Quotes by Scientists - Page 8

Old wood best to burn old wine to drink old friends to trust and old authors to read.
Sir Francis Bacon
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,—or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety.
Bronowski
We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.
Mark Lawrence
It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself.
Mark Lawrence
The lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes a wrong one ... the more active and swift the latter is the further he will go astray.
Francis Bacon
So far as we know, the tiny fragments of the universe embodied in man are the only centers of thought and responsibility in the visible world. If that be so, the appearance of the human mind has been so far the ultimate stage in the awakening of the world; and all that has gone before, the striving of myriad centers that have taken the risks of living and believing, seem to have all been pursuing, along rival lines, the aim now achieved by us up to this point. They are all akin to us, for all these centers - those which led up to our own existence and the far more numerous others which produced different lines of which many are extinct - may be seen engaged in the same endeavor towards ultimate liberation. We may envisage then a cosmic field which called forth all these centers by offering them a short-lived, limited, hazardous opportunity for making some progress of their own towards an unthinkable consummation. And that is also, I believe, how a Christian is placed when worshiping God.
Michael Polanyi
The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
For knowledge too is itself a power.
Sir Francis Bacon
Losing one glove is certainly painful,but nothing compared to the pain,of losing one, throwing away the other,and finding the first one again.
Piet Hein
We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don't often get a glimpse of what we could have been
Alastair Reynolds
We can’t be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.
Mark Lawrence
It was a strange trek — the sullen leading the apathetic, followed by the confused, all tailed by the inveterately amused.
David Brin
I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto 'to live well you must live unseen
René Descartes
It is left only to God and to the angels to be lookers on.
Francis Bacon
Perceptual fields are limited by the attractor patterns that they're associated with. This means that the capacity to recognize significant factors in a given situation is limited by the context that arises from the level of consciousness of the observer. The motive of the viewer automatically determines what is seen; causality is, therefore, ascribed to factors that are, in fact, a function of the biases of the observer and aren't at all instrumental in the situation itself.
David Hawkins
You're confident he'll have found him, then?""Well, no. I didn't sat that.""If there's one thing I hate," Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism.
Alastair Reynolds
...where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.
David Brin
A chain is as strong as its weakest link...........and a brain is as strong as its weakest think!
Ankala Subbarao
ON PROBLEMSOur choicest planshave fallen through,our airiest castlestumbled over,because of lineswe neatly drewand later neatlystumbled over.
Piet Hein
To end the greatest work designed,A thousand hands need but one mind.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There are two ways to slide easily through life: Namely, to believe everything, or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking. The majority take the line of least resistance, preferring to have their thinking done for them; they accept ready-made individual, private doctrines as their own and follow them more or less blindly. Every generation looks upon its own creeds as true and permanent and has a mingled smile of pity and contempt for the prejudices of the past. For two hundred or more generations of our historical past this attitude has been repeated two hundred or more times, and unless we are very careful our children will have the same attitude toward us.
Alfred Korzybski
And thus, the actions of life often not allowing any delay, it is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine the most true opinions we ought to follow the most probable.
René Descartes
The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man, when he is re-born, passes through the ages as he who is born; and the preceding state is always as an egg in respect to the subsequent one, thus he is continually conceived and born: and this not only when he lives in the world, but also when he comes into another life to eternity: and still when he cannot be further perfected, then to be as an egg to those things which remain to be manifested, which are indefinite.
Emanuel Swedenborg
MankindMen, said the Devil,are good to their brothers:they don’t want to mendtheir own ways, but each other's.
Piet Hein
If you Fail, never Give Up because FAIL means First Attempt In Learning!End is not the End, it meansEffort Never Dies!If you get No as an answer; remember NOmeans Next Opportunity!
APJ Abdul Kalam
War, my friends, is a thing of beauty.
Mark Lawrence
REVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
Francis Bacon
The divine essence itself is love and wisdom.
Emmanuel Swedenborg
Everything seemed less frightening with music, even more so with music I knew by heart. It forced a familiar perspective on the scary unknown that was about to happen.
