Famous Quotes & Sayings

Peter Sarnak

The Torus is my enemy!

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.

Philip Pullman

But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

Philip Pullman

Imagination is a form of seeing

Queen Elizabeth II

This new power, which has proved itself to be such a terrifying weapon of destruction, is harnessed for the first time for the common good of our community.

Pythagoras

There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.

Plato

Perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it, and having seen it, to find one in himself.

Plato

But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine. If he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All successful men have agreed in one thing -- they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A day is a miniature eternity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Something is wanting to science until it has been humanised.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science, Nature,-O, I've yearned to open some page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science finds it methods.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment that was older and awaited expectant these larger insights.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.

Lewis Thomas

It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity, filled to overbrimming as we are with questions, and naturally talented as we are for the asking of clear questions, and then for us to do nothing about, or worse, to try to suppress the questions...

Lewis Thomas

We do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang" , all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead.

Lewis Thomas

Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.

Lewis Thomas

The body of science is not, as it is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to the next by a logical string. In truth, whenever we discover a new fact it involves the elimination of old ones. We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally in error.

Lewis Thomas

Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.

Lewis Thomas

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

Vannevar Bush

The common idea that scientists reject a theory as soon as it leads to a contradiction is just not so. When they get something that works at all they plunge ahead with it and ignore its weak spots... scientists are just as bad as the rest of the public in following fads and being influenced by mass enthusiasm.

Vannevar Bush

Basic scientific research is scientific capital.

Vannevar Bush

Science can give mankind a better standard of living, better health and a better mental life, if mankind in turn gives science the sympathy and support so essential to its progress.

Vanna Bonta

'Impossible' is not a scientific term.

Stephen Leacock

The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram - that is, an oblong angular figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything