ToInspire Quotes

Science

Science and art belong to the whole world, and the barriers of nationality vanish before them - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjectures out of such trifling investment of fact. - Mark Twain

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. - Edsgar Dijkstra

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into thereoms. - Paul Erdos

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. - Carl Sagan

All these constructions and the laws connecting them can be arrived at by the principle of looking for the mathematically simplest concepts and the link between them. - Albert Einstein

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. - Albert Einstein

We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough? - Niels Bohr

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. - Buckminster Fuller

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. - Paul Dirac

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. - John von Neumann

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. - Albert Einstein

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation. - H. H. Munro (Saki)

If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries. - Karl Friedrich Gauss

The grand aim of science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms. - Albert Einstein

Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research. - Wilson Mizner

This isn't right, this isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli, upon reading a young physicist's p

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. - Wernher Von Braun

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. - Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies, 1931

Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts. - Heinz Pagels, The Dreams of Reason, 1988

The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science. - Sagan, Carl

Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind. - Albert Einstein

All science is either physics or stamp collecting. - Ernest Rutherford

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. - Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. - Albert Einstein

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter. - James Clerk Maxwell

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

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery. - René Descartes

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another that states that this has already happened. - Douglas Adams

There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. - Desmond Morris

It has become increasingly difficult to keep abreast of and to assimilate the investigative reports which accumulate day after day. My friend. . .was ill at ease because he felt unable to control even the area of his own discipline; one suffocates, he once told me, through exposure to the massive body of rapidly growing information. (German Surgeon 1872) - Bernhard von Langenbeck

...we live in a culture of relentless, round-the-clock boosterism for science and technology. With each new discovery and invention, the virtues are always oversold, the drawbacks understated. Who can forget the freely mobile society of the automobile, the friendly atom, the paperless office, the impending crisis of too much leisure time, or the era of universal education ushered in by television? We now hear the same utopian claims about the Internet. But everyone knows science and technology are inevitably a mixed blessing. (from Ritual Abuse, Hot Air, and Missed Opportunities SCIENCE 5 March 1999; 283 (5407): 1461) - Michael Crichton

Everyone is an explorer. How could you possibly live your life looking at a door and not open it? (quoted by Priit J. Vesilind in National Geographic) - Robert D. Ballard

To the individual who devotes his or her life to science, nothing can give more happiness than when the results immediately find practical applications. There are not two sciences. There is science and the application of science and these two are linked as the fruit is to the tree (1871). - Louis Pasteur