Experimentation Quotes

Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.

~ Criss Jami

Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

~ Jules Verne

Wisdom is nothing more than confirmed imagination: just because one did not study for his exam does not mean that he should leave it blank.

~ Criss Jami

I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

I ended your experiment. Because you're not a scientist. You're a monster. I'm not leaving any of them at your mercy.

~ Rachel Caine

By experimenting with sympathetic joy, we break from the constricted world of individual struggle and see that joy exists in more places than we have yet imagined.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Rather than swallowing our pride and simply asking what we do not know, we choose to fill in the blanks ourselves and later become humbled. Wisdom was often, in its youth, proven foolish, and ones humiliated were meant to become wise.

~ Criss Jami

There is a difference between what I actually want and what I want to have fantasies about. (...) There is a part of my imagination which is a playground, a playground in which I am queen. It fulfils my need to have a fantasy land, and that need may be born of creativity as well as lack or repression. Our fantasies are about exploration and experimentation and the power of the imagination. Looked at intelligently, they can reveal a great deal. But there is a difference between fantasising and thinking about our hopes for the future.

~ Anna Sands

Sometimes the best way to learn a lesson isn't just hearing the words, but putting it into practice by experimenting with it and finding its truth for yourself instead of taking someone else’s word for it.

~ A.j. Darkholme

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences b

~ Francis Bacon

But that was what research and development were like. Full of semi-triumphs and perplexing unforeseen consequences like the whole violent hiccuping thing when conjuring up fire - or the propensity for fillings to fall out of bystanders' teeth when attempting to tease a rainstorm out of a cloud.

~ Jasper Fforde

There is a time and place for electromagnetic shielding and I regard it as a last resort due to the long term biological problems that I have observed with it over the years in plant growth experiments.

~ Steven Magee

Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.

~ Thomas A. Edison

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.

~ Harold Edmund Stearns

But he was a perfect gentleman, Aunt Amelia. He did not even try to kiss me, though he wanted to. ... You always tell me I must be receptive to broadening experiences. That would have been a broadening experience. And, from what I have observed, a very enjoyable one.

~ Elizabeth Peters

The critical issues here concern what is right, what is just -- not the balancing of benefits.

~ Carl Cohen

Many storytellers with possibly more potential than Shakespeare, even though I have not read much of him, could not hit much fame because they treated their stories like their wives. Rather than limiting the emotion only to flirting with their stories, they married them, thus limiting their chances of experimenting.

~ Pawan Mishra

Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliche. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

~ Paul R. Halmos

We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected.

~ Dalai Lama Xiv

It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your daemon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief.

~ Philip Pullman

As a result of its investigation, the NIH said that to qualify for funding, all proposals for research on human subjects had to be approved by review boards—independent bodies made up of professionals and laypeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds—to ensure that they met the NIH’s ethics requirements, including detailed informed consent. Scientists said medical research was doomed. In a letter to the editor of Science, one of them warned, “When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.

~ Rebecca Skloot

How do they find out with the experiments?''...one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one that works.''But isn't that unkind to the animal?''Well, I suppose it is...but I mean, there isn't a dad anywhere who would hesitate, is there, if he knew it was going to make [his child] better? It's changed the whole world during the last hundred years, and that's no exaggeration.

~ Richard Adams

Don't kid yourself by saying that one time can't make you addicted. It can. I believed it couldn't too when I first tried meth. I was so, so wrong. The worst part about it is that you won't realize what has happened immediately afterwards. Addiction is a gradual process and it doesn't happen overnight. But trust me when I tell you that one time is all that it takes to set this into motion. It can and it will.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism.

~ John Brunner

Doing risk sport had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means.

~ Yvon Chouinard

Experimentation is an active science.

~ Claude Bernard