I am inclined to trust you. You shouldn’t be like that with another man, not ever; but I can’t help it. I felt it strongly from the instant I heard your voice; and though I...

Foreshadowings of the principles and even of the language of [the infinitesimal] calculus can be found in the writings of Napier, Kepler, Cavalieri, Fermat, Wallis, and Barrow. It was Newton’s good luck to come at...

[The] structural theory is of extreme simplicity. It assumes that the molecule is held together by links between one atom and the next: that every kind of atom can form a definite small number of...

Ultimately amorality is immorality.

If Enlightenment in a technical sense is the programmatic word for progress in the awareness of explicitness, one can say without fear of grand formulas that rendering the implicit explicit is the cognitive form of...

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering...

There are those whose views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, that we should compromise it. … I respect...

The spirit is one of the most neglected parts of man by doctors and scientists around the world. Yet, it is as vital to our health as the heart and mind. It’s time for science...

chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

The year that Rutherford died (1938) there disappeared forever the happy days of free scientific work which gave us such delight in our youth. Science has lost her freedom. Science has become a productive force....

Mundane, boring stories–not interesting ones–are the ideal in an operating room.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.

[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns…We are now…only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for...

We can’t solve a problem by using the same kind of thinking we used to create them.

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many...

The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive ‘condensation’ of thought. … Steps really sink from...

There is no reason for a sound faith to be irrational. A useful faith should not be blind, but should be well aware of its grounds. A sound faith should be able to use scientific...

{Letter to his brother, 1861}… I remain an utter disbeliever in almost all that you consider the most sacred truths… But whether there be a God and whatever be His nature; whether we have an...

An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet’s four and a half thousand million...

Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.

I believe, therefore, that although it is not the case today, that there may some day come a time, I should hope, when it will fully appreciated that the power of governments should be limited;...

We’re trying to make a place for ourselves in society at a time when science is trying to remove at least some of us. For me, it’s very scary.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?...

Whereas a novice makes moves until he gets checkmated (proof), a Grand Master realizes 20 moves in advance that it’s futile to continue playing (conceptualizing).

Là où il n’y a pas de réflexion théorique, la science n’est plus qu’une collection d’archives

Generations of Humeans have… been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect...

Ronald Fisher was a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science.

Balard did not discover bromine, rather bromine discovered Balard.{Comment on Antoine Jérôme Balard, discoverer of bromine.}

This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in...

It would seem that the scientific revolution involved not just a progressive transformation of scientific theory, but also a transformation in what were considered to be the observable facts!

The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information...

Men-kind shared this world for but a blink, then, sadly, they became enlightened, found science and religion. The new world of men left little room for magic or the magical creatures of old. Earth’s first...

Can we be sure that they are incapable of the feelings or sentiments that are believed to place them on a lower scale than humans? Do we deny sensitivity to all of the so-called lower...

A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external...

I recently asked more than seventy eminent researchers if they would have done I their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: no. I also examined...

A mode of thought does not become ‘critical’ simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.

What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.

The science which teacheth arts and handicrafts is merely science for the gaining of a living; but the science which teacheth deliverance from worldly existence, is not that the true science?

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.

Darwin, with his Origin of Species, his theories about Natural Selection, the Survival of the Fittest, and the influence of environment, shed a flood of light upon the great problems of plant and animal life.These...

It is certainly true that all beliefs and all myths are worthy of a respectful hearing. It is not true that all folk beliefs are equally valid – if we’re talking not about an internal...

We learned that the two cell lines from which Hwang fabricated photos of the other nine cells for the Science paper do not match the DNA of patients who contributed … cells.

There is only gain when you love Nature so profoundly, the richness is everlasting , however much spent’.

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what...

When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when...

For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you,...

Le equazioni della meccanica quantistica e le loro conseguenze vengono usate quotidianamente da fisici, ingegneri, chimici e biologi, nei campi più svariati. Sono utilissime per tutta la tecnologia contemporanea. Non ci sarebbero i transistor senza...

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to...

For centuries the church has stood by while science picked away at religion bit by bit. Debunking miracles. Training the mind to overcome the heart. Condemning religion as the opiate of the masses. They denounce...