Science quotes
7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I wish they would use English instead of Greek words. When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell me it is coloured by "chlorophyll," which at first sounds very instructive; but if they would only say plainly that a leaf is coloured green by a thing which is called "green leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got."
"Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws."
"Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones"
"For I am yearning to visit the limits of the all-nurturing Earth, and Oceans, from whom the gods are sprung."
"If all sentient beings in the universe disappeared, there would remain a sense in which mathematical objects and theorems would continue to exist even though there would be no one around to write or talk about them. Huge prime numbers would continue to be prime, even if no one had proved them prime."
"Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace; there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being."
"Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to choose-Experiment has no fewer."
"Discovery comes as a result of positive discontent, a constructive dissatisfaction. In fact, one might quite truthfully say that there is no discovery when one is content."
"The fame of surgeons resembles the fame of actors, who live only during their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared."
"Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things."
"Education is an organic necessity of a human being."
"[My advice] will one day be found With other relics of 'a former world,' When this world shall be former, underground, Thrown topsy-turvy, twisted, crisped, and curled, Baked, fried or burnt, turned inside-out, or drowned, Like all the worlds before, which have been hurled First out of, and then back again to Chaos, The Superstratum which will overlay us."
"Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones."
"Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful."
"The six thousand years of human history form but a portion of the geologic day that is passing over us: they do not extend into the yesterday of the globe, far less touch the myriads of ages spread out beyond."
"In India there was a sense of time that does not tick with modern clocks, just as there is a knowledge that is not gained through science and empirical experiments. In the modern West knowledge is of objective, finite particulars in historical time. India recognizes that kind of useful information: it calls it "lower knowledge." Higher knowledge (paravidya) proceeds differently, or rather it doesn't proceed at all but enters history full-blown on the morning of a new creation."
"I Once wrote: "In mathematics process and result are equivalent.""
"Suppose someone follows the series "1,3,5,7, ..", and in writing the series 2x+1; and he asked himself "But am I always doing the same thing, or something different every time?" If from one day to the next someone promises: "Tomorrow I will give up smoking", does he say the same thing every day, or every day something different?"
