Quotes by Scientists - Page 2

One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
René Descartes
The way I’d put it,” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.
Mark Lawrence
We need leaders, we need political leaders and we need business leaders, and my hope for this book is that it helps create that next generation of business leaders that will lead us into the future.
James White Fellow of INSTAAR
Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
Francis Bacon
But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.
Francis Bacon
THE FEAR OF ITThey say that resistanceto something inevitable makes it seem worse than it is. Maybe the trickis to give in,try to increase the worry, bend like a tree in the storm, give pain its due,find the center of it and look at it plainly, turn it carefullyin the palm of your hand,and realize it can own only so much of you,unless you give it more.It is a balloonthat can get only so big.Anything more is just the fear of it.
Kat Lehmann
There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don't think this is merely coincidental. It cries out for another explanation, an explanation that... points to purpose and intelligent design in the cosmos.
Guillermo González
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
Francis Bacon
Historically, the Germans had a habit of associating the names of objects with the sounds they made. After bell makers-turned-cannon-makers learned that by closing off the mouth of the cannon before lighting the fuse, the entire cannon could be made to explode, the device they invented became known as the 'bum' (for boom!). In keeping with this tradition, the first one-thousand-pound bomb was dubbed 'ein laussen bum' (meaning, "a loud boom"). After the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, they called the fission device 'ein grossen laussen bum' (or, "a big loud boom"). The next obvious step was the fusion, or H-bomb, which was pronounced 'ein grossen laussen bum all ist kaput!
Charles Pellegrino
The line between fiction and fact is at times factual and at times fictional
Pushkar Ganesh Vaidya
Adventures are to the adventurous. They abound on every side; but only the chosen few have the courage to embrace them. And they will not come to you; you must go out to seek them. Then they meet you half-way, and rush into your arms, for they know their true lovers.
Allen Grant
Beautiful is what we see, More Beautiful is what we know, most Beautiful by far is what we don't
Nicolas Steno
It seems it has been my fate to sadden those I should have made happy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Let us not be like the forest fox foraging for food for itself forever!Let us be like the assiduous ant, always accumulating ample assets for all ants with altruism and all-round assistance.
Ankala V Subbarao
If I love you, what business is it of yours?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the 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
Divide and rule, the politician cries;Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.
John William Draper
The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure, it's a little like making love, the physical act of love.
Francis Bacon
As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the 'eternal verities' on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.
David Brin
Sometimes the only option is to raise the stakes, to throw yourself the other way, to force your opponent further down the path they've chosen, further than they might want to go.
Mark Lawrence
At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge.
Alastair Reynolds
Philosophy, as defined by Fichte, is the "science of sciences." Its aim was to solve the problems of the world. In the past, when all exact sciences were in their infancy, philosophy had to be purely speculative, with little or no regard to realities. But if we regard philosophy as a Mother science, divided into many branches, we find that those branches have grown so large and various, that the Mother science looks like a hen with her little ducklings paddling in a pond, far beyond her reach; she is unable to follow her growing hatchlings. In the meantime, the progress of life and science goes on, irrespective of the cackling of metaphysics. Philosophy does not fulfill her initial aim to bring the results of experimental and exact sciences together and to solve world problems. Through endless, scientific specialization scientific branches multiply, and for want of coordination the great world-problems suffer. This failure of philosophy to fulfill her boasted mission of scientific coordination is responsible for the chaos in the world of general thought. The world has no collective or organized higher ideals and aims, nor even fixed general purposes. Life is an accidental game of private or collective ambitions and greeds.
Alfred Korzybski
I would address one general admonition to all, that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or for fame, or power, or any of these inferior things, but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity. For it was from lust of power that the Angels fell, from lust of knowledge that man fell, but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man come in danger by it.
Francis Bacon
if only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young.
David Brin
Colors are light's suffering and joy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit and not when they miss and commit to memory the one and forget and pass over the other.
Sir Francis Bacon
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.
René Descartes
While I have the floor, here's a question that's been bothering me for some time. Why do so few writers of heroic or epic fantasy ever deal with the fundamental quandary of their novels . . . that so many of them take place in cultures that are rigid, hierarchical, stratified, and in essence oppressive? What is so appealing about feudalism, that so many free citizens of an educated commonwealth like ours love reading about and picturing life under hereditary
David Brin
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Francis Bacon
A steady recognition that the evils which prevent the fullness of moral development are precisely the elements which are also the source of the power that gives existence to whatever moral accomplishments we see about us may eventually lead us to a tolerance we grant to the internal-combustion engine: it is noisy and smelly, and occasionally, it refuses to start, but it is what gets us to wherever we get.We must somehow learn to understand and so to tolerate- not destroy- the free society.
Michael Polanyi
Every day that we read the news we have the possibility of being confronted with a fact about our world that is wildly different from what we thought we knew.
Samuel Arbesman
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon
Everything good or true that the angels inspire in us is God’s, so God is constantly talking to us. He talks very differently, though, to one person than to another.
Emanuel Swedenborg
A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The world’s governments have many classified layers and outsiders rarely gain access to their hidden secrets. And certainly no common man can get confirmation of the existence of exotic technologies.
Takaaki Musha
Our humanity were a poor thing but for the divinity that stirs within us.
Sir Francis Bacon
I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.
Mark Lawrence
The only really interesting thing iswhat happens between two people in a room.
Francis Bacon
The sky is an enormous man.
Emanuel Swedenborg
It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.
Mark Lawrence
You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration’s to your taste,But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Prison for the crime of puberty -- that was how secondary school had seemed.
David Brin
Watson fully comprehended the fact that occasionally it is useful for one’s adversaries to underestimate one’s abilities.”~Sherlock Holmes
Stephanie Osborn
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.
Francis Bacon
For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.
Francis Bacon
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
René Descartes
We are all pilgrims who seek Italy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There was never law or sect or opinion did so much magnify goodness as the Christian religion doth.
Sir Francis Bacon
There are a lot of things animals do that we can't," she says, "like flying and camouflage, and we've adapted, through technology ... It's funny when people say something is natural, or not. Compared with what? Compared with when? It's this vanity of humans to think of themselves as special, as being at the height of evolution. We're not. We're obviously still adapting.
Aarathi Prasad
To have a man whose name is on the label showing such interest, commitment, and determination for the best is a wonderful thing. This is someone who will throw money at quality, who believes in being the best. Never knock it. Would you prefer to have a bean counter in corporate headquarters, someone who never comes near the brewery, making decisions solely on the basis of the bottom line and profit margins?
Charles W. Bamforth
A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect.
Mark Lawrence
When a nation which has long groaned under the intolerable yoke of a tyrant rises at last and throws off its chains, do you call that weakness? The man who, to rescue his house from the flames, finds his physical strength redoubled, so that he lifts burdens with ease which in the absence of excitement he could scarcely move; he who under the rage of an insult attacks and puts to flight half a score of his enemies,—are such persons to be called weak? My good friend, if resistance be strength, how can the highest degree of resistance be a weakness?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
But my favorite of Einstein's words on religion is "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." I like this because both science and religion are needed to answer life's great questions.
Temple Grandin
Every star, turning in the black depth of heaven, burns for no better reason than that humanity raised its face to look. Every great deed needs to be witnessed. Go out there and do something great.
Mark Lawrence
In a great number of the cosmogonic myths the world is said to have developed from a great water, which was the prime matter. In many cases, as for instance in an Indian myth, this prime matter is indicated as a solution, out of which the solid earth crystallized out.
Svante Arrhenius
I take all knowledge to be my province.
Sir Francis Bacon