Quotes about Science

Image description: Leo Tolstoy is best known for his novels and short stories depicting the life of the Russian people during the time of the tsars, but also for his essays, in which he condemns civil and ecclesiastical powers.

Science is an endless quest for understanding and discovery. The following quotes come from some of the brightest minds in scientific history. These thinkers not only pushed the boundaries of knowledge but also formulated profound reflections on the nature of the universe, the scientific method, and the impact of research on society. These thoughts, inspired by rigor, curiosity, and innovation, characterize the scientific world.

Authors

Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910)

"Of all the sciences that man can and must know, the principal one is the science of living in such a way as to do the least harm and the most good possible."

Abbud Marun (1886 - 1962)

"Science, after all, is nothing but experience."

Aristotle (-384 -322 BC)

"The beginning of all sciences is the wonder that things are what they are."

"Science consists in going from one wonder to another."

"There is the same difference between the learned and the ignorant as between the living and the dead."

"Since the past is no more, since the future is not yet, since the present itself has already ceased to be before it has begun to exist, how could there be a reality of time ?"

Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962)

"Old ideas traverse the ages; they always return in more or less learned reveries with their load of primary naivety."

Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962)

"In the union of thought and dreams, it is always thought that is deformed and defeated."

René Barjavel (1911 - 1985)

"The night is only night for us. It is our eyes that are dark."

Bernard Baruch (1870 - 1965)

"Millions of people have seen an apple fall, but Newton is the only one who asked why." "Everyone has the right to be wrong about principles, but no one has the right to be wrong about facts."

Nicolas de Cusa (1401 - 1464)

"The universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768 - 1848)

"Man does not need to travel to grow; he carries immensity with him."

Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

"I will only believe in statistics when I have falsified them myself."

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

"What a good thing it would be if scientists died at 60, for after that age, their opposition to any new theory is certain."

Douglas Adams (1952)

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of such and such an element: I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details."

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."

"If, therefore, free space extends in all directions without limit, if innumerable seeds multiplied to infinity flutter in a thousand ways and for all eternity, is it possible to believe that our globe and our firmament have been the only ones created and that beyond there is only idleness for the multitude of atoms."

"Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler." "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

"It is absolutely possible that beyond what our senses perceive, there are unsuspected worlds."

Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

"The historical trend of physics is to synthesize an ever-increasing number of phenomena into an ever-decreasing number of theories."

Jean Giono (1895 - 1970)

"Time is what happens when nothing happens."

Christopher Fry (1907 - 2005)

"The Moon is nothing but an aphrodisiac revolving in the heavens mandated by God to incite men to have more children."

Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)

(to the religious) "Be content to tell us how to go to heaven, and leave us the care of telling how heaven goes."

Heraclitus of Ephesus (~510 BC - ~450 BC)

"It is fire that created everything and it is in it that everything is resolved."

Werner Heisenberg (1901 - 1976)

"It is known that between what I have just called the future and what I have just called the past, there is a finite time interval, the duration of which depends on the spatial distance that separates the event from the observer."

Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885)

"Strangely, it is within oneself that one must look at the outside."

"Far from expanding, every spirit contracts in the immensities of exact science."

François Jacob (1920 - )

"Science represents for me the most exhilarating form of revolt against the incoherence of the universe. The most powerful means found by man to compete with God." "Our imagination unfolds before us the ever-renewed image of the possible." "Nothing causes as much destruction as the obsession with an absolute truth."

Etienne Klein (1958 - )

"Time is the best means nature has found to prevent everything from happening at once."

Félicité de Lamennais (1782 - 1854)

"Science serves mainly to give us an idea of the extent of our ignorance."

Pierre Simon Laplace (1749 - 1827)

"Astronomy, by the dignity of its object and the perfection of its theories, is the most beautiful monument of the human mind, the noblest title of its intelligence."

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646 - 1716)

"Why is there something rather than nothing ?"

Georges Louis Leclerc (1707 - 1788)

"The word truth gives birth only to a vague idea; it has never had a precise definition."

"The superfluous becomes over time a very necessary thing."

