Knowledge Quotes - Page 31

• Philosophy stands in need of a science which shall determine the possibility, principles, and extent of human knowledge à priori.

  Immanuel Kant

  Philosophy, Science, Principles

  20 Copy quote

• Positivism stands or falls with the principle of scientism, that is that the meaning of knowledge is defined by what the sciences do and can thus be adequately explicated through the methodological analysis of scientific procedures.

  Jurgen Habermas

  Fall, Science, Principles

  21 Copy quote

• Remember that accumulated knowledge, like accumulated capital, increases at compound interest: but it differs from the accumulation of capital in this; that the increase of knowledge produces a more rapid rate of progress, whilst the accumulation of capital leads to a lower rate of interest. Capital thus checks it own accumulation: knowledge thus accelerates its own advance. Each generation, therefore, to deserve comparison with its predecessor, is bound to add much more largely to the common stock than that which it immediately succeeds.

  Charles Babbage

  Science, Progress, Succeed

  "The Exposition of 1851; or, Views of the industry, the science, and the government of England".

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• Research is industrial prospecting. The oil prospectors use every scientific means to find new paying wells. Oil is found by each one of a number of methods. My own group of men are prospecting in a different field, using every possible scientific means. We believe there are still things left to be discovered. We have only stumbled upon a few barrels of physical laws from the great pool of knowledge. Some day we are going to hit a gusher.

  Charles Kettering

  Believe, Mean, Science

  7 Copy quote

• Science begets knowledge; opinion, ignorance.

  Hippocrates

  Ignorance, Science, Ignorant

  10 Copy quote

• Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.

  Vannevar Bush

  Faith, Stress, Science

  "Science is Not Enough" by Vannevar Bush, Ch. X, (p. 191), 1967.

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• Science is the knowledge of constant things, not merely of passing events, and is properly less the knowledge of general laws than of existing facts.

  John Ruskin

  Science, Law, Events

  7 Copy quote

• Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.

  Edwin Powell Hubble

  Science, Generations, Body

  Norriss S. Hetherington, Edwin Powell Hubble (1996). “Hubble's Cosmology: A Guided Study of Selected Texts”

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know.

  Bertrand Russell

  Philosophy, Science, Accounts

  Bertrand Russell, John G. Slater, Peter Köllner (1997). “Last Philosophical Testament: 1943-68”, p.378, Psychology Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way ... Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science.

  Isidor Isaac Rabi

  Philosophy, Science, Numbers

  New Scientist, Vol. 21, No. 374, January 16, 1964.

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point. ...
  Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
  And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. ...
  Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Running, Moving, Science

  'Locksley Hall' (1842) l. 137

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself.

  James Jeans

  Science, Jeans, Rivers

  Sir James Hopwood Jeans (2017). “The Mysterious Universe [New Revised Edition]”, p.126, Pickle Partners Publishing

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sciences usually advances by a succession of small steps, through a fog in which even the most keen-sighted explorer can seldom see more than a few paces ahead. Occasionally the fog lifts, an eminence is gained, and a wider stretch of territory can be surveyed-sometimes with startling results. A whole science may then seem to undergo a kaleidoscopic rearrangement, fragments of knowledge sometimes being found to fit together in a hitherto unsuspected manner. Sometimes the shock of readjustment may spread to other sciences; sometimes it may divert the whole current of human thought.

  James Jeans

  Science, Fog, Together

  5 Copy quote

• Scientia potentia est, sed parva; quia scientia egregia rara est, nec proinde apparens nisi paucissimis, et in paucis rebus. Scientiae enim ea natura est, ut esse intelligi non possit, nisi ab illis qui sunt scientia praediti.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Science, Power

  Thomas Hobbes (1966). “Opera philosophica quae latine scripsit omnia: in unum corpusnunc primum collecta studio et labore Gulielmi Molesworth”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Science, Doubt, Contention

  29 Copy quote

• Simplification of modes of proof is not merely an indication of advance in our knowledge of a subject, but is also the surest guarantee of readiness for farther progress.

  Lord Kelvin

  Science, Progress, Guarantees

  Lord Kelvin, LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S. and Peter Guthrie Tait, M.A. (1912). “Elements of Natural Philosophy”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Something unknown is doing we don't know what-that is what our theory amounts to.

  Arthur Eddington

  Science, Theory, Knows

  Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1933). “The nature of the physical world”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: "A judicious man," says he, "looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him."

  Thomas Carlyle

  Ignorance, Science, Men

  English and Other Critical Essays Chartism, Chapter II

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Stay in college, get the knowledge. And stay there until you're through. If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make something out of you. Advice to a young person to continue his education.

  Muhammad Ali

  Science, College, Advice

  7 Copy quote

• Surgical knowledge depends on long practice, not from speculations.

  Marcello Malpighi

  Science, Practice, Long

  10 Copy quote

• That hemisphere of the moon which faces us is better known than the earth itself; its vast desert plains have been surveyed to within a few acres; its mountains and craters have been measured to within a few yards; while on the earth's surface there are 30,000,000 square kilometres (sixty times the extent of France), upon which the foot of man has never trod, which the eye of man has never seen.

  Camille Flammarion

  Eye, Science, Moon

  15 Copy quote

• That the great majority of those who leave school should have some idea of the kind of evidence required to substantiate given types of belief does not seem unreasonable. Nor is it absurd to expect that they should go forth with a lively interest in the ways in which knowledge is improved and a marked distaste for all conclusions reached in disharmony with the methods of scientific inquiry.

  John Dewey

  School, Science, Should Have

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, H. S. Thayer (2008). “The Middle Works, 1899-1924: 1910-1911”, p.77, SIU Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The conception of objective reality ... has thus evaporated ... into the transparent clarity of mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.

  Werner Heisenberg

  Science, Reality, Clarity

  9 Copy quote

• The end of knowledge is power ... the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action or thing to be done.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Science, Power, Done

  Thomas Hobbes, Thucydides, Homer (1839). “The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury”, p.7

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• The essence of knowledge is generalization. That fire can be produced by rubbing wood in a certain way is a knowledge derived by generalization from individual experiences; the statement means that rubbing wood in this way will always produce fire. The art of discovery is therefore the art of correct generalization. ... The separation of relevant from irrelevant factors is the beginning of knowledge.

  Hans Reichenbach

  Art, Mean, Science

  Hans Reichenbach (1973). “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy”, p.5, Univ of California Press

  10 Copy quote

  Show source