After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) American Novelist
Science is the topography of ignorance.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–94) American Physician, Essayist
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
The Sciences are beneficent. They prevent men from thinking.
—Anatole France (1844–1924) French Novelist
Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.
—Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) American Astronomer
Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
—Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) Spanish Educator, Philosopher, Author
The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965) British Head of State, Political leader, Historian, Journalist, Author
If the study of all these sciences which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.
—Plato (428 BCE–347 BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Mathematician, Educator
We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity.
—Margaret J. Wheatley American Management Consultant, Writer
In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
—Iris Murdoch (1919–99) British Novelist, Playwright, Philosopher
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
—Steven Weinberg (1933–2021) American Physicist
Science is what you know, philosophy what you don’t know.
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbors about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
God pity the man of seience who believes in nothing but what he can prove by scientific methods; for if ever a human being needed divine pity he does.
—Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–81) American Editor, Novelist
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
There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
—P. D. James (b.1920) British Novelist
I know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) English Biologist
No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.
—Thomas Browne (1605–82) English Author, Physician
Observatory: A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist
A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
In Plato’s opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon’s opinion, philosophy was made for man.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–59) English Historian, Essayist, Philanthropist
We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German Philosopher, Scholar, Writer
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
—Denis Diderot (1713–84) French Philosopher, Writer
Science is but the exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.
—Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–99) American Lawyer, Orator, Agnostic
Thomas Edison reads not for entertainment but to increase his store of knowledge. He sucks in information as eagerly as the bee sucks honey from flowers. The whole world, so to speak, pours its wisdom into his mind. He regards it as a criminal waste of time to go through the slow and painful ordeal of ascertaining things for one’s self if these same things have already been ascertained and made available by others. In Edison’s mind knowledge is power.
—B. C. Forbes (1880–1954) Scottish-born American Journalist, Publisher
We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) German Philosopher, Physicist
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher