Quotations on Science and the Mysteries of the Universe

Mike Adams
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.

Albert Einstein
I never think about the future. It comes soon enough.

Aleksandr Aleksandrov
We were flying over America and suddenly I saw snow, the first snow we ever saw from orbit. I have never visited America, but I imagined that the arrival of autumn and winter is the same there as in other places, and the process of getting ready for them is the same. And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth.

Anaxagoras
The purpose of life is the investigation of the Sun, the Moon, and the heavens.

Anaximander
The source from which existing things derive their existence is also that to which they return at their destruction.

Archimedes
Give me a firm place to stand and I will move the Earth.

Isaac Asimov
Before another century is done it will be hard for people to imagine a time when humanity was confined to one world, and it will seem to them incredible that there was ever anybody who doubted the value of space and wanted to turn his or her back on the universe.

Keystone Astronomers
The universe is a pretty thing, a real pretty thing.

Avvaiyar
What we have learned is like a handful of earth. What we have yet to learn is like the whole world.

Francis Bacon
I would live to study, and not study to live.

Francis Bacon
Science is but an image of the truth.

Leo Baeck
Every answer given arouses new questions. The progress of science is matched by an increase in the hidden and mysterious.

Lincoln Barnett
The quick harvest of applied science is the useable process, the medicine, the machine. The shy fruit of pure science is understanding.

Alan Bean
Frequently on the lunar surface I said to myself, 'This is the Moon, that is the Earth. I'm really here, I'm really here!

Anatoli Berezovoy
In space everything is different, you sleep on the ceiling.

Anatoli Berezovoy
We flew throughout the summer and fall and the start of winter. At first the whiteness gave way to the green of summer, and then gold covered the fields and forests, and then the whiteness again.

George David Birkhoff
Mathematics is the codified body of all logical thought.

William Blake (Hamlet)
To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.

Blake
What is now proved was once only imagin'd.

David Bohm
In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe.

Niels Bohr
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.

Niels Bohr
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

Vanna Bonta
'Impossible' is not a scientific term.

Tycho Brahe
When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.

Sydney Brenner
Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.

William J. Broad
The crux is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing.

Jacob Bronowski
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

Samuel Butler
Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Thomas Carlyle
I don't pretend to understand the universe. It's a great deal bigger than I am.

Thomas Carlyle
Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?

Thomas Carlyle
I don't pretend to understand the universe—it's a great deal bigger than I am.

Rachel Carson
The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, where biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

Jimmy Carter
We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.

Arthur C. Clarke
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Marie Curie
The way of progress is neither swift nor easy.

Marie Curie
Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

J. d'Alembert
To someone who could grasp the universe from a unified standpoint the entire creation would appear as a unique truth and necessity.

Heinrich d'Arrest
That star is not on the chart!

George Agostinho Da Dilva
Science is the meeting place of two kinds of poetry: the poetry of thought and the poetry of action.

Charles Darwin
Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realize, those I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.

Charles Darwin
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Leonardo da Vinci
No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.

Democritus
Moving in space, the atoms originally were individual units, but inevitable they began to collide with each other, and in cases where their shapes were such as to permit them to interlock, they began to form clusters. Water, air, fire, and earth, these are simply different clusters of the changeless atoms.

Rene Descartes
It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.

John Dewey
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Peter Dickinson
Come algebra, anatomy, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, geometry, mathematics, meteorology, mineralogy, oceanography, paleontology, physics, psychology, sociology, trigonometry, and zoology!

R.L. Dietz
In space you can hang your clothes anywhere.

Albert Einstein
For us physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion.

Albert Einstein
Things should be made as simple as possible but not simpler.

Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein
Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

Albert Einstein
What science strives for is an utmost acuteness and clarity of concepts as regards their mutual relation and their correspondence to sensory data.

Albert Einstein
One thing I have learned in a long life, that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike.

Albert Einstein
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Albert Einstein
Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be express in a language comprehensible to everyone.

Albert Einstein
I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

Albert Einstein
Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experiments correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

Albert Einstein
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

T.S. Eliot
The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A day is a miniature eternity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Timothy Ferris
If we could speed up our sense of time until thousands of years were speeding by in the wink of an eye, we would see nebulae burst into light, deliver themselves of a shower of stars, then fade back into darkness. As it is we see each nebula frozen at a stage in the process.

Richard Feynman
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard Feynman
The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

Robert Frost
The best thing we're put here for's to see; The strongest thing that's given us to see with's a telescope. Someone in every town, seems to me, owes it to the town to keep one.

Galileo Galilei
The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do.

Galileo Galilei
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Stephen Jay Gould
Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

S. Gudder
The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated but to make complicated things simple.

Albert Gyorgyi
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

George Ellery Hale
Like buried treasures, the outposts of the universe have beckoned to the adventurous from immemorial times ...

William Hartmann
One astronomer set up his equipment in an empty chicken coop to protect his instruments from the wind, and then spent most of the eclipse trying to shoo away the chickens, who dutifully reported to the roost when darkness fell.

