Science quotes
7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside science — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down."
"What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary."
"Nature's great book is written in mathematics."
"If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought."
"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
"Is not Fire a Body heated so hot as to emit Light copiously? For what else is a red hot Iron than Fire? And what else is a burning Coal than red hot Wood?"
"Do not great Bodies conserve their heat the longest, their parts heating one another, and may not great dense and fix'd Bodies, when heated beyond a certain degree, emit Light so copiously, as by the Emission and Re-action of its Light, and the Reflexions and Refractions of its Rays within its Pores to grow still hotter, till it comes to a certain period of heat, such as is that of the Sun?"
"By far the best proof is experience."
"A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation."
"The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs."
"All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P."
"I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there! There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn't have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don't bother."
"Therefore, O students, study mathematics and do not build without foundations."
"I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own."
"Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual."
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
"I never could do anything with figures, never had any talent for mathematics, never accomplished anything in my efforts at that rugged study, and to-day the only mathematics I know is multiplication, and the minute I get away up in that, as soon as I reach nine times seven- [He lapsed into deep thought, trying to figure nine times seven. Mr. McKelway whispered the answer to him.] I've got it now. It's eighty-four. Well, I can get that far all right with a little hesitation. After that I am uncertain, and I can't manage a statistic."
"It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist."
"Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience."
"The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions."
