The apex of mathematical achievement occurs when two or more fields which were thought to be entirely unrelated turn out to be closely intertwined. Mathematicians have never decided whether they should feel excited or upset...

His true monument lies not on the shelves of libraries, but in the thoughts of men, and in the history of more than one science.{Gibbs’s obituary for scientist Rudolf Clausius}

Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe.

Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.

The most difficult science should be about how to live and be happy as opposite to merely exist and have no meaning of life, although there is no such kind of science in the strict...

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are...

Francis Galton, whose mission it seems to be to ride other men’s hobbies to death, has invented the felicitous expression ‘structureless germs’.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

L’imagination, l’illumination, la création, sans lesquelles le progrès des sciences n’aurait pas été possible, n’entraient dans la science qu’en catimini : elles n’étaient pas logiquement repérables, et toujours épistémologiquement condamnables. On en parlait dans les...

Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

The first rule of discovery is to have brains and good luck. The second rule of discovery is to sit tight and wait till you get a bright idea.

It seems that scientific research reaches deeper and deeper. But it also seems that more and more people, at least scientists, are beginning to realize that the spiritual factor is important. I say ‘spiritual’ without...

Faith is a fine inventionWhen gentlemen can see,But microscopes are prudentIn an emergency.

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.

Çoğu insan Kafka’nın ihtiyarına benzer. Umut ederler ama yüreklerinin sesini, itkisini dinleme ve ona göre davranma yetisinden yoksundurlar; bürokratlar onlara yeşil ışık yakmadığı sürece beklerler de beklerler.

You have to think if we’ve been visited by extraterrestrial life, it was like a zookeeper walking into the chimp enclosure: He looks around, takes some pictures, then leaves without interacting significantly with the environment....

Toward the end of his book, Miller explains his need to unite science and religion: science does not explain the meaning and purpose of life. That may be, but why should we assume religion explains...

The command of our language is crucial to focusing our thoughts and communicating them with precision to others.

The mind is more powerful than ever, and you have more control over it than you ever think.

Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel...

The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for...

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks. They are...

Like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The...

God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which...

…space flight still had a long way to go to catch up with the safety record of the milkshake industry.

Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up- wearing top hat and tails, of course.

OUR MOTHER EARTH CAN LIVE WITHOUT US BUT WE CANT LIVE WITHOUT HER

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

We rich nations, for that is what we are, have an obligation not only to the poor nations, but to all the grandchildren of the world, rich and poor. We have not inherited this earth...

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons,...

Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists’ uroburos,...

During the time that Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of immunology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do...

New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on...

Whenever I meet in Laplace with the words ‘Thus it plainly appears’, I am sure that hours and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears.

A wise system of education will at least teach us how little man yet knows, how much he has still to learn.

Reported sightings of UFOs are tailing off. With public interest declining and subscriptions dwindling, NICAP and APRO start to compete with each other over membership. The open-minded middle ground is stretched to breaking point, caught...

Both died, ignored by most; they neither sought nor found public favour, for high roads never lead there. Laurent and Gerhardt never left such roads, were never tempted to peruse those easy successes which, for...

I’d ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I’d ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct — if God works in...

In the beginning, there was physics. “Physics” describes how matter, energy, space, and time behave and interact with one another. The interplay of these characters in our cosmic drama underlies all biological and chemical phenomena....

Tej seemed such a sunny personality, much of the time–these flashes of dark were like a crack in the sky, shocking and wrong. Reminding him that the daylight was the illusion, the scattering of light...

[T]he downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of...

Justice, love, truth, peace and harmony, a serene unity with science and the laws of the universe.

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight...

Temporis filia veritas; cui me obstetricari non pudet.Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them...

Dissection … teaches us that the body of man is made up of certain kinds of material, so differing from each other in optical and other physical characters and so built up together as to...

I remembered the old doctor, – “It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.” I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria’s effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied...

The universe seems to be a lot like a car or a computer, in that it’s designed to be user-friendly, which doesn’t necessarily require the user to have a clue what’s going on under the...