Quotes on Science

“Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.”
― William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

William James, Science, Life

“When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, okay, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength — 400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well, it’s really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore after that.”

Elon Musk, Courage, Science

“Well, I do think there’s a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. What I mean by that is boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn’t be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach.”

Elon Musk, Goals, Intelligence/Wisdom, Science, Truth, Life

“The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Nature, Society, Science

“There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science

“We must surrender our skepticism only in the face of rock-solid evidence. Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. Where we are ignorant, we withhold belief. Whatever annoyance the uncertainty engenders serves a higher purpose: It drives us to accumulate better data. This attitude is the difference between science and so much else. Science offers little in the way of cheap thrills. The standards of evidence are strict. But when followed they allow us to see far, illuminating even a great darkness.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science

“Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science

“There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science

“Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things, that there are wonders unimagined, that the Universe is not obliged to conform to what we consider comfortable or plausible. We have learned something about the idiosyncratic nature of our common sense. Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. This is surely a rite of passage, a step towards maturity.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science, Nature

“It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science, Nature

“On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science, Nature

“A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.” ― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Belief, Science

“What do we really want from religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish. You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such thoughts into print. The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe -- which seems truly pointless -- but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Belief, Science

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Belief, Science

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Society, Science

“The symbolism seemed so apt. The same technology that can propel apocalyptic weapons from continent to continent would enable the first human voyage to another planet. It was a choice of fitting mythic power: to embrace the planet named after, rather than the madness ascribed to, the god of war.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science, Technology

“The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything in space in the past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science, Technology

“We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science, Technology

“Planetary exploration satisfies our inclination for great enterprises and wanderings and quests that has been with us since our days as hunters and gatherers on the East African savannahs a million years ago. By chance—it is possible, I say, to imagine many skeins of historical causality in which this would not have transpired—in our age we are able to begin again.

Exploring other worlds employs precisely the same qualities of daring, planning, cooperative enterprise, and valor that mark the finest in military tradition. Never mind the night launch of an Apollo spacecraft bound for another world. That makes the conclusion foregone. Witness mere F-14s taking off from adjacent flight decks, gracefully canting left and right, afterburners flaming, and there’s something that sweeps you away—or at least it does me. And no amount of knowledge of the potential abuses of carrier task forces can affect the depth of that feeling. It simply speaks to another part of me. It doesn’t want recriminations or politics. It just wants to fly.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science, Technology

“Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there&pos;s no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science, Technology

“I do not think it irresponsible to portray even the direst futures if we are to avoid them we must understand that they are possible. But where are the alternatives Where are the dreams that motivate and inspire We long for realistic maps of a world we can be proud to give to our children. Where are the cartographers of human purpose Where are the visions of hopeful futures of technology as a tool for human betterment and not a gun on hair trigger pointed at our heads.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Science, Technology, Goals

"There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever."

Thomas Edison, Ideas, Science, Anger and Fighting

“Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of man; since they lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties.”

David Hume, Science

“You may not believe in evolution, and that’s alright. How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves.”

Jane Goodall, Science

“Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn't so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.”

Jane Goodall, Sex, Science

"The only English patients I have ever known refuse tea have been typhus cases; and the first sign of their getting better was their craving again for tea."

Florence Nightingale, Science

"Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection."

Florence Nightingale, Science

"There are no specific diseases, only specific disease conditions."

Florence Nightingale, Science

"If you knew how unreasonably sick people suffer from reasonable causes of distress, you would take more pains about all these things."

Florence Nightingale, Science

"The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply."

Florence Nightingale, Science

"The craving for ‘the return of the day, which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light."

Florence Nightingale, Science

“It is the unqualified result of all my experience with the sick that, second only to their need of fresh air, is their need of light; that, after a close room, what hurts them most is a dark room and that it is not only light but direct sunlight they want.”

Florence Nightingale, Science

"The amount of relief and comfort experienced by the sick after the skin has been carefully washed and dried, is one of the commonest observations made at a sick bed."

