Quotes on Science

Why are you so sure parallel lines exist? Believe nothing, merely because you have been told it, or because it is traditional, or because you have imagined it.

And as I had my father's kind of mind-which was also his mother's-I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

Physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.

There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry... There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.

The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing.

The science of systematics has long been affected by profound philosophical preconceptions, which have been all the more influential for being usually covert, even subconscious.

The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life.

The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.

No one can speak well, unless he thoroughly understands his subject.

Mighty is geometry; joined with art, resistless.

There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.

Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard-or try to turn back-the measureable advances that we have made.

My aim is to say that the machinery of the heavens is not like a divine animal but like a clock (and anyone who believes a clock has a soul gives the work the honour due to its maker) and that in it almost all the variety of motions is from one very simple magnetic force acting on bodies, as in the clock all motions are from a very simple weight.

It is in the nature of water ... to become transformed into earth through a predominating earthy virtue; ... it is in the nature of earth to become transformed into water through a predominating aqueous virtue.

Since, then, there is no objection to the mobility of the Earth, I think it must now be considered whether several motions are appropriate for it, so that it can be regarded as one of the wandering stars. For the fact that it is not the centre of all revolutions is made clear by the apparent irregular motion of the wandering stars, and their variable distances from the Earth, which cannot be understood in a circle having the same centre as the Earth.

The body of the earth is of the nature of a fish... because it draws water as its breath instead of air.

All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.