Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Kuhn

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

Thomas Jefferson

Freedom, the first-born of science.

Woody Allen

Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for those people who can't remember where they leave things.

William Whewell

Astronomy is ... the only progressive Science which the ancient world produced.

William Whewell

To discover the laws of operative power in material productions, whether formed by man or brought into being by Nature herself, is the work of a science, and is indeed what we more especially term Science.

William Whewell

The hypotheses we accept ought to explain phenomena which we have observed. But they ought to do more than this: our hypotheses ought to foretell phenomena which have not yet been observed.

William James

I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.

William James

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.

William James

Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.

William James

Man lives for science as well as bread.

William James

Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

William James

Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'.

William James

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

William James

...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.

William James

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

William James

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.

William Gilbert

The magnetic force is animate, or imitates a soul; in many respects it surpasses the human soul while it is united to an organic body.

William Faulkner

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Willard Van Orman Quine

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.

Ronald Reagan

[A woman waiting for him in the Kremlin asked Gobachev] "Was communism invented by a politician or a scientist?" [He replied] "Well, a politician." She said, "That explains it. The scientist would have tried it on mice first."

Saint Augustine

Then assuredly the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.

Richard Dawkins

It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you can learn to be an expert connoisseur of music without being able to play a note on any instrument. Of course, music would come to a halt if nobody ever learned to play it. But if everybody grew up thinking that music was synonymous with playing it, think how relatively impoverished many lives would be. Couldn't we learn to think of science in the same way?

Robin Williams

Clouds are like boogers hanging on the nostrils of the moon.

Robin G. Collingwood

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that ... he is going to be a beginner all his life.

Richard P. Feynman

That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.

Richard P. Feynman

This is not very important what I'm doing. I'm just proving something.

Richard P. Feynman

The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

Richard P. Feynman

If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives.

Richard P. Feynman

If I say [electrons] behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before.

Richard P. Feynman

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Richard P. Feynman

Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory.

Richard P. Feynman

I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' ...Nobody knows how it can be like that.