quotations about science
Science mines nature for truth of a different order -- it is our mightiest means of communing with reality, probing its mysteries, and gleaning from them some sense of belonging, of locating ourselves in the universe, understanding our place in it, and liberating ourselves from delusion.
MARIA POPOVA
"Poetry as Protest and Sanctuary", brainpickings, April 18, 2017
Science is my life. To live out here you need to know things. You need to be able to read the land and feel the changes. I call it a quiet voice. To really hear it and understand your sense of place and where you are.... You really need to clear your mind to hear it.
JASMINE GIL
"Science is my life", Juneau Empire, September 8, 2017
Without the ontological assumption which goes with it, what is called science, is nothing but the dreamer's well-ordered dream.
GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD
Philosophy of Mind: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Psychology
In science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.
LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
A Universe from Nothing
Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively; strive to get clear notions about all; give up no science entirely, for science is but one.
SENECA
attributed, Day's Collacon
The meaning of science is not fixed, but is dynamic. As science has evolved, so has its meaning.
RUSSELL L. ACKOFF
Scientific Method: Optimizing Applied Research Decisions
Science has equipped man in less than fifty years with more tools than he had made during the thousands of years he had lived on earth. Each new machine being for man a new organ -- an artificial organ -- his body became suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being at the same time able to dilate to the dimensions of his body.
HENRI BERGSON
Centennial of Engineering: History and Proceedings of Symposia: 1852-1952
In popularizing a scientific development it was always crucial to sail the narrow strait between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public befuddlement.
GREGORY BENFORD
Artifact
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
WILL DURANT
The Story of Philosophy
Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply -- there are always new worlds to conquer.
SIR HUMPHREY DAVY
discourse delivered at the Royal Society, November 30, 1825
I'd like to think by the end of the show, you have warmed up to what science is. It's not just some class you took in school and you forget about after you sell back the textbook. You recognize that science is everywhere -- it touches us at all times.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
"Neil DeGrasse Tyson Says Science Isn't Dead -- And You're The One Who's Saving It", Good Education, September 29, 2017
One of the chief interests in Science is its bearing on [the] great questions: the light it throws on our own nature and the nature of the Universe; and the humility it teaches by everywhere leaving us in presence of the inscrutable. The dull world outside thinks of Science as nothing but a matter of chemical analyses, calculations of distance and times, labeling of species, physiological experiments, and the like; but among the initiated, those of higher type, while seeking scientific knowledge for its proximate value, have an ever-increasing consciousness of its ultimate value as a transfiguration of things, which, marvellous enough within the limits of the knowable, suggests a profounder marvel that cannot be known.
HERBERT SPENCER
An Autobiography
The success of science, both its intellectual excitement and its practical application, depend upon the self-correcting character of science. There must be a way of testing any valid idea. It must be possible to reproduce any valid experiment. The character or beliefs of the scientists are irrelevant; all that matters is whether the evidence supports his contention.
CARL SAGAN
Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Out of My Later Years
For science is ... like virtue, its own exceeding great reward.
CHARLES KINGSLEY
"Soldiers of Science", The Works of Charles Kingsley
True science, so far from being an enemy to religious truth, will always stand as the mediator in the ever-pending conflict between religious faith and human reason.
C. S. WEST
"The Moral Element in Education", Southern Student's Hand-book of Selections for Reading and Oratory
The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
STEPHEN HAWKING
A Brief History of Time
So what is science, and why do we consider it so useful and important? Despite the Hollywood stereotypes, science is not about white lab coats and bubbling beakers or sparkling apparatuses. Science is a way of looking at the world using a specific toolbox--the scientific method.
DONALD PROTHERO
"The Holocaust, Denier's Playbook, and the Tobacco Smokescreen: Common Threads in the Thinking and Tactics of Denialists and Pseudoscientists", Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem
Better for science that she should be free, in holy poverty, to go where she will and say what she knows, than that she should be hired out at so much a year to say things pleasing to the many, and to those who guide the many.
CHARLES KINGSLEY
"Soldiers of Science", The Works of Charles Kingsley
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Descent of Man