Gaia B. Amman
That's my secret and my shame. I'm Nona Grey, war is in my veins, and the screams of my enemies are music to me.
Mark Lawrence
There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they find to laugh at.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future.
Bernard de Fontenelle
schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf / denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff" (loose translation: nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man & a rogue)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A wise man does not always admit to everything he knows. And sometimes an overly-credulous friend can be a source of mild amusement.”~Sherlock Holmes
Stephanie Osborn
To conclude, therefore, let no man upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation think or maintain that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or the book of God's works, divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavor an endless progress or proficience in both; only let men beware that they apply both to charity, and not to swelling; to use, and not to ostentation; and again, that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together.
Francis Bacon
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A bookshelf is a biography written by others.
Kat Lehmann
Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Naturalists tell of a noble race of horses that instinctively open a vein with their teeth, when heated and exhausted by a long course, in order to breathe more freely. I am often tempted to open a vein, to procure for myself everlasting liberty. Cento volte ho impugnato una lama per conficcarmela nel cuore. Si dice di una nobile razza i cavalli,che quando si sentono accaldati e affaticati, si aprono istintivamente una vena, per respirare più liberamente. Spesso anche io vorrei aprirmi una vena che mi desse libertà eterna.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One's first step in wisdom is to question everything one's last is to come to terms with everything.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure
Francis Bacon
At the dockside I was pleasantly surprised to find the North wasn't all hairy men in animal skins. There was also hairy women in animal skins.
Mark Lawrence
For more than four hundred years we nurtured the belief (should that, perhaps, be faith?) that evidence-based investigation meeting scientific standards of rigor would reveal the true mechanism of nature. and yet when the mechanisms of nature were revealed to be quantum mechanisms, the worlds of science and philosophy were set on a collision course. instead of truth and comprehension, we got deeply unsettling questions about what we can ever hope to know about the world.
Jim Baggott
You have my advice. Carry it with you. It won't slow you down.
Mark Lawrence
Now there are four chief obstacles in grasping truth, which hinder every man, however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to learning, namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge.
Roger Bacon
We have found that the values of the constants of nature have not been fine-tuned for life by accident, but that these values are constrained by and logically follow from the fundamental space-time organization of the Cosmic Tree of Life.
Carl Johan Calleman
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
How wonderful it is being a sheep in the flock of God. Our shepherd is the one that created the grass that we need for pasture, He is the one that created the rivers and the waters, He is the one who holds everything in His hand and He is my Shepherd.
Edmond Sanganyado
Being full of mischief, they love to listen;they gladly obey, for they like to betray you,pretending to be sent from Heaven,and lisping like angels, while they lie.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The way you see people is the way you treat them and the way you treat them is what they become.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Tyranny is yielding to the lust of governing.
Lord Moulton
What is history? What is its significance for humanity? Dr. J. H. Robinson gives us a precise answer: "Man's abject dependence on the past gives rise to the continuity of history. Our convictions, opinions, prejudices, intellectual tastes; our knowledge, our methods of learning and of applying for information we owe, with slight exceptions, to the past-often to the remote past. History is an expansion of memory, and like memory it alone can explain the present and in this lies its most unmistakable value.
Alfred Korzybski
I knew I was putting you under immense pressure when I rejected your work the other day. I set an impossible deadline - yet you have met it with work that I can only call outstanding. As your teacher, I had to push you to your limits so that you could recognize your own true potential.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
If you would create something,you must be something.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What a waste of time it would be to insist that everyone develop each of the specialties we call upon to an equal level. We'd get bogged down in remedial training programs, trying to get the cornet players up to speed with the computer programmers, sacrificing the tends to be exceptional in so many individual situations in order to be average in all of them.
Robert Watson
But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won’t be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You’ll carry for it for ever, when you could have had a few more years of blissful innocence. Are you sure, now?
Alastair Reynolds
Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.
Mark Lawrence
Ethical hacking!! Is it not an oxymoron?
Ankala V Subbarao