Famous Quotes & Sayings

Joseph Butler

The only distinct meaning of the word "natural" is stated, fixed, or settled; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e. to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once.

Leland Stanford

Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth; and second, to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.

John D. Barrow

What cannot be known is more revealing than what can.

Louise Slaughter

As a microbiologist, I am particularly concerned with Mr. Bush's blatant disregard for science.

Lord Kelvin

I can never satisfy myself until I can make a mechanical model of a thing. If I can make a mechanical model, I can understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way through I cannot understand.

Lord Kelvin

There is nothing in science which teaches the origin of anything at all.

Lord Kelvin

If you cannot measure it, then it is not science.

Lord Kelvin

In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.

Lord Kelvin

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

Loren Eiseley

Certainly science has moved forward. But when science progresses, it often opens vaster mysteries to our gaze. Moreover, science frequently discovers that it must abandon or modify what it once believed. Sometimes it ends by accepting what it has previously scorned.

Malcolm Forbes

Scientists ofttimes have the greatest faith in a higher power. The more they dig into, establish facts and figures, the more they marvel about the mystery of it all.

Mahatma Gandhi

There are innumerable definitions of God because his manifestations are innumerable.

Mahatma Gandhi

We have no evidence whatsoever that the soul perishes with the body.

Joseph Needham

But Chinese civilization has the overpowering beauty of the wholly other, and only the wholly other can inspire the deepest love and the profoundest desire to learn.

Joseph Parker

When science advances religion goes along with it; science builds the altar at which religion prays.

Joseph Priestley

But it is not given to every electrician to die in so glorious a manner as the justly envied Richmann.

Josh Billings

[Science is] the literature of truth.

Otto von Bismarck

Politics is no exact science.

Maria Mitchell

In my younger days, when I was painted by the half-educated, loose and inaccurate ways women had, I used to say, "How much women need exact science" But since I have known some workers in science, I have now said, "How much science needs women"

Paul Tillich

Culture (science) is the form of religion; Religion is the substance of culture (science).

Paul Dirac

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it is the exact opposite.

Paul Dirac

Well, in the first place, it leads to great anxiety as to whether it's going to be correct or not ... I expect that's the dominating feeling. It gets to be rather a fever... At age 60, when asked about his feelings on discovering the Dirac equation.

Paul Dirac

I admired Bohr very much. We had long talks together, long talks in which Bohr did practically all the talking.

Paul Dirac

I consider that I understand an equation when I can predict the properties of its solutions, without actually solving it.

Paul Dirac

When [Erwin Schrödinger] went to the Solvay conferences in Brussels, he would walk from the station to the hotel where the delegates stayed, carrying all his luggage in a rucksack and looking so like a tramp that it needed a great deal of argument at the reception desk before he could claim a room.

Hans Selye

The true scientist never loses the faculty of amazement.

Harlan Ellison

People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it? Isn't it?

Gustave Flaubert

Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'

Gustave Flaubert

DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence, which cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution that he knew there could never be a revolution in America..

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact.

Louis Pasteur

If it is a terrifying thought that life is at the mercy of the multiplication of these minute bodies [microbes], it is a consoling hope that Science will not always remain powerless before such enemies...

Louis Pasteur

There is no such thing as a special category of science called applied science; there is science and its applications, which are related to one another as the fruit is related to the tree that has borne it.