Science Quotes

• First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Beautiful, Smart, Simple

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• The fascination of any search after truth lies not in the attainment, which at best is found to be very relative, but in the pursuit, where all the powers of the mind and character are brought into play and are absorbed by the task. One feels oneself in contact with something that is infinite and one finds joy that is beyond expression in sounding the abyss of science and the secrets of the infinite mind.

  Florence Bascom

  Lying, Character, Expression

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• We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

  Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth

  Rivers, Environmental, Earth

  Attributed in A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, ed. Barbara K. Rodes and Rice Odell (1992)

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• Art is science made flesh.

  Jean Cocteau

  Art, Flesh, Made

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• Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.

  David Cronenberg

  Math, Technology, Mad

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• [Kepler] preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science.

  Carl Sagan

  Heart, Kepler, Illusion

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• Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.

  Michael J. Fox

  Cancer, Health, Medicine

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• Jamaica is more than just the 'brand' the world recognizes so well; it's a place of pride for the people who live here, its educational institutions, its sports achievements, its science and technology growth.

  Portia Simpson-Miller

  Sports, Country, Educational

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• In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

  Galileo Galilei

  Truth, Inspiration, Independent

  "Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men". Book by François Arago, as translated by Baden Powell, Robert Grant, and William Fairbairn, p. 365, 1859.

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• The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.

  John N. Bahcall

  Knowledge, Discovery, Important

  Obituary at CalTech, September 7, 2005.

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• Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.

  Charles Lamb

  Time, Thinking, Space

  Letter to Thomas Manning, 2 January 1810, in E. Marrs (ed.) 'The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb' vol. 3 (1978) p. 36

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• Experimental science is the queen of knowledge.

  Roger Bacon

  Queens, Experimental Science

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• What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

  Jacques Yves Cousteau

  Men, Curiosity, Trying

  Christian Science Monitor, July 21, 1971.

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• The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design.

  Edward Robert Harrison

  Design, Tuning, Scientist

  Edward Robert Harrison (1986). “Masks of the universe”, Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers

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• In essence, science is a perpetual search for an intelligent and integrated comprehension of the world we live in.

  C. B. van Niel

  Intelligent, Essence, World

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• OK, so what's the speed of dark?

  Steven Wright

  Funny, Humor, Dark

  "Believe the hype: Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez might be the real deal" by DJ Gallo, www.theguardian.com. September 1, 2016.

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• Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Reality, Facts, Dependence On Others

  1651 Leviathan, pt.1, ch.5.

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• The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.

  Aristotle

  Engineering, Order, Special

  Aristotle (2012). “The Metaphysics”, p.202, Roger Bishop Jones

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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, Knowledge

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• Knowledge comes by taking things apart, analysis. But wisdom comes by putting things together.

  John Alexander Morrison

  Wisdom, Knowledge, Together

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• I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

  Isaac Newton

  Inspirational, Success, Trust

  Quoted in Christian Monitor, and Religious Intelligencer, 4 July 1812. An almost identical quotation by Newton, said to have been uttered "a little before he died," appears in Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men, published in 1820 but extant in manuscript form from around 1730. A paraphrase of Newton's words was printed in a note in a 1797 edition of TheWorks of Alexander Pope.

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• It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

  Carl Sagan

  Death, Witty, Atheist

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.32, Ballantine Books

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• Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

  Martin Rees

  Vastness, Ontology, Logic

  Quoted in Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a System for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, rev. ed., ed. B. M. Oliver and J. Billingham (1973). An earlier version by A. R. Burn appeared in a book review by Burn in The Classical Review, June 1969: "absence of evidence is not identical with evidence of absence."

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• Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Thinking, Giving

  Thomas Carlyle (1840). “Works”, p.20

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• To define it rudely but not inaptly, engineering is the art of doing that well with one dollar which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.

  Arthur M. Wellington

  Fashion, Art, Engineering

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