"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
— Albert Einstein

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
— Albert Einstein

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
— Isaac Asimov

"Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler."
— Albert Einstein

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science."
— Albert Einstein (Albert Einstein)

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
— Niels Bohr

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'"
— Isaac Asimov

"God does not play dice with the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?"
— Stephen W. Hawking (A Brief History of Time)

"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have."
— Albert Einstein

"The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions."
— Claude Lévi-Strauss

"The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power."
— Bertrand Russell

"The young specialist in English Lit, ... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong.

... My answer to him was, "... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.""
— Isaac Asimov

"Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own. "
— Bertrand Russell (What I Believe)

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

"It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct."
— Michio Kaku (Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension)

"Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition."
— Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations)

"We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are."
— Stephen Jay Gould (The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History)

"Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification."
— Karl Popper

"What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does."
— Richard P. Feynman (QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter)

"Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming."
— J.B.S. Haldane (Possible Worlds: And Other Papers)

"Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.

It flung them like stones."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of Evolution"
— T.G. Dobzhansky

"To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. "
— Evelyn Fox Keller (Reflections on Gender and Science: Tenth Anniversary Paperback Edition)

"Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope."
— Theodore Roszak (Where the Wasteland Ends)

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. "
— Max Planck

"Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about - yet. There have been other great mysteries: the mystery of the origin of the universe, the mystery of life and reproduction, the mystery of the design to be found in nature, the mysteries of time, space, and gravity. These were not just areas of scientific ignorance, but of utter bafflement and wonder. We do not yet have all the answers to any of the questions of cosmology and particle physics, molecular genetics and evolutionary theory, but we do know how to think about them .... With consciousness, however, we are still in a terrible muddle. Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist -- and hope -- that there will never be a demystification of consciousness."
— Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained)

"Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house."
— Henri Poincare (Science and Hypothesis)

"The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems."
— G.W. Allport

"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. "
— John Dewey (The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge And Action)

"Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free"
— Stuart Kauffman (At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity)

"Science is the search for the truth--it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others. We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs, to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find the right solution, the just solution of international problems, and not an effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible. I believe in morality, in justice, in humanitarianism.
"
— Linus Pauling (Linus Pauling On Peace - A Scientist Speaks Out on Humanism and World Survival)

"For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. "
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"Those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn!"
— Claudius Galen

"Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue."
— Robert King Merton (Social Theory and Social Structure)

"Science without conscience is the soul's perdition."
— François Rabelais (Pantagruel)

"In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."
— Murray Gell-Mann (The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex)

"If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all."
— Stuart Kauffman

"Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law."
— William James (The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy)

"An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water."
— Arthur S. Eddington

"Big whirls have little whirls,
That feed on their velocity;
And little whirls have lesser whirls,
And so on to viscosity."
— Lewis Fry Richardson

"Science is the topography of ignorance."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

"Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

"Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry. "
— John Dewey (Reconstruction in Philosophy)

"Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take. "
— Fritjof Capra (The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture)

"The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too."
— Freeman Dyson (From Eros to Gaia)

"I once read that if the folds in the cerebral cortex were smoothed out it would cover a card table. That seemed quite unbelievable but it did make me wonder just how big the cortex would be if you ironed it out. I thought it might just about cover a family-sized pizza: not bad, but no card-table. I was astonished to realize that nobody seems to know the answer. A quick search yielded the following estimates for the smoothed out dimensions of the cerebral cortex of the human brain.

An article in Bioscience in November 1987 by Julie Ann Miller claimed the cortex was a "quarter-metre square." That is napkin-sized, about ten inches by ten inches. Scientific American magazine in September 1992 upped the ante considerably with an estimated of 1 1/2 square metres; thats a square of brain forty inches on each side, getting close to the card-table estimate. A psychologist at the University of Toronto figured it would cover the floor of his living room (I haven't seen his living room), but the prize winning estimate so far is from the British magazine New Scientist's poster of the brain published in 1993 which claimed that the cerebral cortex, if flattened out, would cover a tennis court. How can there be such disagreement? How can so many experts not know how big the cortex is? I don't know, but I'm on the hunt for an expert who will say the cortex, when fully spread out, will cover a football field. A Canadian football field."
— Jay Ingram (Burning House)