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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:

To determine what science will be in the future, we need a conception of what science is. I define science as "the systematic effort to understand natural phenomena."

Gerald Feinberg Solid Clues: Quantum Physics, Molecular Biology, and the Future of Science (1985)

Evolution is a change from an indefinite, incoherent, homogeneity to a definite, coherent, heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations.

Herbert Spencer

'Twas thus by the glare of false science betray'd,
That leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind.

James Beattie The Hermit. Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922)

O star-eyed Science, hast thou wander'd there,
To waft us home the message of despair?

Thomas Campbell

I'm not anti-science, I'm anti the way science is sometimes used.

Charles III

The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge.

Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

Science makes progress by combining imagination with experimental results—by insisting on evidence.

Gordon L. Kane

We're science: we're all about coulda, not shoulda!

Patton Oswalt

What are the sciences but maps of universal laws, and universal laws but the channels of universal power; and universal power but the outgoings of a universal mind?

Edward Thomson

Luther is abundantly learned, therefore you hate him and me, but we are at least a match for you.

Paracelsus

Atomism began life as a philosophical idea that would fail virtually every contemporary test of what should be regarded as 'scientific'; yet, eventually, it became the cornerstone of physical science.

John D. Barrow Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation (1991)

Einstein's law of gravitation controls a geometrical quantity curvature in contrast to Newton's law which controls a mechanical quantity of force.

Arthur Eddington The Nature of the Physical World (1928)

There is something wrong with our world, something fundamentally and basically wrong.

Martin Luther King Jr. Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)

Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.

Arthur Balfour The Foundations of Belief (1895)

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman

Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

Henri Poincaré Science and Hypothesis (1905)

Like a chemist, Napoleon considered all Europe to be material for his experiments. But in due course, this material reacted against him.

Frédéric Bastiat

Chemists do not usually stutter. It would be very awkward if they did, seeing that they have at times to get out such words as methylethylamylophenylium.

William Crookes William H. Brock (1993)

It's chemistry, brother, chemistry! There's no help for it, your reverence, you must make way for chemistry.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton

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