Knowledge Quotes - Page 36

• [At high school in Cape Town] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects.

  Allan McLeod Cormack

  School, Learning, Science

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• The mechanist is intimately convinced that a precise knowledge of the chemical constitution, structure, and properties of the various organelles of a cell will solve biological problems. This will come in a few centuries. For the time being, the biologist has to face such concepts as orienting forces or morphogenetic fields. Owing to the scarcity of chemical data and to the complexity of life, and despite the progresses of biochemistry, the biologist is still threatened with vertigo.

  Andre Michel Lwoff

  Science, Cells, Data

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• We find that one of the most rewarding features of being scientists these days ... is the common bond which the search for truth provides to scholars of many tongues and many heritages. In the long run, that spirit will inevitably have a constructive effect on the benefits which man can derive from knowledge of himself and his environment.

  Stanford Moore

  Running, Science, Men

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• If the God of revelation is most appropriately worshipped in the temple of religion, the God of nature may be equally honored in the temple of science. Even from its lofty minarets the philosopher may summon the faithful to prayer, and the priest and sage exchange altars without the compromise of faith or knowledge.

  David Brewster

  God, Faith, Prayer

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• Geology holds the keys of one of the kingdoms of nature; and it cannot be said that a science which extends our Knowledge, and by consequence our Power, over a third part of nature, holds a low place among intellectual employments.

  William Buckland

  Science, Keys, Intellectual

  William Buckland (1820). “Vindiciæ Geologicæ: The Connexion of Geology with Religion, Explained in an Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before University of Oxford, May 15, 1819, on the Endowment of Readership in Geology”, p.7

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• On examinations: Das Wissen ist der Tad der Forschung. Knowledge is the death of research. Nernst's motto.

  Walther Nernst

  Research, Examination, Motto

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• A man who is all theory is like "a rudderless ship on a shoreless sea." ... Theories and speculations may be indulged in with safety only as long as they are based on facts that we can go back to at all times and know that we are on solid ground.

  Elisha Gray

  Science, Men, Sea

  Elisha Gray (1899). “Nature's Miracles: Familiar Talks on Science”, W. Briggs ; Montreal : C.W. Coates ; Halifax : S.F. Huestis, [19--?]

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• A scientist strives to understand the work of Nature. But with our insufficient talents as scientists, we do not hit upon the truth all at once. We must content ourselves with tracking it down, enveloped in considerable darkness, which leads us to make new mistakes and errors. By diligent examination, we may at length little by little peel off the thickest layers, but we seldom get the core quite free, so that finally we have to be satisfied with a little incomplete knowledge.

  Torbern Bergman

  Mistake, Science, Errors

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• According to my views, aiming at quantitative investigations, that is at establishing relations between measurements of phenomena, should take first place in the experimental practice of physics. By measurement to knowledge [door meten tot weten] I should like to write as a motto above the entrance to every physics laboratory.

  Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

  Writing, Science, Doors

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• All knowledge attains its ethical value and its human significance only by the human sense with which it is employed. Only a good man can be a great physician.

  Hermann Nothnagel

  Science, Men, Good Man

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• And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man regress, should he allow himself to resemble a primitive beast, the louse begins to multiply again and treats man as he deserves, as a brute beast. This conclusion would have endeared itself to the warm heart of Alfred Nobel. My contribution to it makes me feel less unworthy of the honour which you have conferred upon me in his name.

  Charles Nicolle

  Teaching, Heart, Science

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• As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.

  Charles Scott Sherrington

  Science, Thinking, Space

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• As was the case for Nobel's own invention of dynamite, the uses that are made of increased knowledge can serve both beneficial and potentially harmful ends. Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility. We reject the notion advocated in some quarters that man should stop eating from the tree of knowledge, as if that were humanly possible.

  Nicolaas Bloembergen

  Responsibility, Science, Men

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• At a given instant everything the surgeon knows suddenly becomes important to the solution of the problem. You can't do it an hour later, or tomorrow. Nor can you go to the library and look it up.

  John W. Kirklin

  Science, Important, Library

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• Each time one of the medicine men dies, it's as if a library has burned down.

  Mark Plotkin

  Science, Men, Medicine

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• Either one or the other [analysis or synthesis] may be direct or indirect. The direct procedure is when the point of departure is known-direct synthesis in the elements of geometry. By combining at random simple truths with each other, more complicated ones are deduced from them. This is the method of discovery, the special method of inventions, contrary to popular opinion.

  Andre-Marie Ampere

  Science, Simple, Discovery

  "André-Marie Ampère: Enlightenment and Electrodynamics". Book by James R. Hofmann, p. 159, 1996.

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• Equations seem like treasures, spotted in the rough by some discerning individual, plucked and examined, placed in the grand storehouse of knowledge, passed on from generation to generation. This is so convenient a way to present scientific discovery, and so useful for textbooks, that it can be called the treasure-hunt picture of knowledge.

  Robert P. Crease

  Science, Discovery, Generations

  Robert P. Crease (2010). “The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Frequently, I have been asked if an experiment I have planned is pure or applied science; to me it is more important to know if the experiment will yield new and probably enduring knowledge about nature. If it is likely to yield such knowledge, it is, in my opinion, good fundamental research; and this is more important than whether the motivation is purely aesthetic satisfaction on the part of the experimenter on the one hand or the improvement of the stability of a high-power transistor on the other.

  William Shockley

  Motivation, Science, Yield

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• From the physician, as emphatically the student of Nature, is expected not only an inquiry into cause, but an investigation of the whole empire of Nature and a determination of the applicability of every species of knowledge to the improvement of his art.

  John Gorrie

  Art, Determination, Science

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• I do not believe anything very certainly, but everything very probably.

  Christiaan Huygens

  Believe, Science, Certain

  "The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought". Book by Jacques Roger, letter to Pierre Perrault, 1997.

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• I do not believe there is anything useful which men can know with exactitude that they cannot know by arithmetic and algebra.

  Nicolas Malebranche

  Believe, Science, Men

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• If physicists could not quote in the text, they would not feel that much was lost with respect to advancement of knowledge of the natural world. If historians could not quote, they would deem it a disastrous impediment to the communication of knowledge about the past. A luxury for physicists, quotation is a necessity for historians, indispensable to historiography.

  J. H. Hexter

  Communication, Science, Past

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• If popular medicine gave the people wisdom as well as knowledge, it would be the best protection for scientific and well-trained physicians.

  Rudolf Virchow

  Wisdom, Science, Medicine

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• If the question were, "What ought to be the next objective in science?" my answer would be the teaching of science to the young, so that when the whole population grew up there would be a far more general background of common sense, based on a knowledge of the real meaning of the scientific method of discovering truth.

  Elihu Thomson

  Real, Teaching, Science

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• If we would serve science, we must extend her limits, not only as far as our own knowledge is concerned, but in the estimation of others.

  Rudolf Virchow

  Science, Limits, Concerned

  Rudolf Virchow, Frank CHANCE (1860). “Cellular Pathology as based upon physiological and pathological histology. Twenty lectures delivered in ... 1858. Translated from the second edition of the original by F. Chance. With notes and numerous emendations principally from MS. notes of the author, and illustrated by ... engravings on wood.”, p.10

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