quotations about science
Science: The creation of dilemmas by the solution of mysteries.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
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The Butlerian Jihad
Science is the process of trying to understand the nature of reality. And it's a fundamental of science that we believe reality exists, instead of having it be a human construct or all a matter of relative point of view. There isn't another side of the story in science. There are the right and wrong answers, and you do a better or worse job of understanding that reality, but we do believe reality is there. That's fundamental to what we're doing.
LUCY JONES
Newsweek, October 15, 2007
It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is sure of.
JEAN ROSTAND
"A Biologist's Thoughts", The Substance of Man
To make reason the arbiter and supreme guide of public opinion; that is the essential goal of the sciences; that is how science will contribute to the advancement of civilization.
GEORGES CUVIER
Rapport historique sur les progrès des sciences naturelles
The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.
ISAAC ASIMOV
"The Three Numbers", Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September 1974
Science is the only religion of mankind.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Childhood's End
Consecrate the morning of your reason to the study of the sciences: they are of infinite resource in the course of life; they form the heart, polish the mind, and instruct man in his duties.
NABI-EFFENDI
Some Tracts of the Advice to His Son
Science helps us before all things in this, that it somewhat lightens the feeling of wonder with which Nature fills us; then, however, as life becomes more and more complex, it creates new facilities for the avoidance of what would do us harm and the promotion of what will do us good.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
'Twas thus by the glare of false science betray'd,
That leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind.
JAMES BEATTIE
The Hermit
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
Science is not possible without faith in our perceptions, yet science itself tells us how limited those unaided perceptions are. Knowing within our sliver of reality, therefore, comes naturally; all the rest is rather harder.
DAVID L. KATZ
"Science And Sense In A Post-Truth World: How Do We Know?", Huffington Post, September 29, 2017
Nothing tends more to the corruption of science than to suffer it to stagnate. These waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues. A man who works beyond the surface of things, though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others, and may chance to make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth.
EDMUND BURKE
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke
What has science to offer? This: that we are ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed. No longer an absentee God; no longer a Great First Cause, setting in motion secondary causes which frame the world; no longer a divine mechanic, who has built the world, stored it with forces, launched it upon its course, and now and again interferes with its operation if it goes not right; but one great, eternal, underlying Cause, as truly operative to-day as he was in that first day when the morning stars sang together -- every day a creative day. That is the word of science.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"The Great God Flux", The Art of Being Ruled
On the one hand, science is indispensable to the rational organization of society; on the other, being incapable of interesting itself in that which is real and living, it must not interfere with the real or practical organization of society.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Let science, by cultivating man's intellect, elevate him to nobler and more spiritual views of God's wisdom and power.
JOSIAH P. COOKE
Religion and Chemistry
On entering upon any scientific pursuit, one of the student's first endeavors should be to prepare his mind for the reception of the truth, by dismissing or at least loosening his hold on all such crude and hastily adopted notions respecting the objects and relations he is about to examine, as may tend to embarrass or mislead him.
SIR JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM HERSCHEL
attributed, Day's Collacon
Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for a higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosopher of another: He takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him.
THOMAS PAINE
The Works of Thomas Paine
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
Science and Human Values
The distinctive feature of science is that it is both broad and deep: broad in the way it tackles all physical phenomena and deep in the way it weaves them, economically, into a common explanatory scheme requiring fewer and fewer assumptions. No other system of thought can match its breadth and depth.
PAUL DAVIES
Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life