Science quotes
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"Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing."
"If [science] tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom."
"Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways."
"I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them."
"There are two classes [of scientists], those who want to know, and do not care whether others think they know or not, and those who do not much care about knowing, but care very greatly about being reputed as knowing."
"There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one."
"There is no such source of error as the pursuit of absolute truth."
"You cannot have a thing "matter" by itself which shall have no motion in it, nor yet a thing "motion" by itself which shall exist apart from matter; you must have both or neither. You can have matter moving much, or little, and in all conceivable ways; but you cannot have matter without any motion more than you can have motion without any matter that is moving."
"Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate."
"Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and a negative pole."
"A man should carry nature in his head."
"But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?"
"Line in Nature is not found; Unit and Universe are round."
"We are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be explored. "What we know is a point to what we do not know.""
"Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology."
"Astronomy is a cold, desert science, with all its pompous figures,-depends a little too much on the glass-grinder, too little on the mind. 'T is of no use to show us more planets and systems. We know already what matter is, and more or less of it does not signify."
"Let us make education brave and preventive. Politics is an afterwork, a poor patching. We are always a little late... We shall one day learn to supercede politics by education... We must begin higher up, namely in Education."
"All successful men have agreed in one thing -- they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things."
"Drive out Nature with a fork, she comes running back."
"Something is wanting to science until it has been humanised."
