We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher...

We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can...

All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people...

I esteem myself happy to have as great an ally as you in my search for truth. I will read your work … all the more willingly because I have for many years been a...

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. ”—Psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung in a 1919 address to the Society for Psychical Research in England

I’ve found out so much about electricity that I’ve reached the point where I understand nothing and can explain nothing.[Describing his experiments with the Leyden jar.]

Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.

There is no truth, only science and fiction.

To bracket form and finality out of one’s investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics.

A man who believes everything can be explained by science is just as ignorant as someone who believes everything can be explained by religion.

The manner of Demoivre’s death has a certain interest for psychologists. Shortly before it, he declared that it was necessary for him to sleep some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour longer each...

The alchemists of past centuries tried hard to make the elixir of life: … Those efforts were in vain; it is not in our power to obtain the experiences and the views of the future...

The weeds of a seemingly learned and brilliant but actually trivial and empty philosophy of Nature which, after having been replaced some 50 years ago by the exact sciences, is now once more dug up...

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance – a teaming up of the internal rivals – is optimal for brains. … Some...

… I left Caen, where I was living, to go on a geological excursion under the auspices of the School of Mines. The incidents of the travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached...

I had fallen in love with a young man…, and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis… Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have...

The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist’s job to find the ways in which these laws can...

It was badly received by the generation to which it was first addressed, and the outpouring of angry nonsense to which it gave rise is sad to think upon. But the present generation will probably...

Much of the geographical work of the past hundred years… has either explicitly or implicitly taken its inspiration from biology, and in particular Darwin. Many of the original Darwinians, such as Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, Bates,...

Accordingly, we find Euler and D’Alembert devoting their talent and their patience to the establishment of the laws of rotation of the solid bodies. Lagrange has incorporated his own analysis of the problem with his...

Any clock that can track this sideral schedule proves itself as perfect as God’s magnificent clockwork.Dava Sobel

To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.

[Concerning] phosphorescent bodies, and in particular to uranium salts whose phosphorescence has a very brief duration. With the double sulfate of uranium and potassium … I was able to perform the following experiment: One wraps...

As is well known the principle of virtual velocities transforms all statics into a mathematical assignment, and by D’Alembert’s principle for dynamics, the latter is again reduced to statics. Although it is is very much...

Scientists are the true driving force of civilization.

It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science.

I once read that if the folds in the cerebral cortex were smoothed out it would cover a card table. That seemed quite unbelievable but it did make me wonder just how big the cortex...

By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.

We must not wait for favours from Nature; our task is to wrest them from her.

But then, we have science, and with its help we shall discover Truth once more; then we shall accept it in full knowledge. Knowledge is of a higher order than feeling; awareness of life is...

No, it is not a commonplace, sir! If up to now, for example, I have been told to ‘love my neighbor,’ and I did love him, what came of it?. . . What came of...

Laws of nature have no physical properties of mass /energy. They are platonic truths in transcendent realm that create & govern the Universe.

But every day I go to work I’m making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.

The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the...

In our vital need … science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the question which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most...

The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch...

There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and obscurities…more worthy to express the invariable relations of all natural things [than mathematics]. [It interprets] all phenomena by the same...

You are to make up your mind whether it is to be God or man. Whether you are to be free or a slave. Whether it is to be progress or stagnation.As long as man...

If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There’s a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about...

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form…The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning. There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan’s 127 million people...

They keep saying that sea levels are rising an’ all this. It’s nowt to do with the icebergs melting, it’s because there’s too many fish in it. Get rid of some of the fish and...

The works which this man leaves behind him occupy a few pages only; their importance is not greatly superior to their extent; and yet his name will shine out with lustre in the history of...

I love to teach children science.

During my stay in London I resided for a considerable time in Clapham Road in the neighbourhood of Clapham Common… One fine summer evening I was returning by the last bus ‘outside’ as usual, through...

Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent.

We have at any rate one advantage over Time and Space. We think them whereas it is extremely doubtful whether they think us!

Islam expect every Muslim to do this duty, and if we realise our responsibility time will come soon when we shall justify ourselves worthy of a glorious past.

The celebration feels great, but it will be very brief because before we start our main science phase, we still have six months of challenging work to adjust the orbit to the right size and...