Science Quotes

It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.

~ Lewis Thomas

It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another's learning.

~ Robert Boyle

The text-book is rare that stimulates its reader to ask, Why is this so? Or, How does this connect with what has been read elsewhere?

~ J. Norman Collie

I received comments on how extraordinary it was that I could keep up speaking for exactly 45 minutes. Indeed, in an age of soundbites lasting some seconds and of quick quotes in the news, all those minutes do seem like an eternity, easy to get lost in. Yet, wait a moment. Television is not the only place where speeches are given. Some hundred thousand teachers teach every day. They all speak 45 minutes, more times a day. They have been doing this for years. Every teacher knows exactly when the time will be over and that by then his speech will need to come to a natural end. It is this tension that determines the success of a lesson. It is a sign of the times that we forget these daily achievements in education. A million students daily attend several ‘live’ lectures and this in secondary education alone. These are high ratings!

~ Robbert Dijkgraaf

Life without death simply isn't life, but death

~ Juliet Daniel

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences b

~ Francis Bacon

[Cornell University will be] an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.

~ Andrew Dickson White

When scientific conversations cease, then dogma rather than knowledge begins to rule the day.

~ Jaak Panksepp

One can give or withhold in a manner far more effective, sophisticated, useful, which is quite invisible to people who think that giving or withholding is done by external assessment. If you seek some mark of favour or 'promotion', know that you are not ready for it. Progress comes through capacity to learn, and is irresistible. Nobody can stand between you and knowledge if you are fit for it.

~ Idries Shah

Most importantly, I'd learned how to question and why (when had never been an issue: always).

~ Leslie Anthony

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

~ Ruth Ozeki

If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. However, when gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.

~ Sam Harris

Meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree. It completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are.

~ Matthieu Ricard

Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences, or of the more elevated departments of science, than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.

~ Jeanette Winterson

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 by the atmosphere, and the endless night was the permanent default behind it all.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

There is a wide yawning black infinity. In every direction the extension is endless, the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce. But most of all, there is very nearly nothing in the dark; except for little bits here and there, often associated with the light, this infinite receptacle is empty.This picture is strangely frightening. It should be familiar. It is our universe.Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are, as sand, as dust, or less than dust, in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing. Nothing! We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s Pensées and read, 'I am the great silent spaces between wo

~ Carl Sagan

By death the moon was gathered in Long ago, ah long ago;Yet still the silver corpse must spinAnd with another's light must glow.Her frozen mountains must forgetTheir primal hot volcanic breath,Doomed to revolve for ages yet,Void amphitheatres of death.And all about the cosmic sky,The black that lies beyond our blue,Dead stars innumerable lie,And stars of red and angry hueNot dead but doomed to die.

~ Julian Huxley

Science . . . has opened our eyes to the vastness of the universe and given us light, truth and freedom from fear where once was darkness, ignorance and superstition. There is no personal salvation, except through science.

~ Luther Burbank

The clear light of science teaches us that we must be our own saviors, if we are to be found worth saving.

~ Luther Burbank

Full spectrum lights should be used in all daytime offices for good health.

~ Steven Magee

For excellent health and a good skin color, I recommend that people sit next to a shady ultraviolet transmitting window when indoors.

~ Steven Magee

God created… light anddark, heaven and hell—science claims the same thing as religion, that the Big Bang createdeverything in the universe with an opposite.“Including matter itself, antimatter

~ Dan Brown

If it was the warmth of the sun, and not its light, that produced this operation, it would follow, that, by warming the water near the fire about as much as it would have been in the sun, this very air would be produced; but this is far from being the case..

~ Jan Ingenhousz

How many times did the sun shine, how many times did the wind howl over the desolate tundras, over the bleak immensity of the Siberian taigas, over the brown deserts where the Earth’s salt shines, over the high peaks capped with silver, over the shivering jungles, over the undulating forests of the tropics! Day after day, through infinite time, the scenery has changed in imperceptible features. Let us smile at the illusion of eternity that appears in these things, and while so many temporary aspects fade away, let us listen to the ancient hymn, the spectacular song of the seas, that has saluted so many chains rising to the light.

~ Emile Argand

His [Faraday's] third great discovery is the Magnetization of Light, which I should liken to the Weisshorn among mountains-high, beautiful, and alone.

~ John Tyndall

The Theory of Relativity confers an absolute meaning on a magnitude which in classical theory has only a relative significance: the velocity of light. The velocity of light is to the Theory of Relativity as the elementary quantum of action is to the Quantum Theory: it is its absolute core.

~ Max Planck

Light brings us the news of the Universe.

~ William Henry Bragg

If the hand be held between the discharge-tube and the screen, the darker shadow of the bones is seen within the slightly dark shadow-image of the hand itself... For brevity's sake I shall use the expression 'rays'; and to distinguish them from others of this name I shall call them 'X-rays'.

~ Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

That all plants immediately and substantially stem from the element water alone I have learnt from the following experiment. I took an earthern vessel in which I placed two hundred pounds of earth dried in an oven, and watered with rain water. I planted in it a willow tree weighing five pounds. Five years later it had developed a tree weighing one hundred and sixty-nine pounds and about three ounces. Nothing but rain (or distilled water) had been added. The large vessel was placed in earth and covered by an iron lid with a tin-surface that was pierced with many holes. I have not weighed the leaves that came off in the four autumn seasons. Finally I dried the earth in the vessel again and found the same two hundred pounds of it diminished by about two ounces. Hence one hundred and sixty-four pounds of wood, bark and roots had come up from water alone.

~ Jan Baptist Van Helmont

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper. ...The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc. ...I did not think I investigated. ...I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else. ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded. ...There is much to do, and I am busy, very

~ Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

I picture the vast realm of the sciences as an immense landscape scattered with patches of dark and light. The goal towards which we must work is either to extend the boundaries of the patches of light, or to increase their number. One of these tasks falls to the creative genius; the other requires a sort of sagacity combined with perfectionism.

~ Denis Diderot

For a billion years the patient earth amassed documents and inscribed them with signs and pictures which lay unnoticed and unused. Today, at last, they are waking up, because man has come to rouse them. Stones have begun to speak, because an ear is there to hear them. Layers become history and, released from the enchanted sleep of eternity, life's motley, never-ending dance rises out of the black depths of the past into the light of the present.

~ Hans Cloos

The discovery of the telephone has made us acquainted with many strange phenomena. It has enabled us, amongst other things, to establish beyond a doubt the fact that electric currents actually traverse the earth's crust. The theory that the earth acts as a great reservoir for electricity may be placed in the physicist's waste-paper basket, with phlogiston, the materiality of light, and other old-time hypotheses.

~ William Henry Preece

When I was young, I thought it was thunder that kills people. But when I learnt physics in St. Paul's High School, I discovered that it is rather the lightning that does the killing. The voice of the thunder itself is just a noise. The lightning is the poise. I learnt to take the course of my life, not by violence but rather with intelligence.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

They intend to make people's very appetites the next weapon of uncountable destruction. They intend that your people will lust themselves into oblivion in front of little boxes of changing light. Addictive light. A light that makes you feel like you live a life, when all you really do is eat what the light tells you to eat and squirt pee and pump poo. And watch the changing light!

~ Robert Stikmanz

Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past.

~ Brian Cox

Rich or poor, living in a trusting society simply makes people happier.

~ Paul J. Zak

No one trusts a model except the man who wrote it; everyone trusts an observation, except the man who made it.

~ Harlow Shapley

I have learned to have more trust in the scientist than he does in himself.

~ David Sarnoff