Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.

think think think until you blink

Journalism is not a precise science, it’s a crude art

The child is more individualised than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent. In each case, it is towards the first...

The sciences have two extremities which meet. The first is the ignorance in which men find themselves at birth. The second is that attained by great souls. They have surveyed whatever man can know, find...

Asking where memory is “located” in the brain is like asking where running is located in the body. There are certainly parts of the body that are more important (the legs) or less important (the...

Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical reasoning involved and contrast it with the...

Christians believe, as is reported in the New Testament scriptures, that Jesus of Nazareth healed 10 men with leprosy. It sounds like an astounding feat, but compare that to Jacinto Convit who saved thousands of...

Cuvier had even in his address & manner the character of a superior Man, much general power & eloquence in conversation & great variety of information on scientific as well as popular subjects. I should...

How did I discover saccharin? Well, it was partly by accident and partly by study. I had worked a long time on the compound radicals and substitution products of coal tar… One evening I was...

Experiment is the sole source of truth. It alone can teach us something new; it alone can give us certainty.

The earth is large and old enough to teach us modesty.

The element of chance in basic research is overrated. Chance is a lady who smiles only upon those few who know how to make her smile.

It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve. To insist we are damned because a country girl talked to the snake one afternoon long ago. Children must starve in Somalia for that, and...

If music serves to convey feelings through the interaction of physical gestures and sound, the musician needs his brain state to match the emotional state he is trying to express. Although the studies haven’t been...

Scientism and godism are superstitions, one blindly believes in what’s visible, the other blindly believes in what’s invisible.

Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire...

You can’t protect the world from itself, Gina. You can only give good men the tools necessary to do their jobs. We need to know what is possible.

Umut kendi içinde çelişkilidir (paradoksaldır). Ne edilgin bekleyiştir, ne de gerçekleşmesi olanaksız koşulların gerçekçi olmayan bir şekilde zorlanmasıdır. Atlama anı geldiğinde sıçrayacak olan çömelik bir kaplana benzer umut. Ne yorgun reformculuk umudun bir anlatımıdır ne...

And fragile is thy tenure of this worldStill haunted by the monstrous ghost of God.(“To Science”)

We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans...

… on these expanded membranes [butterfly wings] Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species, so truly do all changes of the organisation register themselves thereon. Moreover, the same colour-patterns...

Gay-Lussac was quick, lively, ingenious and profound, with great activity of mind and great facility of manipulation. I should place him at the head of all the living chemists in France.

…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…

It is a matter for considerable regret that Fermat, who cultivated the theory of numbers with so much success, did not leave us with the proofs of the theorems he discovered. In truth, Messrs Euler...

… respecto al origen del mundo, si es que lo tuvo, no nos queda más remedio que aceptar que nunca sabremos cómo ocurrió y que Dios es una explicación necia que no explica nada pues...

The theist and the scientist are rival interpreters of nature, the one retreats as the other advances.

These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.

The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiased by personal feeling is characteristic of what...

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky’s syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and...

A billion neutrinos go swimming in heavy water: one gets wet.

Puesto que el que contempla con sus ojos la belleza, no es ya tributario de la muerte, como dice Platen, sino de la Naturaleza, cuya belleza ha comprendido. Y si sus ojos sirven realmente para...

I don’t mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way–characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don’t fit, the whole works–is simply asking too much of a reader....

Science says: “We must live,” and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable, wisdom says: “We must die,” and seeks how to make us die well.

In describing a protein it is now common to distinguish the primary, secondary and tertiary structures. The primary structure is simply the order, or sequence, of the amino-acid residues along the polypeptide chains. This was...

Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.

Teaching students the evidence for and against Darwinism is not the same as teaching intelligent design. The U.S. Congress has officially endorsed teaching students ‘the full range of scientific views’ about Darwinian evolution.

Monotheism generally allows for no greys. Ideas are either true or false. Hence, although science develops out of the alchemy of the medieval Christian milieu (derived from Arabic alchemy, which was stimulated by the much...

Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we’re made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life—the...

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

I am very much out of my element here. There are moments, listening to the conversations going on around me, when I feel I am going to lose my mind. Earlier today, I heard someone...

Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate; I desire, therefore, in this narration, to state those facts which led to my predilection for that science. When I was thirteen years of age,...

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

Sometimes the dim veil between sanity and insanity is perception.

The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.

Sólo un sentido común con imaginación de poeta podría haber sido el inventor de la rueda.

Every discovery in science and art, is due to the trained power of seeing things … Keep your eyes open, your ears open … Trace difficulties.

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship...

The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities… If there is poetry in my book about...