Georges Louis Leclerc (1707 - 1788)

"Death is only the last nuance of life."

Pierre Lecomte du Noüy (1883 - 1947)

"The goal of science is to predict and not, as is often said, to understand."

Henri Michaux (1899 - 1984)

"All science creates a new ignorance."

"The teaching of the spider is not for the fly."

Jacques Monod (1910 - )

"Man is lost in the indifferent immensity of the universe from which he emerged by chance."

Montesquieu (1654 - 1713)

"Today we receive three different or contradictory educations: those of our fathers, those of our masters, that of the world. What is told to us in the latter overthrows all the ideas of the former."

Charles Nodier (1780 - 1844)

"Science consists in forgetting what one believes one knows, and wisdom in not caring about it."

Jean O'Neil (1936)

"No thing is real in itself. It is born from the neighborhood of others."

Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727)

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895)

"Chance favors only the prepared mind." "A little science distances one from God, but a lot brings one back."

Plato (427 BC - 346 BC)

"The greatest advantage of the sciences, but an advantage whose price is not easy to feel, is that they purify and revive an organ of the soul blinded and as if extinguished by the other occupations of life, an organ by which alone one perceives the truth."

Karl Popper (1902 - 1994)

"What cannot be observed or refuted belongs to magic or mysticism, but not to the scientific domain."

Michel Quoist (1921 - 1997)

"Science may one day explain the world, but it will not be able to give it its meaning."

Hubert Reeves (1932 - )

"The history of science is full of instructive examples where passions have delayed the development of knowledge."

"Over time, cosmic gestation unfolds. At every second, the universe prepares something. It slowly climbs the steps of complexity."

Ernest Renan (1823 - 1892)

"Immortality is to work on an eternal work."

"Human stupidity is the only thing that gives an idea of the infinite."

"Science will always remain the satisfaction of the highest desire of our nature, curiosity; it will provide man with the only means he has to improve his lot."

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

"More than a millennium ago, Ptolemy established a system of the world that lasted until the seventeenth century, then overthrown by that of Newton, which lasted until it was recently replaced by that of Mr. Einstein, here present, of which I will not venture to try to predict what it will last."

Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)

"What the courses of our schools almost totally neglect is what interests the most: the question of life."

Trinh Xuan Thuan (1948 - )

"From our islet of the present, waves of the past surge from all sides."

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935)

"The Earth is the cradle of humanity. But one cannot remain in the cradle forever."

Miguel de Unamuno (1864 - 1936)

"The more life is pleasant and sweet and enchanting, the more horrible is the idea of losing it. And thus cultures corrupt and decadences come."

"True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant."

Steven Weinberg (1933 - )

"The more we understand the universe, the more it appears devoid of meaning."

Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

"Every era has always found a way to explain, if not to understand."

Émile Zola (1840 - 1902)

"The question is this: where does man come from? Where is man going? I solve it triumphantly by saying: man comes and goes in the night."

"Every time science advances a step, it is because an idiot pushes it, without doing it on purpose."

Influential Greek Thinkers

What do we know about Pythagoras (≈570-495 av. J.-C)?

The philosophical characteristics of Aristotle (384 - 322 BC)

The world of Ptolemy (90-168)

The theory of Copernicus (1473-1543), heliocentrism

Galileo (1564-1642) and the moons of Jupiter

Kepler (1571-1630), planets follow ellipses

Newton (1643-1727) and gravity

Faraday (1791-1867), the student who surpassed his master

Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921), A Pioneer in Astronomy

Einstein (1879-1955) and the concept of time

Amalie Emmy Noether (1882-1935), the Mathematician Who Revolutionized Algebra

Cecilia Payne (1900-1979), the Scientist Who Revealed the Composition of Stars

Margaret Burbidge (1919-2020): An Exceptional Journey in Astrophysics

Vera Rubin (1928-2016), Revealer of the Invisible, Pioneer of Dark Matter

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943-), the Scientist Who Discovered Pulsars

Quotes about Science

Babylonian Astronomy and Astrology: History and Contributions