Science quotes
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"You know, all is development. The principle is perpetually going on. First, there was nothing, then there was something; then-I forget the next-I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came-let me see-did we come next? Never mind that; we came at last. And at the next change there will be something very superior to us-something with wings. Ah! That's it: we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows."
"...the debate among the scientists if over. There is no more debate. We face a planetary emergency. There is no more scientific debate among serious people who've looked at the science...Well, I guess in some quarters, there's still a debate over whether the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona, or whether the Earth is flat instead of round."
"The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen-this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress."
"About weak points [of the Origin] I agree. The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder."
"My imagination would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention"
"Do experimental work but keep in mind that other investigators in the same field will consider your discoveries as less than one fourth as important as they seem to you."
"Man is an animal with primary instincts of survival. Consequently his ingenuity has developed first and his soul afterwards. The progress of science is far ahead of man's ethical behavior."
"Ardent desire for knowledge, in fact, is the one motive attracting and supporting investigators in their efforts; and just this knowledge, really grasped and yet always flying before them, becomes at once their sole torment and their sole happiness. Those who do not know the torment of the unknown cannot have the joy of discovery which is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel."
"In a word, I consider hospitals only as the entrance to scientific medicine; they are the first field of observation which a physician enters; but the true sanctuary of medical science is a laboratory; only there can he seek explanations of life in the normal and pathological states by means of experimental analysis."
"In the philosophic sense, observation shows and experiment teaches."
"Obervation is a passive science, experimentation is an active science."
"Laplace considers astronomy a science of observation, because we can only observe the movements of the planets; we cannot reach them, indeed, to alter their course and to experiment with them. "On earth," said Laplace, "we make phenomena vary by experiments; in the sky, we carefully define all the phenomena presented to us by celestial motion." Certain physicians call medicine a science of observations, because they wrongly think that experimentation is inapplicable to it."
"A discovery is generally an unforeseen relation not included in theory."
"It has often been said that, to make discoveries, one must be ignorant. This opinion, mistaken in itself, nevertheless conceals a truth. It means that it is better to know nothing than to keep in mind fixed ideas based on theories whose confirmation we constantly seek, neglecting meanwhile everything that fails to agree with them."
"You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years."
"At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. ... I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world. After I had learned the fifth proposition, my brother told me that it was generally considered difficult, but I had found no difficulty whatsoever. This was the first time it had dawned on me that I might have some intelligence."
"I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions."
"In science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it. ... In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement."
"The parts of the universe ... all are connected with each other in such a way that I think it to be impossible to understand any one without the whole."
"Flies are so mighty that they win battles, paralyse our minds, eat up our bodies."
