Best 9669 quotes in «science quotes» category

'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward.

'Tis the witching hour of night, Orbed is the moon and bright. And the stars they glisten, glisten, Seeming with bright eyes to listen- For what listen they?

To achieve this density of a neutron star at home, just cram a herd of 50 million elephants into the volume of a thimble.

To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.

To adopt nuclear disarmament would be akin to behaving like a virgin in a brothel.

To any action there is always an opposite and equal reaction; in other words, the actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal and always opposite in direction.

Tobacco has not yet been fully tried before the bar of science. But the tribunal has been prepared and the gathering of evidence has begun and when the final verdict is rendered, it will appear that tobacco is evil and only evil; that as a drug it is far more deadly than alcohol, killing in a dose a thousand times smaller, and that it does not possess a single one of the quasi merits of alcohol.

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin".

Tobacco, in its various forms, is one of the most mischievous of all drugs. There is perhaps no other drug which injures the body in so many ways and so universally as does tobacco. Some drugs offer a small degree of compensation for the evil effects which they produce; but tobacco has not a single redeeming feature and gives nothing in return.

To be anthropocentric is to remain unaware of the limits of human nature, the significance of biological processes underlying human behavior, and the deeper meaning of long-term genetic evolution.

To be a Naturalist is better than to be a King.

To be born, to live and to die is merely to change forms... And what does one form matter any more than another?... Each form has its own sort of happiness and unhappiness. From the elephant down to the flea... from the flea down to the sensitive and living molecule which is the origin of all, there is not a speck in the whole of nature that does not feel pain or pleasure.

To be human is to be aware of the passage of time; no concept lies closer to the core of our consciousness.

To be sure, it is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive.

To bother about the best method of accomplishing an accidental result.

To be worthy of the name, an experimenter must be at once theorist and practitioner. While he must completely master the art of establishing experimental facts, which are the materials of science, he must also clearly understand the scientific principles which guide his reasoning through the varied experimental study of natural phenomena. We cannot separate these two things: head and hand. An able hand, without a head to direct it, is a blind tool; the head is powerless without its executive hand.

To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.

To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.

To cross the seas, to traverse the roads, and to work machinery by galvanism, or rather electro-magnetism, will certainly, if executed, be the most noble achievement ever performed by man.

To conclude, therefore, let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or in the book of God's works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both."—Bacon: "Advancement of Learning".

To consider the matter aright, reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with particular qualities, according to their particular situations and relations. This instinct, 'tis true, arises from past observation and experience; but can anyone give the ultimate reason, why past experience and observation produces such an effect, any more than why nature alone should produce it?

To conclude, The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end.

Today, in directly harnessing the power of the Sun, we're taking the energy that God gave us, the most renewable energy that we will ever see, and using it to replace our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.

Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.

Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and work to restore America's place as the world leader in science and technology.

Today's water institutions-the policies and laws, government agencies and planning and engineering practices that shape patterns of water use-are steeped in a supply-side management philosophy no longer appropriate to solving today's water problems.

Today we no longer ask what really goes on in an atom; we ask what is likely to be observed-and with what likelihood-when we subject atoms to any specified influences such as light or heat, magnetic fields or electric currents.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Today when the public thinks of the products of science it is likely to think about environmental problems, an unproductive armament industry, careless or dishonest 'scientific' reports, Livermore cheers for 'nukes forever' and a huge amount of self-serving noise on every subject from global warming to 'the face of God'.

To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.

To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, aboutwhat is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.

To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.

To demonstrate experimentally that a microscopic organism actually is the cause of a disease and the agent of contagion, I know no other way, in the present state of Science, than to subject the microbe (the new and happy term introduced by M. Sédillot) to the method of cultivation out of the body.

To divide a cube into two other cubes, a fourth power, or in general any power whatever into two powers of the same denomination above the second is impossible, and I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it.

To do science today is to experience a dimension unique in contemporary working lives; the work promises something incomparable: the sense of living both personally and historically. That is why science now draws to itself all kinds of people - charlatans, mediocrities, geniuses - everyone who wants to touch the flame, feel alive to the time.

To explain new phenomena, that is my task; and how happy is the scientist when he finds what he so diligently sought, a pleasure that gladdens the heart.

To derive two or three general Principles of Motion from Phænomena, and afterwards to tell us how the Properties and Actions of all corporeal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy.

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.

To eliminate the discrepancy between men's plans and the results achieved, a new approach is necessary. Morphological thinking suggests that this new approach cannot be realized through increased teaching of specialized knowledge. This morphological analysis suggests that the essential fact has been overlooked that every human is potentially a genius. Education and dissemination of knowledge must assume a form which allows each student to absorb whatever develops his own genius, lest he become frustrated. The same outlook applies to the genius of the peoples as a whole.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.

To get to know, to discover, to publish-this is the destiny of a scientist.

To give a causal explanation of an event means to deduce a statement which describes it, using as premises of the deduction one or more universal laws, together with certain singular statements, the initial conditions ... We have thus two different kinds of statement, both of which are necessary ingredients of a complete causal explanation.

Toil of science swells the wealth of art.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

To her friends said the Bright one in chatter, "I have learned something new about matter: My speed was so great, Much increased was my weight, Yet I failed to become any fatter!

To learn is to incur surprise-I mean really learning, not just refreshing our memory or adding a new fact. And to invent is to bestow surprise-I mean really inventing, not just innovating what others have done.

[To] mechanical progress there is apparently no end: for as in the past so in the future, each step in any direction will remove limits and bring in past barriers which have till then blocked the way in other directions; and so what for the time may appear to be a visible or practical limit will turn out to be but a bend in the road.

Tolstoi explains somewhere in his writings why, in his opinion, “Science for Science's sake” is an absurd conception. We cannot know all the facts, since they are practically infinite in number. We must make a selection. Is it not better to be guided by utility, by our practical, and more especially our moral, necessities?

To me, cruelty is the worst of human sins. Once we accept that a living creature has feelings and suffers pain, then by knowingly and deliberately inflicting suffering on that creature, we are guilty, whether it be human or animal.

To mean understandings, it is sufficient honour to be numbered amongst the lowest labourers of learning; but different abilities must find different tasks. To hew stone, would have been unworthy of Palladio; and to have rambled in search of shells and flowers, had but ill suited with the capacity of Newton.