Famous Quotes & Sayings

Peter Medawar

Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless; times such as these are hard for scientists-days of leaden gray skies bringing with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy.

Peter Medawar

The fact that scientists do not consciously practice a formal methodology is very poor evidence that no such methodology exists. It could be said-has been said-that there is a distinctive methodology of science which scientists practice unwittingly, like the chap in Moliere who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.

Peter Medawar

It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.

Peter Medawar

Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.

Peter Medawar

You have ... been told that science grows like an organism. You have been told that, if we today see further than our predecessors, it is only because we stand on their shoulders. But this [Nobel Prize Presentation] is an occasion on which I should prefer to remember, not the giants upon whose shoulders we stood, but the friends with whom we stood arm in arm ... colleagues in so much of my work.

Peter Medawar

Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

Peter Medawar

Any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not not enough that a problem should be "interesting." ... The problem must be such that it matters what the answer is-whether to science generally or to mankind.

Peter Medawar

For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.

Peter Abelard

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.

Rachel Carson

There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life - we are never bored.

Pliny the Elder

It [the earth] alone remains immoveable, whilst all things revolve round it.

Victor Hugo

[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity...

Victor Hugo

Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.

Vernor Vinge

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

Robert Frost

The best thing we're put here for's to see; The strongest thing that's given us to see with's a telescope. Someone in every town, seems to me, owes it to the town to keep one.

Robert Frost

And one of the three great things in the world is gossip, you know. First there's religion; and then there's science; and there's-and then there's friendly gossip. Those are the three-the three great things.

Richard E. Byrd

We men who serve science serve only a reflection in a mirror.

Rene Descartes

I should consider that I know nothing about physics if I were able to explain only how things might be, and were unable to demonstrate that they could not be otherwise.

Rene Descartes

The nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something which is hard or heavy or coloured, or which affects the senses in any way, but simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth.

Rene Descartes

And thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.

Thucydides

When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason.

Thomas Paine

Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cooacters can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored genetically.

Thomas Huxley

For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you, and to find you pitching into me for being more Darwinian than yourself. However, you have set me going, and must just take the consequences, for I warn you I will stop at no point so long as clear reasoning will take me further.

Thomas Huxley

What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work.

Thomas Huxley

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

Thomas Huxley

It is a popular delusion that the scientific enquirer is under an obligation not to go beyond generalisation of observed facts...but anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond the facts, rarely get as far.

Thomas Huxley

I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything...

Thomas Huxley

Science ... warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

Thomas Huxley

The birth of science was the death of superstition.

Thomas Huxley

I know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.

Thomas Huxley

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

Thomas Huxley

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.