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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.

Random quote on Science

Most quoted on science:

The whole subject-matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications.

Arthur Eddington The Nature of the Physical World (1928)

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872)

Concern for the symbol has completely disappeared from our science.

Simone Weil The Need for Roots (1949)

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

René Daumal The Lie of the Truth (1938)

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

Edwin Hubbell Chapin Living Words (1860)

Everyone else besides the faithful already knows that religion has nothing useful to say to science.

Jerry Coyne

The science of arithmetic may be called the science of exact limitation of matter and things in space, force, and time.

Francis Wayland Parker Talks on Pedagogics (1894)

Unite behind the science, that is our demand. (Thunberg told a plenary session of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC).

Greta Thunberg

Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant.

Orson Scott Card Speaker for the Dead (1986)

In this sense, we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

Donald Knuth Computer Programming as an Art (1974)

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification — the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

Karl Popper The Open Universe : An Argument for Indeterminism (1992)

Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.

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

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Richard Feynman

I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

Charles Lindbergh

There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions.

Freeman Dyson The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole.

Freeman Dyson The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

J. G. Ballard

For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.

C. J. Cherryh The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh (2004)

The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.

Thomas Szasz Anti-Freud (1990)

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

Thomas Henry Huxley On the advisableness of improving natural knowledge (1866)

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