88 quotes
No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Science is not a special sense. It is as wide as the literal meaning of its name: knowledge.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike.
The God Particle (1993)
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature.
Science is a way of describing reality; it is therefore limited by the limits of observation; and it asserts nothing which is outside observation. Anything else is not science; it is scholastics.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.
The Ascent of Man (1973)
There are three creative ideas which, each in its turn, have been central to science. They are the idea of order, the idea of causes, and the idea of chance.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
The great flood was the seventeenth century. That was the time of change, the hanging moment of instability in which men like Cromwell and Newton could remake the world.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
The mastery and the greatness of science rests in the end on this, that here the rational and the empirical are knotted together. Science is fact and thought giving strength to one another.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.
An earthly paradise is not made by this endless repetition, going round and round like a caged animal, making always the same thing, failing to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge.
All great scientists have used their imaginations freely, and let it ride them to outrageous conclusions without crying "Halt!"
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
Fifty years from now, if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books, we shall not exist.
The Ascent of Man (1973)
In a parched African landscape like this at Omo, man first put his foot to the ground. That seems a pedestrian way to begin the ascent of man.
The Ascent of Man (1973)
The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.
The Ascent of Man (1973)
The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists, was science itself.
To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
The Scientific Revolution revolution was a change from a world of things ordered according to their ideal nature, to a world of events running in a steady mechanism of before and after.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it.
The Ascent of Man (1973)
It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all.
Science and Human Values (1956)