Florence Nightingale, Science

"People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too. Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by color, and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical effect. Variety of form and brilliancy of color in the objects presented to patients, are actual means of recovery."

Florence Nightingale, Science

"Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion. Remember he is face to face with his enemy all the time."

Florence Nightingale, Science

“It is often thought that medicine is the curative process. It is no such thing; medicine is the surgery of functions, as surgery proper is that of limbs and organs. Neither can do anything but remove obstructions; neither can cure; nature alone cures. Surgery removes the bullet out of the limb, which is an obstruction to cure, but nature heals the wound. So it is with medicine; the function of an organ becomes obstructed; medicine, so far as we know, assists nature to remove the obstruction, but does nothing more. And what nursing has to do in either case, is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.”

Florence Nightingale, Science

“Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow.”

Florence Nightingale, Science

“Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings.”

Helen Keller, Science

"I like the scientific spirit – the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine – it always keeps the way beyond open – always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake – after a wrong guess."

Walt Whitman, Science

"Science is constantly proved all the time. If we take something like any fiction, any holy book, and destroyed it, in a thousand years’ time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back because all the same tests would be the same result."

Ricky Gervais, Belief, Science

"Dear Religion, This week I safely dropped a man from space while you shot a child in the head for wanting to go to school. Yours, Science."

Ricky Gervais, Belief, Science

"We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself."

Maria Montessori, Life, Science

"Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions."

Stephen Hawking, Science, Time

"If you remember every word in this book, your memory will have recorded about two million pieces of information: the order in your brain will have increased by about two million units. However, while you have been reading the book, you will have converted at least a thousand calories of ordered energy, in the form of food, into disordered energy, in the form of heat that you lose to the air around you by convection and sweat. This will increase the disorder of the universe by about twenty million million million million units - or about ten million million million times the increase in order in your brain - and that's if you remember everything in this book."

Stephen Hawking, Science, Intelligence/Wisdom

"The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time."

Stephen Hawking, Science

"If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do."

Stephen Hawking, Life, Science

"The idea of 10 dimensions might sound exciting, but they would cause real problems if you forget where you parked your car."

Stephen Hawking, Science

"What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary."

Stephen Hawking, Belief, Science

"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."

Stephen Hawking, Belief, Science

"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?"

Stephen Hawking, Science

"Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.

Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war."

Tesla, Anger and Fighting, Intelligence/Wisdom, Science

"Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise."

Tesla, Belief, Science, Life

"I am part of a light, and it is the music. The Light fills my six senses: I see it, hear, feel, smell, touch and think. Thinking of it means my sixth sense. Particles of Light are written note. O bolt of lightning can be an entire sonata. A thousand balls of lightening is a concert.. For this concert I have created a Ball Lightning, which can be heard on the icy peaks of the Himalayas."

Tesla, Science

"Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

Tesla, Science

"What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics."

Tesla, Belief, Science

"Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors."

Tesla, Life, Science

"When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt to-day that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole?

For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. Metaphysical proofs are, however, not the only ones which we are able to bring forth in support of this idea. Science, too, recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense as it admits that the suns, planets, and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection. Still more: this one human being lives on and on. The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole."

Tesla, Society, Friendship, Belief, Science

"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more."

Tesla, Life, Science

"If your hate could be turned into electricity, it would light up the whole world."

Tesla, Anger and Fighting, Science

"The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence."

Tesla, Science

"If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration."

Tesla, Science

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."

Steve Jobs, Management, Science

"The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet."

JFK- John F. Kennedy, Science

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."

JFK- John F. Kennedy, Science

"Nature does nothing uselessly."

Aristotle, Science

"The energy of the mind is the essence of life."

Aristotle, Life, Science

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

Aristotle, Science

"Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know."

Bertrand Russell, Science, Intelligence/Wisdom

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show."

Quotes

Famous and Original Quotes