Stephen Hawking
My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

Lee Hays
The future just ain't what it use to be and what's more it never was.

Heisenberg
The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand.

W. Heisenberg
By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning.

Werner Heisenberg
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

William Herschel
I have looked farther into space than ever a human being did before me.

Jeff Hoffman
Suddenly I saw a meteor go by underneath me.

Horace
The Sun, the stars and the seasons as they pass, some can gaze upon these with no strain of fear.

Edwin Hubble
Observations always involve theory.

Edwin Hubble
Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.

W. Huggins
It is remarkable that the elements diffused through the host of stars are some of those most closely connected with the living organisms of our globe.

William Huggins
May it not be that the brighter stars are like our Sun, the upholding and energizing centers of systems of living beings?

Victor Hugo
Where the telescope ends the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?

Zora Neale Hurston
Research is formalized curiosity.

Thomas Henry Huxley
It is the first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Michael Hyatt
You can't improve what you don't measure.

Eugene Ionesco
The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.

Robert Jastrow
The universe is populated by innumerable suns, innumerable earths, and perhaps, innumerable forms of life. That thought expresses the essence of the Copernican revolution. No revelation more striking has ever come from the scientific mind.

Alison Jolly
Anyone who has lived through an English winter can see the point of building Stonehenge to make the Sun come back.

Steve Jones
Research is wonder.

St. Juliana
He showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought; "What may this be?" And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.

Immanuel Kant
The infinitude of creation is great enough to make a world, or a Milky Way of worlds, look in comparison with it what a flower or an insect does in comparison with the Earth.

Johanne Kepler
Eyesight should learn from reason.

Johannes Kepler
There will certainly be no lack of human pioneers when we have mastered the art of flight ... Let us create vessels and sails justed to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travelers, maps of the celestial bodies.

Johannes Kepler
Why are things as they are and not otherwise?

John Keynes
Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.

Maxine Hong Kingston
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

Kokyu
It is not easy to describe the sea with the mouth.

Sonya Kovalevsky
Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

Antoine Lavoisier
I consider nature a vast chemical laboratory in which all kinds of composition and decompositions are formed.

Antoine Lavoisier
It is impossible to disassociate language from science ... To call for a concept, a word is needed.

Claude Levi-Strauss
The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

Abraham Lincoln
I know of nothing so pleasant to minds as the discovery of anything which is at once new and valuable; for nothing which so lightens and sweetens toil, as the hopeful pursuit of such discovery.

H.W. Longfellow (the Milky Way)
Torrent of light and river of air, Along whose bed the glimmering stars are seen, Like gold and silver sands in some ravine Where mountain streams have left their channels bare!

Lucretius
How is it that the sky feeds the stars?

Lord Macaulay
Knowledge advances by steps and not by leaps.

Archibald Macleish
See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.

John Masefield
I must go down to the seas again, To the lonely sea and the sky. And all I want is a tall ship, And a star to steer her by.

Art Mason
Time begins from some place Measured by the age of light. It began from the furthest thing We see flicker in the night.

Isaac Newton
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Bill Nye
Never make an obtuse observation about a triangle. It just isn’t right.

Ellen Parr
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Louis Pasteur
The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric.

Gerald Piel
The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself.

Max Planck
Experimenters are the shock troops of science.

William Pogue
I raised the visor on my helmet cover and looked out to try to identify constellations. As I looked out into space, I was overwhelmed by the darkness. I felt the flesh crawl on my back and the hair rise on my neck.

Jules Henri Poincaré
Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

George Polya
Beauty in mathematics is seeing the truth without effort.

Henri Ponicare
It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.

Sir Karl Popper
Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

Richard Powers
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Franklin D. Roosevelt
That is the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns. Now I think we are small enough.

John Ruskin
The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

Carl Sagan
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of facts.

Carl Sagan
The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff.

Carl Sagan
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Jonas Salk
What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the disovery of the question.

Hans Selye
The true scientist never loses the faculty of amazement. It is the essence of his being.

Seneca
The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject ... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them ... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.

William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
I could be bound in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.

W.H. Smyth
The number of those seen by the naked eye at once is seldom above a thousand; though from their scintillation, and the indistinct manner in which they are viewed, they appear to be almost infinite.

Ralph W. Sockman
The longer the island of knowledge the longer the shoreline of wonder.

Socrates
Wisdom begins in wonder.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.

Tennyson
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, Ere I went to rest, Did I look on great Orion, Sloping slowly to the west.

Tennyson
Many a night I saw the Pleiades, Rising thro' the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies, Tangled in a silver braid.

Satires Tupelos
They toiled and built a thousand years In love's all powerful might; And so the Milky Way was made A starry bridge of light.

Mark Twain
There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others.

Mark Twain (Life on the Mississippi)
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Vincent Van Gogh
For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it, but looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

Thorstein Veblen
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.

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

Wernher von Braun
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

Lancelot Law White
Both science and art have to do with ordered complexity.

Robert W. White
Technology shapes society and society shapes technology.