Science quotes
7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside science — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?"
"O telescope, instrument of much knowledge, more precious than any sceptre!"
"To understand is to invent."
"The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist."
"A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road."
"The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation."
"It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak."
"Science is simply common sense at its best."
"Science is public, not private, knowledge."
"The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning."
"It seems probable to me that God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportions to space, as most conduced to the end for which He formed them; and that these primitive particles, being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them, even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God had made one in the first creation."
"We are not to consider the world as the body of God: he is an uniform being, void of organs, members, or parts; and they are his creatures, subordinate to him, and subservient to his will."
"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering."
"No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience."
"The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics."
"When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless."
"Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems."
"Edison was by far the most successful and, probably, the last exponent of the purely empirical method of investigation. Everything he achieved was the result of persistent trials and experiments often performed at random but always attesting extraordinary vigor and resource. Starting from a few known elements, he would make their combinations and permutations, tabulate them and run through the whole list, completing test after test with incredible rapidity until he obtained a clue. His mind was dominated by one idea, to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every possibility."
"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree."
