Famous Quotes & Sayings

Scott Adams

Dilbert: I'm obsessed with inventing a perpetual motion machine. Most scientists think it's impossible, but I have something they don't. Dogbert: A lot of spare time? Dilbert: Exactly.

Scott Adams

Newsreader: A huge asteroid could destroy Earth! And by coincidence, that's the subject of tonight's miniseries. Dogbert: In science, researchers proved that this simple device can keep idiots off your television screen. [TV remote control] Click.

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.

Simone Weil

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

Simone Weil

Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.

Simone Weil

science has now been for a long time - and to an ever-increasing extent - a collective enterprise. Actually, new results are always, in fact, the work of specific individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past discoveries and possible future researches that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole.

Simone Weil

One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work ...

Simone Weil

A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.

Simone Weil

Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.

Simone Weil

The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty ...

Ruth Benedict

The prime lesson the social sciences can learn from the natural sciences is just this: that it is necessary to press on to find the positive conditions under which desired events take place, and that these can be just as scientifically investigated as can instances of negative correlation. This problem is beyond relativity.

Rudolf Carnap

Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.

Roger Bacon

All science requires mathematics.

Roger Bacon

All science requires mathematics. [Editors' summary of Bacon's idea, not Bacon's wording.]