quotations about science
On entering upon any scientific pursuit, one of the student's first endeavors should be to prepare his mind for the reception of the truth, by dismissing or at least loosening his hold on all such crude and hastily adopted notions respecting the objects and relations he is about to examine, as may tend to embarrass or mislead him.
SIR JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM HERSCHEL
attributed, Day's Collacon
Science is the poetry of reality.
RICHARD DAWKINS
"Slaves to Superstition", The Enemies of Reason
Let science, by cultivating man's intellect, elevate him to nobler and more spiritual views of God's wisdom and power.
JOSIAH P. COOKE
Religion and Chemistry
Science does not reveal anything beyond this life.
PIERRE FORESTIER
attributed, Day's Collacon
It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is sure of.
JEAN ROSTAND
"A Biologist's Thoughts", The Substance of Man
The distinctive feature of science is that it is both broad and deep: broad in the way it tackles all physical phenomena and deep in the way it weaves them, economically, into a common explanatory scheme requiring fewer and fewer assumptions. No other system of thought can match its breadth and depth.
PAUL DAVIES
Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life
Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for a higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosopher of another: He takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him.
THOMAS PAINE
The Works of Thomas Paine
Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
A connecting principle
Linked to the invisible
Almost imperceptible
Something inexpressible
Science insusceptible
Logic so inflexible
Causally connectable
Nothing is invincible
If we share this nightmare
We can dream
Spiritus mundi
THE POLICE
"Synchronicity I"
Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.
ISAAC ASIMOV
interview, Bill Moyers' World of Ideas, October 21, 1988
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
Science and Human Values
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
To make reason the arbiter and supreme guide of public opinion; that is the essential goal of the sciences; that is how science will contribute to the advancement of civilization.
GEORGES CUVIER
Rapport historique sur les progrès des sciences naturelles
The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.
ISAAC ASIMOV
"The Three Numbers", Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September 1974
Don't tell me about the scientific advances of the twentieth century. So men are planning a trip to the moon. So computers run every large industry in America. So body organs are being transplanted like perennials. Big deal! You show me a washer that will launder a pair of socks and return them to you as a pair, and I'll light a firecracker.
ERMA BOMBECK
Forever, Erma
Science is the only religion of mankind.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Childhood's End
Science! thou fair effusive ray from the great source of mental Day, free, generous, and refin'd! Descend with all thy treasures fraught, illumine each bewilder'd thought, and bless my labouring mind.
MARK AKENSIDE
"Hymn to Science"
Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world--a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious--surely never again to set.
WALT WHITMAN
"Democratic Vistas", Two Rivulets
Science: The creation of dilemmas by the solution of mysteries.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Science helps us before all things in this, that it somewhat lightens the feeling of wonder with which Nature fills us; then, however, as life becomes more and more complex, it creates new facilities for the avoidance of what would do us harm and the promotion of what will do us good.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe