Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Tukey

An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.

John Updike

Human was the music, natural was the static.

John Stuart Mill

The application of algebra to geometry ... has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.

John Stuart Mill

The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.

John Stuart Mill

If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.

James Jeans

All discussion of the ultimate nature of things must necessarily be barren unless we have some extraneous standards against which to compare them.

James Jeans

One must stand stiller than still. On reverse time travel.

James Jeans

Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.

James Hutton

In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.

James Russell Lowell

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

James Russell Lowell

In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the latter poetry has become science.

Laurence Sterne

Learning is the dictionary, but sense the grammar of science.

Friedrich Engels

Life is the mode of action of proteins.

Friedrich Engels

And what is impossible to science?

Friedrich Engels

One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?

Friedrich Schiller

To one, science is an exalted goddess; to another it is a cow which provides him with butter.

Frederick Soddy

Innumerable entirely new compounds have been produced in the last century. The artificial dye-stuffs, prepared from materials occurring in coal-tar, make the natural colours blush. Saccharin, which is hundreds of times sweeter than sugar, is a purely artificial substance. New explosives, drugs, alloys, photographic substances, essences, scents, solvents, and detergents are being poured out in a continuous stream.

Frederick Soddy

Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

That is the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns. Now I think we are small enough.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I Once wrote: "In mathematics process and result are equivalent."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Proof, one might say, does not merely shew that it is like this, but: how it is like this. It shows how 13+14 yield 27.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.

Niels Bohr

Prediction is difficult, especially the future.

Niels Bohr

An independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.

Niels Bohr

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

Niels Bohr

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

Nassau William Senior

We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy.

Nassau William Senior

The time I trust will come, perhaps within the lives of some of us, when the outline of this science will be clearly made out and generally recognised, when its nomenclature will be fixed, and its principles form a part of elementary instruction.

Morris Kline

There is no rigorous definition of rigor.

Morris Kline

The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder that Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz erected in order to scale the heavens rests upon a continually shifting, unstable foundation.

John Ruskin

I wish they would use English instead of Greek words. When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell me it is coloured by "chlorophyll," which at first sounds very instructive; but if they would only say plainly that a leaf is coloured green by a thing which is called "green leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got.

John Ruskin

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

John Ruskin

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.