Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Marcus Aurelius

The man who doesn't know what the universe is doesn't know where he lives.

Samuel Johnson

The roads of science are narrow, so that they who travel them, must wither follow or meet one another...

Samuel Johnson

I do not see, Sir, that it is reasonable for a man to be angry at another, whom a woman has preferred to him; but angry he is, no doubt; and he is loath to be angry at himself.

Samuel Johnson

There prevails among men of letters, an opinion, that all appearance of science is particularly hateful to Women; and that therefore whoever desires to be well received in female assemblies, must qualify himself by a total rejection of all that is serious, rational, or important; must consider argument or criticism as perpetually interdicted; and devote all his attention to trifles, and all his eloquence to compliment.

Samuel Johnson

If a man has a science to learn he must regularly and resolutely advance.

Samuel Johnson

I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.

Samuel Johnson

Hoc age ['do this'] is the great rule, whether you are serious or merry; whether ... learning science or duty from a folio, or floating on the Thames. Intentions must be gathered from acts.

Samuel Johnson

Round numbers are always false.

Samuel Johnson

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Ronald Reagan

I am not a scientist.

Robertson Davies

But as a skeptic I am dubious about science as about everything else, unless the scientist is himself a skeptic, and few of them are. The stench of formaldehyde may be as potent as the whiff of incense in stimulating a naturally idolatrous understanding.

Robertson Davies

Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense; they're men of technique.

Robertson Davies

I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is [the doctors'] symbol.

Robert Mayer

Truly I say to you, a single number has more genuine and permanent value than an expensive library full of hypotheses.

Robert M. Pirsig

Science values static patterns.

Robert M. Pirsig

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

Robert M. Pirsig

The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.

Robert M. Pirsig

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The greatest engineering is the engineering of men.

Walt Whitman

I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes - but is that all?

Walt Whitman

O amazement of things-even the least particle!