Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jean Rostand

One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it.

Harold Wilson

[Criticizing as "appalingly complacent" a Conservative Government report that by the '60s, Britain would be producing all the scientists needed] Of course we shall, if we don't give science its proper place in our national life. We shall no doubt be training all the bullfighters we need, because we don't use many.

Harold Wilson

We are redefining and we are restating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution ... The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdated methods on either side of industry.

Hugh Miller

Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The complaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. True, in an age like the present,-considerably more scientific than poetical,-science substitutes for the smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth.

Howard Nemerov

Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.

Hortense Calisher

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist.

George Berkeley

Colour, Figure, Motion, Extension and the like, considered only so many Sensations in the Mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or Images, referred to Things or Archetypes existing without the Mind, then are we involved all in Scepticism.

George Berkeley

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

George Bernard Shaw

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

George Bernard Shaw

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

George Bernard Shaw

Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous.

Galileo Galilei

I wish, my dear Kepler, that we could have a good laugh together at the extraordinary stupidity of the mob. What do you think of the foremost philosophers of this University? In spite of my oft-repeated efforts and invitations, they have refused, with the obstinacy of a glutted adder, to look at the planets or the Moon or my glass [telescope].

Galileo Galilei

When the moon is ninety degrees away from the sun it sees but half the earth illuminated (the western half). For the other (the eastern half) is enveloped in night. Hence the moon itself is illuminated less brightly from the earth, and as a result its secondary light appears fainter to us.

Galileo Galilei

It reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are entirely incomprehensible in the light of the generally accepted hypotheses. To refute the latter I collected many proofs, but I do not publish them ... I would dare to publish my speculations if there were people men like you.

Galileo Galilei

Spots are on the surface of the solar body where they are produced and also dissolved, some in shorter and others in longer periods. They are carried around the Sun; an important occurrence in itself.

Galileo Galilei

I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go.

Galileo Galilei

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

Galileo Galilei

Science proceeds more by what it has learned to ignore than what it takes into account.

Galileo Galilei

The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.

Galileo Galilei

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.

Galileo Galilei

We see only the simple motion of descent, since that other circular one common to the Earth, the tower, and ourselves remains imperceptible. There remains perceptible to us only that of the stone, which is not shared by us; and, because of this, sense shows it as by a straight line, always parallel to the tower, which is built upright and perpendicular upon the terrestrial surface.

Galileo Galilei

The vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never having understood anything. For anyone who had ever experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished, would recognize that of the infinity of other truths he understands nothing.

Frederik Pohl

You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.

Frederick William Robertson

Poetry creates life; Science dissects death.

Freeman Dyson

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann's aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations.

Freeman Dyson

If the tools are bad, nature's voice is muffled. If the tools are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question.

Freeman Dyson

Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

Freeman Dyson

One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.

Freeman Dyson

Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.

Freeman Dyson

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.

Franz Kafka

All science is methodolgy with regard to the Absolute. Therefore, there need be no fear of the unequivocally methodological. It isa husk, but not more than everything except the One.