"Research cannot be forced very much. There is always danger of too much foliage and too little fruit."
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Science quotes
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Science quotes (page 10 of 352)
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"Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club."
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"My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus."
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"In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."
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"It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences."
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"All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann's aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations."
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"Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness?' ... all science, natural as well as unnatural-which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge-has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit."
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"The general mental qualification necessary for scientific advancement is that which is usually denominated "common sense," though added to this, imagination, induction, and trained logic, either of common language or of mathematics, are important adjuncts."
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"Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe."
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"Poets need be in no degree jealous of the geologists. The stony science, with buried creations for its domains, and half an eternity charged with its annals, possesses its realms of dim and shadowy fields, in which troops of fancies already walk like disembodied ghosts in the old fields of Elysium, and which bid fair to be quite dark and uncertain enough for all the purposes of poesy for centuries to come."
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"An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet."
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"A man can do his best only by confidently seeking (and perpetually missing) an unattainable perfection."
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"One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer."
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"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations."
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"The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village."
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"And if this were so in all cases, the principle would be established, that sometimes conditions can be treated by things opposite to those from which they arose, and sometimes by things like to those from which they arose."
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"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."
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"Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists."
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"All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas."
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"To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth."
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