Quotes by Scientists - Page 10

... science demands a terrible price - that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not.
David Brin
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man's control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.
Mark Lawrence
He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune for they are impediments to great enterprises either of virtue or mischief.
Sir Francis Bacon
If I wasn't a devil myself I'd give Me up to the Devil this very minute.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.
Mark Lawrence
Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections - that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It's hard to imagine this, so let's visualise each connection as a disc that's 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.
Nessa Carey
Wives are young men's mistresses companions for middle age and old men's nurses.
Sir Francis Bacon
When a course of action is forced upon you it’s best to accept it with grace and milk it for whatever you can get, right up to the moment the first opportunity to weasel out of the deal presents itself.
Mark Lawrence
to treat a human being as an animal - as a mere space-binder - because humans have certain animal propensities, is an error of the same type and grossness as to treat a cube as a surface because it has surface properties.
Alfred Korzybski
You may have heard that America doesn't have enough scientists and is in danger of "falling behind" (whatever that means) because of it. Tell this to an academic scientist and watch her laugh. For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don't have too few scientists, we've got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation... The list goes on and on.
Hope Jahren
Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
For each person I lost I found a new layer of grief to cover myself with, and each time I tried to bring something of their essence into my own being - be it unconditional love, kindness and piety.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
People work harder, longer, and more creatively if they are motivated by the intrinsic pleasure of their work. Managers must do everything they can to make the value of jobs obvious and the joy in them accessible.
Robert Watson
It's said that 'power corrupts,' but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.
David Brin
Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years.
Alexander Graham Bell
In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm. ... In the real world, all rests on perseverance.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.
Francis Bacon
Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.
René Descartes
What you inherit from your fathermust first be earned before it's yours.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Be yourself. Who else is better qualified?
Frank J. Giblin
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Most importantly, I'd learned how to question and why ("when" had never been an issue: always).
Leslie Anthony
Well, it is generally considered— though not always true— that the wife of a man so honoured is likely also to be worthy of the honour, and so it is accorded her. In the event it is false, and I have known that to be so in more than one circumstance , it is still accorded her in deference to her husband."~Sherlock Holmes, with respect to aristocratic titles
Stephanie Osborn
It is always better to try and fail than not to try.
Alastair Reynolds
It’s as if our bodies know the secret that we don’t wish to admit yet.
Nicky Fox
Gratitude comes in a spectrum of colors, but Ingratitude is always black.
Ankala V Subbarao
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is not easy in this world for one person to understand the next one.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained.
Mark Lawrence
The species greatest harvest ― words.
David Brin
CANDLE WISDOM If you knewwhat you will knowwhen your candlehas burnt low,it would greatlyease your plightwhile your candlestill burns bright.
Piet Hein
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Scientific literacy is a rather noble ideal. Achieving it, however, is problematic thanks to our tribal brains. If science is equated with knowledge, then communicating facts, figures, and theories should be a way to increase the public’s level of engagement with it. However, this boils down to the authority distributing the information. Who do you listen to when there are conflicting sources? Our brain’s desire for certainty and its tendency to evaluate new information based on social clues means anybody painted as an expert, who sounds confident, shares our values and flatters our expectations, is more likely to win over our opinion...regardless of the scientific merits of their argument.
Mike McRae
People like us, we think differently, don't we? We are different. We do all the things that others do. But when it comes down to it, we don't need anyone else. We're happy doing what we do and having obligation interferes with that. And sometimes I think we don't even need ourselves. What's most important is to find out whether we're right or not.
Simon Morden
The difference between an Employer and an Employee is that as payday approaches, the Employee is full of hope and expectation while the Employer is full of fear and trepidation
Ankala V Subbarao
You want leaders driven by mission – not by adrenaline. No one wants to work with people who need to be heroes more than they need to be catalysts.
Robert Watson
Time is the author of authors.
Francis Bacon
Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.
Alastair Reynolds
...no thought, if it be non-mathematical in spirit, can be trusted, and, although mathematicians sometimes make mistakes, the spirit of mathematics is always right and always sound.
Alfred Korzybski
Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.
Mark Lawrence
Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.
Mark Lawrence
We need to consume less. A lot less. Less food, less energy, less stuff. Fewer cars, electric cars, cotton T-shirts, laptops, mobile phone upgrades. Far fewer.Yet, every decade, global consumption continues to increase relentlessly.
Stephen Emmott
Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
René Descartes
It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Radical space technologies never reach the public because unknown groups do not wish humanity to have access to the highest knowledge or the most advanced scientific inventions. Perhaps this suppression is out of fear that the masses may be able to explore our Solar System and the Universe beyond it. Whatever the case, it seems they want us to stay at ignorant levels forever.
Takaaki Musha
All of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand.
David Hawkins
Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You don't usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That's because you've only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.
Alastair Reynolds
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon
Death was kind.” He drew a sharp breath. “But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child.
Mark Lawrence
In evolutionary terms, that means we asked for it.
Sharon Moalem
The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems.
Vladimir L. Voeikov
I demolish my bridges behind me...then there is no choice but to move forward
Fridtjof Nansen
Lies can be expensive to maintain, Alexa. And I’m sure we haven’t seen one percent of the price that the lies in this case ultimately will exact.
Theodore Jerome Cohen
Knowledge is power.
Francis Bacon
I speak as a planetary physician whose patient, the living Earth, complains of fever; I see the Earth's declining health as our most important concern, our very lives depending upon a healthy Earth. Our concern for it must come first, because the welfare of the burgeoning mass of humanity demands a healthy planet.
James E. Lovelock
There is no mistaking a good book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Until Einstein (roughly), THE universe of Newton was, for us, THE universe. With Einstein, it became A universe. Something similar happen to man. A new 'man' was produced, just as good, certainly contraditory to the old one. THE man became A man, otherwise a 'conceptual construction', one among the infinity of possible ones.
Alfred Korzybski
As Eternity has reckonedThere's a lifetime in a second
Piet Hein
Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologically functioning, life sustaining biosphere on the earth. It is the only habitable place we know of in a forbidding universe. We all depend on it to live and we are compelled to share it; it is our only home... the earth's biosphere seems almost magically suited to human beings and indeed it is, for we evolved through eons of intimate immersion within it. We cannot live long or well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything we have.
Joseph Guth