When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
—W. H. Auden (1907–73) British-born American Poet, Dramatist
The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their public monuments or from their domestic relics. Archaeology is to social nature what comparative anatomy is to organized nature. A mosaic reveals an entire society, just as a skeleton of an ichthyosaur suggests an entire creation. Everything is deducible, everything is linked. The cause allows one to guess the effect, just as each effect allows one to reconstruct a cause. The scientist can resuscitate in this manner even the warts of ancient times. From this comes without doubt the prodigious interest that an architectural description can inspire when the writer’s fantasy is faithful to its basic elements. Cannot each person reattach it to its past by rigorous deductions? And as for man, does not the past singularly resemble the future? Tell him what was and is this not almost always the same thing as telling him what will be?
—Honore de Balzac (1799–1850) French Novelist
In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) American Nuclear Physicist
Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.
—Thomas Fuller (1608–61) English Cleric, Historian
Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
—Arthur Koestler (1905–83) British Writer, Journalist, Political Refugee
In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) English Biologist
Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.
—Georges Braque (1882–1963) French Painter, Artist, Sculptor
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
—Cyril Connolly (1903–74) British Literary Critic, Writer
The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.
—Wayne Dyer (b.1940) American Motivational Writer, Author, Motivational Speaker
For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.”
—Primo Levi (1919–87) Italian Novelist, Poet, Chemist
Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) German Philosopher, Physicist
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
—Unknown
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
—Democritus (c.460–c.370 BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher
Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought—particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.
—Woody Allen (b.1935) American Film Actor, Director
Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.
—Blaise Pascal (1623–62) French Mathematician, Physicist, Theologian
There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.
—Hippocrates (460–370 BCE) Ancient Greek Physician
I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) American Head of State, Lawyer
A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.
—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) Italian-born French Poet, Playwright
Science is all metaphor.
—Timothy Leary (1920–96) American Psychologist, Author
Science without conscience is the soul’s perdition.
—Francois Rabelais (1494–1553) French Humanist, Satirist
A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
If it can’t be expressed in figures, it’s not science it’s opinion.
—Robert A. Heinlein (1907–88) American Science Fiction Writer
We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.
—Richard Feynman (1918–88) American Physicist
An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.
—Agatha Christie (1890–1976) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
New discoveries in science … will continue to create a thousand new frontiers for those who still would adventure.
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st American President
Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Essayist, Short Story Writer, Satirist
Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don’t know.
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
An archaeologist is someone whose career lies in ruins.
—Unknown
If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.
—Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish Physicist
From man or angel the great Architect did wisely to conceal, and not divulge his secrets to be scanned by them who ought rather admire; or if they list to try conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens left to their disputes, perhaps to move his laughter at their quaint opinions wide hereafter, when they come to model heaven calculate the stars, how they will wield the mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive to save appearances, how gird the sphere with centric and eccentric scribbled o’er, and epicycle, orb in orb.
—John Milton (1608–74) English Poet, Civil Servant, Scholar, Debater
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
—Karl Marx (1818–1883) German Philosopher, Economist
There is no method but to be very intelligent.
—T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) American-born British Poet, Dramatist, Literary Critic
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
Science is not … a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when taken as an end in itself.
—Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) Swiss Psychologist, Psychiatrist, Philosopher
Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be—and the non-necessity of it.
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English Novelist, Poet
They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.
—William S. Burroughs (1914–97) American Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer, Painter
Physical science reads through its sense of touch like a blind man, and the supply of books in braille type on the spiritual life is very small.
—Austin O’Malley (1858–1932) American Aphorist, Ophthalmologist
Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one’s provisional consent.
—Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American Paleontologist
So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) German Philosopher, Physicist
Man has to awaken to wonder—and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-born British Philosopher
The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good, are the two most important aims of philosophy.
—Voltaire (1694–1778) French Philosopher, Author
In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.
—John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) Canadian-Born American Economist
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
—H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) American Journalist, Literary Critic
Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far back as we know anything of man
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may from a raw recruit, and its methods differ from those of common sense, only as the guardsman’s cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) English Biologist
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
—Carl Sagan (1934–96) American Astronomer
Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher