Famous Quotes & Sayings

Werner Heisenberg

By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning.

Werner Heisenberg

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

Werner Heisenberg

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Samuel Butler

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth.

Samuel Horsley

The sciences are said, and they are truly said, to have a mutual connection, that any one of them may be the better understood, for an insight into the rest.

Samuel Beckett

Mysterious affair, electricity.

Ralph Richardson

I like talking to engineers best. They built bridges, they're very precise, very disciplined, yet I find they have roving minds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of themanly contemplation of the whole.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;" "reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

People seem sheathed in their tough organization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, or spirit, or poetry,--a narrow belt.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky. ... These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the Chancellors of God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned tomorrow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Lee De Forest

[Man will never reach the Moon] regardless of all future scientific advances.

Thomas Aquinas

For it is necessary in every practical science to proceed in a composite (i.e. deductive) manner. On the contrary in speculative science, it is necessary to proceed in an analytical manner by breaking down the complex into elementary principles.

Thomas Aquinas

Practical sciences proceed by building up; theoretical science by resolving into components.

Thomas Aquinas

It is not possible to be ignorant of the end of things if we know their beginning.

Theophrastus

Anaximenes ... also says that the underlying nature is one and infinite ... but not undefined as Anaximander said but definite, for he identifies it as air; and it differs in its substantial nature by rarity and density. Being made finer it becomes fire; being made thicker it becomes wind, then cloud, then (when thickened still more) water, then earth, then stones; and the rest come into being from these.

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.