quotations about science
Doubtless it is true that while consciousness is occupied in the scientific interpretation of a thing, which is now and again "a thing of beauty," it is not occupied in the aesthetic appreciation of it. But it is no less true that the same consciousness may at another time be so wholly possessed by the aesthetic appreciation as to exclude all thought of the scientific interpretation. The inability of a man of science to take the poetic view simply shows his mental limitation; as the mental limitation of a poet is shown by his inability to take the scientific view. The broader mind can take both.
HERBERT SPENCER
An Autobiography
What has science to offer? This: that we are ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed. No longer an absentee God; no longer a Great First Cause, setting in motion secondary causes which frame the world; no longer a divine mechanic, who has built the world, stored it with forces, launched it upon its course, and now and again interferes with its operation if it goes not right; but one great, eternal, underlying Cause, as truly operative to-day as he was in that first day when the morning stars sang together -- every day a creative day. That is the word of science.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
Science does not reveal anything beyond this life.
PIERRE FORESTIER
attributed, Day's Collacon
The distinctive feature of science is that it is both broad and deep: broad in the way it tackles all physical phenomena and deep in the way it weaves them, economically, into a common explanatory scheme requiring fewer and fewer assumptions. No other system of thought can match its breadth and depth.
PAUL DAVIES
Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life
Let science, by cultivating man's intellect, elevate him to nobler and more spiritual views of God's wisdom and power.
JOSIAH P. COOKE
Religion and Chemistry
A connecting principle
Linked to the invisible
Almost imperceptible
Something inexpressible
Science insusceptible
Logic so inflexible
Causally connectable
Nothing is invincible
If we share this nightmare
We can dream
Spiritus mundi
THE POLICE
"Synchronicity I"
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
Science and Human Values
It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is sure of.
JEAN ROSTAND
"A Biologist's Thoughts", The Substance of Man
Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.
ISAAC ASIMOV
interview, Bill Moyers' World of Ideas, October 21, 1988
Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for a higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosopher of another: He takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him.
THOMAS PAINE
The Works of Thomas Paine
To make reason the arbiter and supreme guide of public opinion; that is the essential goal of the sciences; that is how science will contribute to the advancement of civilization.
GEORGES CUVIER
Rapport historique sur les progrès des sciences naturelles
Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world--a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious--surely never again to set.
WALT WHITMAN
"Democratic Vistas", Two Rivulets
Science is the only religion of mankind.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Childhood's End
Don't tell me about the scientific advances of the twentieth century. So men are planning a trip to the moon. So computers run every large industry in America. So body organs are being transplanted like perennials. Big deal! You show me a washer that will launder a pair of socks and return them to you as a pair, and I'll light a firecracker.
ERMA BOMBECK
Forever, Erma
The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.
ISAAC ASIMOV
"The Three Numbers", Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September 1974
Science: The creation of dilemmas by the solution of mysteries.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
The Act of Creation
Science! thou fair effusive ray from the great source of mental Day, free, generous, and refin'd! Descend with all thy treasures fraught, illumine each bewilder'd thought, and bless my labouring mind.
MARK AKENSIDE
"Hymn to Science"