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Science Quotes

Asimov, Jacob Bronowski, Einstein, Arthur Eddington and Carl Sagan lead the page. The most-sourced writer is Henri Poincaré, with several passages from Science and Hypothesis (1901) and The Value of Science (1905), including the one about doubting everything and believing everything being two equally convenient ways to avoid thinking.

Two entries are flagged. “Etymology is a science in which vowels signify nothing at all, and consonants very little” is credited to Voltaire as disputed, and the notes cite two scholarly articles on where the saying comes from. “Mathematics is the key and door to the sciences” is credited to Galileo and flagged misattributed.

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Most quoted on science:

The successful launching of the Sputnik was a demonstration of one of the highest scientific and technological achievements of man—a tantalizing invitation both to the militarist in search of ever more devastating means of destruction and to the astronomer searching for new means of carrying his instruments away from their earthbound environment.

Bernard Lovell

Zoologists maintain that the embryonic development of an animal recapitulates in brief the whole history of its ancestors throughout geologic time. It seems it is the same in the development of minds. The teacher should make the child go over the path his fathers trod; more rapidly, but without skipping stations. For this reason the history of science should be our first guide.

Henri Poincaré Science and Method (1914)

The aim of science is, on the one hand, a comprehension, as complete as possible, of the connection between the sense experiences in their totality, and, on the other hand, the accomplishment of this aim by the use of a minimum of primary concepts and relations. (Seeking, as far as possible, logical unity in the world picture, i.e. paucity in logical elements.)

Albert Einstein

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

If light takes the path with the least time between two points, and light beams bend under the influence of gravity, then the shortest distance between two points is a curved line. Einstein was shocked by this conclusion: If light could be observed traveling in a curved line, it would mean that space itself is curved.

Michio Kaku

The history of science should not be an instrument to defend any kind of social or philosophic theory; it should be used only for its own purpose, to illustrate impartially the working of reason against unreason, the gradual unfolding of truth, in all its forms, whether pleasant or unpleasant, useful or useless, welcome or unwelcome.

George Sarton A History of Science Vol.1 Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece (1952)

Scientists don’t arrive at the truth by inward certainty or by majority vote, but they do demonstrate it to each other (and to other men) by open and rational procedures. If an experiment or observation can’t be repeated, it can’t be accepted, no matter how great the reputation, scientific or otherwise, of the man who says he did it or saw it.

Fritz Leiber

Тhе сепtгаl роіпt геmаіпs that Darwin provided a theory which predicts that organisms should have parts adapted to ensure their survival and reproduction. This has led to the suggestion that life should be defined by the possession of those properties which are needed to ensure evolution by natural selection. That is, entities with the properties of multiplication, variation, and heredity are alive, and entities lacking one or more of those properties are not.

John Maynard Smith The Problems of Biology (1986)

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.

Karl Popper Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963)

Vigorous criticism is more constructive in science than in some other areas of human endeavor because in science there are adequate standards of validity that can be agreed upon by competent practitioners the world over. The objective of such criticism is not to suppress but rather to encourage the advance of new ideas: those that survive a firm skeptical scrutiny have a fighting chance of being right, or at least useful.

Carl Sagan Broca's Brain (1979)

It has never been in my power to study anything, — mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic.

Charles Sanders Peirce

In a fashion, at least in your time, science has as much as religion to fear from the free intellect as religion does. And (with irony) any strong combination of intellectual and intuitional abilities is not tailor-made to bring you great friends from either category. Science has, unfortunately, bound up the minds of its own most original thinkers, for they dare not stray from certain scientific principles.

Jane Roberts The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981)

Too often, this concern for the big picture is simply obscurantist and is put forward by people who prefer vagueness and mystery to (partial) answers. Vagueness is at times necessary and mystery is never in short supply, but I don’t think they’re anything to worship. Genuine science and mathematical precision are more intriguing than are the “facts” published in supermarket tabloids or a romantic innumeracy which fosters credulity, stunts skepticism, and dulls one to real imponderables.

John Allen Paulos Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1988)

With respect to science, the assumption behind consensus is that science is a source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists. Of course, science is not primarily a source of authority. Rather, it is a particularly effective approach to inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science; consensus is foreign.

Richard Lindzen

The impression that science is over has occurred many times in various branches of human knowledge, often because of an explosion of discoveries made by a genius or a small group of men in such a short time that average minds could hardly follow and had the unconscious desire to take breath, to get used to the unexpected things that came to be revealed. Dazzled by these new truths, they could not see beyond. Sometimes an entire century did not suffice to produce this accommodation.

Charles Fabry La vie et l'oeuvre scientifique de Augustin Fresnel (1927)

Science is a culture, constantly growing and changing. The science of today has broken out of the molds of classical nineteenth-century science, just as the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock broke out of the molds of nineteenth-century art. Science has as many competing styles as painting or poetry.

Freeman Dyson

What is a scientist?… 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

I praise the chemical physicians, for they do not go about gorgeous in satins, silks, and velvets, silver daggers hanging at their sides, and white gloves on their hands, but they tend their work at the fire patiently day and night. They do not go promenading, but seek their recreation in laboratory. They thrust their fingers among the coals into dirt and rubbish and not into golden rings.

Paracelsus

Every chemical substance, whether natural or artificial, falls into one of two major categories, according to the spatial characteristic of its form. The distinction is between those substances that have a plane of symmetry and those that do not. The former belong to the mineral, the latter to the living world.

Louis Pasteur

Our species, from the time of its creation, has been travelling onwards in pursuit of truth; and now that we have reached a lofty and commanding position, with the broad light of day around us, it must be grateful to look back on the line of our past progress;—to review the journey.

William Whewell History of the Inductive Sciences (1837)

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