Quotes on Science

After all, science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it.

I had ... come to an entirely erroneous conclusion, which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data.

It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another's learning.

In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought.

To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.

It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing.

Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.

The history of science is science itself; the history of the individual, the individual.

The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality.

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

Scientific reasoning is a dialogue between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal between what might be true, and what is in fact the case.

All things are from water and all things are resolved into water.

Civilization no longer needs to open up wilderness; it needs wilderness to help open up the still largely unexplored human mind.

They assembled together and dedicated these as the first-fruits of their love to Apollo in his Delphic temple, inscribing there those maxims which are on every tongue- 'know thyselP and 'Nothing overmuch.'