Best 423 quotes in «scientist quotes» category

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter—for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.

There is an overflowing grace, for every great work.

There is an inexplicable sense of relief in being proven wrong, which perhaps can only be realized by either a scientist or a philosopher.

The world is most consistent with purposeful creation.

Think of facts and figures as bricks and cement, and science or scientific understanding as a building. Without the vision of the architect, it's impossible to construct the building no matter how much bricks and cement you have.

This [discovery of a cell-free yeast extract] will make him famous, even though he has no talent for chemistry. {Comment on German scientist Eduard Buchner who later ironically won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery}

Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound... {His second motto, from King Lear by Shakespeare}

This man [Alexander von Humboldt] is as knowledgeable as a whole academy.

You make experiments and I make theories. Do you know the difference? A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it. {Remark to scientist Herman Francis Mark}

True understanding is an indivisible land of liberation beyond all judgement and all conclusions.

Vulnerable, like all men, to the temptations of arrogance, of which intellectual pride is the worst, he [the scientist] must nevertheless remain sincere and modest, if only because his studies constantly bring home to him that, compared with the gigantic aims of science, his own contribution, no matter how important, is only a drop in the ocean of truth.

Without the basic humane connection, even the expertise of a scientist turns worthless.

You want to test our apples?" Carter asked. "I want to find out what makes them taste so special so that we can share that with other people, maybe lots of them." Grace saw Carter's perplexed expression. "You ever had a fruit-flavored soft drink?" "Like an orange soda?" "Exactly. Well, somebody found the perfect orange somewhere, studied it carefully, and then made a formula based on its special flavor so that anyone anywhere in the world could taste it." "In a can of soda." "Right." "Very cool." "Do you like peach ice cream?" "Yes!" "Well, a lot of the 'all-natural peach flavoring' that you taste in that ice cream is really Gamma-Aldehyde C-14, a molecule created by Nanjing Yuance Trade Company, which I'm sure is based on a perfect peach they found somewhere." "So you're like a scientist-cook," Carter said excitedly. "Something like that." Grace smiled.

Abraham Lincoln was on the side of the social scientists when he said, "God must have loved the people of lower and middle socioeconomic status, because he made such a multiplicity of them.

A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.

A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.

A great scientist is more open to a new idea than almost anybody.

Alice Stewart [is] a much underestimated scientist who has been an indomitable challenger of the establishment and a thorn in the flesh of the nuclear industry.

And yet I would not freely exchange my science for those of my fellow laureates. They are forever confined in their professional discussions to the small numbers of their fellow scientists.

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

A first-rate laboratory is one in which mediocre scientists can produce outstanding work.

All women scientists should marry, rear children, cook, and clean in order to achieve fulfillment, to be a complete woman.

Although scientists can often be as resistant to new ideas as anyone, the process of science ensures that, over time, good ideas and theories prevail.

Although the term dialogue was really a euphemism for scientists trying to kill each other, this format worked very well.

art itself shuns commonality: while the scientist may seek the phenomenon that repeats itself, the artist seeks the exception.

And when statesman or others worry [the scientist] too much, then he should leave with his possessions.

As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn't really overturn a science paradigm.

As a Christian Scientist, I don't go to doctors and get diagnoses.

As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data.

A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge.

A scientist should be the happiest of men.

A scientist sounds like a scientist because the things that come out of their mouth don't stumble, that's all. If they [said], "And the, um, a microwave, uh," you know, then you don't sound right, but if you can just get it out without stumbling then you're going to sound fine.

Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan.

A scientist is an unlikely character to put at the center of a movie.

A scientist is only a human being, a particle in the whole universe. How can the observations and logic of a particle measure the life and size of a phenomenon that is limitless?

A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.

A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.

A scientist who is also a human being cannot rest while knowledge which might be used to reduce suffering rests on the shelf.

Because scientists know that all human beings do not age at the same rate, biological age is measured by how well one's physiological systems are functioning.

Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement

At a recent conference, a colleague told one of us that in IPCC discussions, some scientists have been reluctant to make strong claims about the scientific evidence, lest contrarians "attack us". Another said that she'd rather err on the side of conservatism in her estimates, because then she feels more "secure.

A theory accepted by 99 percent of scientists may be wrong.

Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.

Computer scientists are the historians of computing.

Being a scientist and staring immensity and eternity in the face every day is as grand and inspiring as it gets.

Computer scientists stand on each other's feet.

But scientists, who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about.

Energy is the master resource, because energy enables us to convert one material into another. As natural scientists continue to learn more about the transformation of materials from one form to another with the aid of energy, energy will be even more important.

Controlling for all the things that sociologists, economists, and political scientists say you should control for, we find that what drives one's views [most significantly] is race.