quotations about science
One of the chief interests in Science is its bearing on [the] great questions: the light it throws on our own nature and the nature of the Universe; and the humility it teaches by everywhere leaving us in presence of the inscrutable. The dull world outside thinks of Science as nothing but a matter of chemical analyses, calculations of distance and times, labeling of species, physiological experiments, and the like; but among the initiated, those of higher type, while seeking scientific knowledge for its proximate value, have an ever-increasing consciousness of its ultimate value as a transfiguration of things, which, marvellous enough within the limits of the knowable, suggests a profounder marvel that cannot be known.
HERBERT SPENCER
An Autobiography
There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook K", Aphorisms
The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply -- there are always new worlds to conquer.
SIR HUMPHREY DAVY
discourse delivered at the Royal Society, November 30, 1825
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
WILL DURANT
The Story of Philosophy
Science has equipped man in less than fifty years with more tools than he had made during the thousands of years he had lived on earth. Each new machine being for man a new organ -- an artificial organ -- his body became suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being at the same time able to dilate to the dimensions of his body.
HENRI BERGSON
Centennial of Engineering: History and Proceedings of Symposia: 1852-1952
In popularizing a scientific development it was always crucial to sail the narrow strait between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public befuddlement.
GREGORY BENFORD
Artifact
The success of science, both its intellectual excitement and its practical application, depend upon the self-correcting character of science. There must be a way of testing any valid idea. It must be possible to reproduce any valid experiment. The character or beliefs of the scientists are irrelevant; all that matters is whether the evidence supports his contention.
CARL SAGAN
Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
True science, so far from being an enemy to religious truth, will always stand as the mediator in the ever-pending conflict between religious faith and human reason.
C. S. WEST
"The Moral Element in Education", Southern Student's Hand-book of Selections for Reading and Oratory
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Out of My Later Years
Science is a good piece of furniture for a man to have in an upper chamber, provided he has common sense on the ground floor.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
For science is ... like virtue, its own exceeding great reward.
CHARLES KINGSLEY
"Soldiers of Science", The Works of Charles Kingsley
The meaning of science is not fixed, but is dynamic. As science has evolved, so has its meaning.
RUSSELL L. ACKOFF
Scientific Method: Optimizing Applied Research Decisions
Scientists are supposed to be dispassionate, cool-headed, and unemotional when they evaluate their data. But it's hard for me to avoid a sense of awe when I'm hunting fossils.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
Scientists actively approach the door to knowledge--the boundary of the domain of what we know. We question and explore and we change our views when facts and logic force us to do so. We are confident only in what we can verify through experiments or in what we can deduce from experimentally confirmed hypotheses.
LISA RANDALL
Knocking on Heaven's Door
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Descent of Man
So what is science, and why do we consider it so useful and important? Despite the Hollywood stereotypes, science is not about white lab coats and bubbling beakers or sparkling apparatuses. Science is a way of looking at the world using a specific toolbox--the scientific method.
DONALD PROTHERO
"The Holocaust, Denier's Playbook, and the Tobacco Smokescreen: Common Threads in the Thinking and Tactics of Denialists and Pseudoscientists", Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem
Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively; strive to get clear notions about all; give up no science entirely, for science is but one.
SENECA
attributed, Day's Collacon
I'd like to think by the end of the show, you have warmed up to what science is. It's not just some class you took in school and you forget about after you sell back the textbook. You recognize that science is everywhere -- it touches us at all times.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
"Neil DeGrasse Tyson Says Science Isn't Dead -- And You're The One Who's Saving It", Good Education, September 29, 2017
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
What I Believe