17 quotes
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature — or more exactly, in the variety of our experience.
The God Particle (1993)
In science and in art and in self-knowledge we explore and move constantly by turning to the world of sense to ask, Is this so?
Science and Human Values (1956)
The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations — more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness.
Science and Human Values (1956)
The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself.
Those who think that science is ethically neutral confuse the findings of science, which are, with the activity of science, which is not.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.
Science and Human Values (1956)
If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have created something, then certainly it is the ideas of science.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
The Ascent of Man (1973)
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.
All great scientists have used their imaginations freely, and let it ride them to outrageous conclusions without crying "Halt!"
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists, was science itself.
Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved. The shame is ours if we do not make science part of our world...
If I were giving this lecture fifty years from now, the word "gravitation" would be as old-fashioned as the word "phlogiston" is to us. Relativity has certainly demoted gravitation as a real explanation, just as Priestley's and Lavoisier's analyses and decoding of chemical reactions destroyed the word "phlogiston."
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)