"Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency are like a face without eyes."
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Science quotes
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Science quotes (page 98 of 352)
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"I told him that for a modern scientist, practicing experimental research, the least that could be said, is that we do not know. But I felt that such a negative answer was only part of the truth. I told him that in this universe in which we live, unbounded in space, infinite in stored energy and, who knows, unlimited in time, the adequate and positive answer, according to my belief, is that this universe may, also, possess infinite potentialities."
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"[Concerning] the usual contempt with which an orthodox analytic group treats all outsiders and strangers ... I urge you to think of the young psychoanalysts as your colleagues, collaborators and partners and not as spies, traitors and wayward children. You can never develop a science that way, only an orthodox church."
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"O amazement of things-even the least particle!"
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"The magnet's name the observing Grecians drew. From the magnetic region where it grew."
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"The magnetic force is animate, or imitates a soul; in many respects it surpasses the human soul while it is united to an organic body."
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"Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not."
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"Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?"
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"Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart."
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"'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it."
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"Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein."
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"A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description."
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"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous."
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"We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of Prayer. Many reasons are given why we should not pray. Others give reasons why we should pray. Very little is said of the reason we do pray. The reason is simple: We pray because we cannot help praying."
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"Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man."
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"I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one."
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"Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know."
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"While, on the one hand, the end of scientific investigation is the discovery of laws, on the other, science will have reached its highest goal when it shall have reduced ultimate laws to one or two, the necessity of which lies outside the sphere of our cognition. These ultimate laws-in the domain of physical science at least-will be the dynamical laws of the relations of matter to number, space, and time. The ultimate data will be number, matter, space, and time themselves. When these relations shall be known, all physical phenomena will be a branch of pure mathematics."
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"And nature must obey necessity."
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"There's nothing situate under heaven's eye But hath his bond in earth, in sea, in sky. The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowls Are their males' subjects and at their controls. Man, more divine, the master of all these, Lord of the wide world and wild wat'ry seas, Indu'd with intellectual sense and souls, Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls, Are masters to their females, and their lords; Then let your will attend on their accords."
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