Skip to content

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.

Random quote on Science

Most quoted on science:

GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportion to the quantity of matter they contain -- the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.

Ambrose Bierce The Cynic's Dictionary (1906)

Light-waves in passing a massive body such as the sun are deflected through a small angle. This is additional evidence that the Newtonian picture of gravitation as a tug is inadequate. You cannot deflect waves by tugging at them, and clearly another representation of the agency which deflects them must be found.

Arthur Eddington The Nature of the Physical World (1928)

Children, behold the Chimpanzee;
He sits on the ancestral tree
From which we sprang in ages gone.
I'm glad we sprang: had we held on,
We might, for aught that I can say,
Be horrid Chimpanzees to-day.

Oliver Herford The Chimpanzee; Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

The present revolution of scientific thought follows in natural sequence on the great revolutions at earlier epochs in the history of science. Einstein's special theory of relativity, which explains the indeterminateness of the frame of space and time, crowns the work of Copernicus who first led us to give up our insistence on a geocentric outlook on nature; Einstein's general theory of relativity, which reveals the curvature or non-Euclidean geometry of space and time, carries forward the rudimentary thought of those earlier astronomers who first contemplated the possibility that their existence lay on something which was not flat. These earlier revolutions are still a source of perplexity in childhood, which we soon outgrow; and a time will come when Einstein's amazing revelations have likewise sunk into the commonplaces of educated thought.

Arthur Eddington

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious — fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance.

Thomas Henry Huxley The interpreters of Genesis and the interpreters of Nature (1885)

Hellenic science is a victory of rationalism, which appears greater, not smaller, when one is made to realize that it had been won in spite of the irrational beliefs of the Greek people; all in all, it was a triumph of reason in the face of unreason. Some knowledge of Greek superstitions is needed not only for a proper appreciation of that triumph but also for the justification of occasional failures, such as the many Platonic aberrations.

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

For indeed it is one of the lessons of the history of science that each age steps on the shoulders of the ages which have gone before. The value of each age is not its own, but is in part, in large part, a debt to its forerunners. And this age of ours, if, like its predecessors, it can boast of something of which it is proud, would, could it read the future, doubtless find much also of which it would be ashamed.

Michael Foster

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

Carl Sagan The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

Science has wonders far transcending those of superstition, and they are poor philosophers who try to bring Nature down to the level of their small capacities instead of striving to exalt those capacities to the height of creation's truth. No savage, worshipping the most preposterous idol, ever believed greater absurdities than a modern sceptic, who makes his small modicum of reason the standard by which to measure the boundless universe.

Henry James Slack

Moreover, force, gravity, and words of that kind, are often, and not unwisely, used in the concrete; in such a way that they know the movement of the body, the difficulty of resistance, etc. But when they are used by philosophers to signify certain natures, precise and abstract from all these, which are neither subject to the senses, nor can be understood by any power of the mind, nor can they be shaped by the imagination, they in turn give rise to errors and confusion.

George Berkeley De Motu (1721)

Histories of scientific thought tend to obscure the revolutionary state of knowledge in the age of Archimedes—the Hellenistic period—toning down the differences between it, the natural philosophy of classical Greece two centuries earlier, and even the prescientific knowledge of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Lucio Russo

He who performs not practical work nor makes experiments will never attain to the least degree of mastery. But then, O my son, do thou experiment so that thou mayesy acquire knowledge. Scientists delight not in abundance of material; they rejoice only in the excellence of their experimental methods.

Jabir ibn Hayyan

The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to a rigorous scrutiny, and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world, of which science is the second-order expression.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

The history of science may be treated from the point of view that it records attempts to place metaphysical disguises upon the faces of process and procedure... The metaphysics that still dominates science and enthralls the minds of men is nothing but a metaphor, and a limited one.

Colin Murray Turbayne The Myth of Metaphor (1962)

Let such a history be once provided and well set forth, and let there be added to it such auxiliary and light-giving experiments... and the investigation of nature and of all sciences will be the work of a few years. ...In this way, and in this way only, can the foundations of a true and active philosophy be established; and then will men wake as from deep sleep.

Francis Bacon

How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about our world! And it is all so novel, too. The cosmology underlying our mental processes is but three centuries old—a mere infant in the history of thought—and yet we cling to it with the same embarrassed zeal with which a young father fondles his new-born baby.

Edwin Arthur Burtt The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science; a Historical and Critical Essay (1925)

The effect of these researches has been, a persuasion, that we need not despair of seeing, even in our own time, a renovation of sound philosophy, directed by the light which the History of Science sheds. Such a reform, when its Epoch shall arrive, will not be the work of any single writer, but the result of the intellectual tendencies of the age.

William Whewell History of the Inductive Sciences (1837)

Tell your son to stop trying to fill your head with science — for to fill your heart with love is enough!

Richard Feynman

Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly.

Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)

Any sufficiently advanced form of magick will appear indistinguishable from science.

Peter J. Carroll PsyberMagick (1995)

Related topics