Famous Quotes & Sayings

Francis Bacon

Half of science is putting forth the right questions.

Francis Bacon

The only hope [of science] ... is in genuine induction.

Francis Bacon

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

Francis Bacon

Wonder is the seed of knowledge

Francis Bacon

By far the best proof is experience.

Francis Bacon

Let the mind be enlarged... to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind

Frances Wright

The best road to correct reasoning is by physical science; the way to trace effects to causes is through physical science; the only corrective, therefore, of superstition is physical science.

Fran Lebowitz

modern science was largely conceived of as an answer to the servant problem and ... it is generally practiced by those who lack a flair for conversation.

George Wald

[Attributing the origin of life to spontaneous generation.] However improbable we regard this event, it will almost certainly happen at least once.... The time... is of the order of two billion years.... Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One only has to wait: time itself performs the miracles.

George Wald

Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader, the answers are seen to be more limited.

George Wald

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

George Santayana

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

George Orwell

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

G. H. Hardy

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

G. H. Hardy

I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.

G. H. Hardy

A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities has to distinguish two different questions. The first is whether the work which he does is worth doing; and the second is why he does it (whatever its value may be).

G. H. Hardy

The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid's theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.

G. H. Hardy

I wrote a great deal during the next ten [early] years,but very little of any importance; there are not more than four or five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.

G. H. Hardy

A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.

G. H. Hardy

I propose to put forward an apology for mathematics; and I may be told that it needs none, since there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy.

G. H. Hardy

The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. ... [Whereas] the physicist's reality, whatever it may be, has few or none of the attributes which common sense ascribes instinctively to reality. A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Frantz Fanon

There is a point at which methods devour themselves.

Isaac Watts

No science is speedily learned by the noblest genius without tuition.

Isaac Newton

Are not all Hypotheses erroneous, in which Light is supposed to consist in Pression or Motion, propagated through a fluid Medium? For in all these Hypotheses the Phaenomena of Light have been hitherto explain'd by supposing that they arise from new Modifications of the Rays; which is an erroneous Supposition.

Isaac Newton

[1.] And first I suppose that there is diffused through all places an aethereal substance capable of contraction & dilatation, strongly elastick, & in a word, much like air in all respects, but far more subtile. 2. I suppose this aether pervades all gross bodies, but yet so as to stand rarer in their pores then in free spaces, & so much ye rarer as their pores are less ... 3. I suppose ye rarer aether within bodies & ye denser without them, not to be terminated in a mathematical superficies, but to grow gradually into one another.

Isaac Newton

Hypotheses non fingo. I frame no hypotheses.

Isaac Newton

Therefore, the causes assigned to natural effects of the same kind must be, so far as possible, the same.

Isaac Newton

Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

Isaac Newton

I have been much amused at ye singular phenomena resulting from bringing of a needle into contact with a piece of amber or resin fricated on silke clothe. Ye flame putteth me in mind of sheet lightning on a small-how very small-scale.

Isaac Newton

Against filling the Heavens with fluid Mediums, unless they be exceeding rare, a great Objection arises from the regular and very lasting Motions of the Planets and Comets in all manner of Courses through the Heavens.

Isaac Newton

The Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discovered and established as Principles, and by them explaining the Phænomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.

Isaac Newton

Do not Bodies and Light act mutually upon one another; that is to say, Bodies upon Light in emitting, reflecting, refracting and inflecting it, and Light upon Bodies for heating them, and putting their parts into a vibrating motion wherein heat consists?