt Whitman


The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

"The Great God Flux", The Art of Being Ruled

Tags: Wyndham Lewis


The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet.

ARTHUR KOESTLER

The Act of Creation

Tags: Arthur Koestler


Science has an important part to play in our everyday existence, and there is far too much neglect of science; but its intention is to supplement not to supplant the familiar outlook.

ARTHUR EDDINGTON

Science and the Unseen World


Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.

JACOB BRONOWSKI

Science and Human Values

Tags: Jacob Bronowski


Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for a higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosopher of another: He takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him.

THOMAS PAINE

The Works of Thomas Paine

Tags: Thomas Paine