Quotes on Science
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein
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Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan
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I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
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Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.
Albert Einstein
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I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
Richard Feynman
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All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
Galileo Galilei
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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein
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Our success in war and peace depends not on luck, or rhetoric, or the intervention of mythical gods; it depends on human character and modern scientific creations, and on respect for the meaning and methods of science.
Harlow Shapley
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Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey
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The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
Daniel Boorstin
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All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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The job of a scientist is to generate wrong ideas as fast as possible.
Murray Gell-Mann
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I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
Gerry Spence
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
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The antidote to bad religion is good science.
Steven Landsburg
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God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.
Thomas Huxley
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If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
Francis Bacon
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With all your science can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?
Henry David Thoreau
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What I believe in my heart must make sense in my mind.
Ravi Zacharias
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At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes - an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the world, but there is a built-in error-correcting mechanism: The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the field on track.
Carl Sagan
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No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.
Lyman Beecher
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There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein
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An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.
John Tukey
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It is fine to be ignorant of a great many things; nobody has time to understand more than a few things deeply. But in those numerous topics on which we are not experts, we are nevertheless tempted to construct a coherent-seeming but illusory image of reality, and believe it with undue certainty. We are far too sure of ourselves when we have not earned it. Overcertainty is an anchor, undue inertia, dragging feet, when we should really be leaves on the winds of evidence.
Xan
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The most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur.
John Dewey
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The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Cormac McCarthy
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Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
Randall Munroe
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Natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment.
E. O. Wilson
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Truth emerges much more readily from error than from confusion.
Francis Bacon
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There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.
John Von Neumann
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Natural selection has built us, and it is natural selection we must understand if we are to comprehend our own identities.
Richard Dawkins
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Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
Richard Feynman
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Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?"
Richard Feynman
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The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman
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Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.
Richard Feynman
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This is the source.
The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
Richard Feynman
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We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty—some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.
Richard Feynman
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What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the mystery of existence? If we take everything into account—not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know—then I think we must frankly admit that we do not know. But, in admitting this, we have probably found the open channel.
Richard Feynman
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We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming "This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!" we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before. It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.
Richard Feynman
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There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.
Ran Prieur
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[E]xperiment and observation is the sole and ultimate judge of the truth of an idea.
Richard Feynman
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Learn by trying to understand simple things in terms of other ideas—always honestly and directly. What keeps the clouds up, why can't I see stars in the daytime, why do colors appear on oily water, what makes the lines on the surface of water being poured from a pitcher, why does a hanging lamp swing back and forth—and all the innumerable little things you see all around you. Then when you have learned to explain simpler things, so you have learned what an explanation really is, you can then go on to more subtle questions.
Richard Feynman
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The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It is the illusion of knowledge.
Stephen Hawking
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Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
Richard Feynman
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I believe that understanding what is good is obtained by looking at the way the world works and figuring out how to operate in harmony with it to help it (and yourself) evolve.
Ray Dalio
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Though how nature works is way beyond man's ability to comprehend, I have found that observing how nature works offers innumerable lessons that can help us understand the realities that affect us.
Ray Dalio
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I believe there are an infinite number of laws of the universe and that all progress or dreams achieved come from operating in a way that's consistent with them. These laws and the principles of how to operate in harmony with them have always existed. We were given these laws by nature. Man didn't and can't make them up. He can only hope to understand them and use them to get what he wants.
Ray Dalio
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This is the source.
As children look out upon the world with wide, uncritical, undemanding, innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the matter or demanding that it be otherwise, so do self-actualizing people tend to look upon human nature in themselves and in others.
Abraham Maslow
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[Y]ou should not let yourself believe whatever comes to your mind. To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.
Daniel Kahneman
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Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum set of assumptions that can explain, through a straightforward logical derivation, the existence of many phenomena of nature.
Eliyahu Goldratt
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Many philosophers—particularly amateur philosophers, and ancient philosophers—share a dangerous instinct: If you give them a question, they try to answer it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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