Famous Quotes & Sayings

Herbert Spencer

Only when Genius is married to Science can the highest results be produced.

Herbert Spencer

So far from science being irreligious, as many think, it is the neglect of science that is irreligious-it is the refusal to study the surrounding creation that is irreligious.

Herbert Spencer

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

Herbert Spencer

Science is organized knowledge.

Henry David Thoreau

It will be seen that we contemplate a time when man's will shall be law to the physical world, and he shall no longer be deterredby such abstractions as time and space, height and depth, weight and hardness, but shall indeed be the lord of creation.

Henry David Thoreau

Let us consider under what disadvantages Science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress.

Henry David Thoreau

Linnæus, setting out for Lapland, surveys his "comb" and "spare shirt," "leathern breeches" and "gauze cap to keep off gnats," with as much complacency as Bonaparte a park of artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the man is admirable.

Henry David Thoreau

Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.

Henry David Thoreau

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Henry David Thoreau

Our science, so called, is always more barren and mixed with error than our sympathies.

Henry David Thoreau

If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention

Henry David Thoreau

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip.

Henry David Thoreau

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

Henry David Thoreau

The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.

Henry David Thoreau

Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

Ernst Haeckel

Phylogeny and ontogeny are, therefore, the two coordinated branches of morphology. Phylogeny is the developmental history [Entwickelungsgeschichte] of the abstract, genealogical individual; ontogeny, on the other hand, is the developmental history of the concrete, morphological individual.

In right-angled triangles the square on the side subtending the right angle is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle.

Erwin Chargaff

If at one time or another I have brushed a few colleagues the wrong way, I must apologize: I had not realized that they were covered with fur.

Erwin Chargaff

One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.

Florence Nightingale

Averages ... seduce us away from minute observation.

Fletcher Knebel

It is now proved beyond doubt that smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.

Herbert Hoover

Engineering without imagination sinks to a trade.

Henri Frederic Amiel

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Society rests upon conscience, not upon science.

Henri Frederic Amiel

[T]he habit of scientific analysis ... exhausts the material offered to it...

Henri Frederic Amiel

[I]t is truth alone-scientific, established, proved, and rational truth-which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, 'faith governs the world,'-but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest-it is in reason and in science.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

Gottfried Leibniz

Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.

Gottfried Leibniz

What is is what must be.

Gottfried Leibniz

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.

Gottfried Leibniz

One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.

Gottfried Leibniz

[Alternate translation:] The Divine Spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis, that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and not-being, which we call the imaginary root of negative unity.