Skip to content

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.

— Robert Oppenheimer

Another quote →

Topics

Science

More quotes by Robert Oppenheimer

There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.

The extreme danger to mankind inherent in the proposal [to develop thermonuclear weapons] wholly outweighs any military advantage.

We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

All Robert Oppenheimer quotes →

You may also like

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many features.

Freeman Dyson Infinite in All Directions (1988)

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

Henri Poincaré Science and Hypothesis (1901)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Oppenheimer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.