Quotes by Scientists - Page 15

Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years.
Alexander Graham Bell
When they killed him, Mother wouldn't hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I've learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who've fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it IS a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him loose them all.
Mark Lawrence
We should not give up and we should not allow the problem to defeat us.
APJ Abdul Kalam
Everything is hard before it is easy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cyphel knew exactly how he felt about her as well — it was there in her expression whenever they spoke that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a look that expressed disdain at Campion’s guarded advances but also a kind of measured probationary respect as well. It was a look that said You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me Well perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me if only fleetingly.
Alastair Reynolds
Knowledge itself is power
Francis Bacon
Prison for the crime of puberty -- that was how secondary school had seemed.
David Brin
All of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand.
David Hawkins
Instruction does much, but encouragement everyt
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Anything in the world can be endured, except a series of wonderful days.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or the wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.
Francis Bacon
For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.
Francis Bacon
If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.
Francis Bacon
The world needs all types of minds.
Temple Grandin
I have accepted that I don't know all the things that I ought to know, but I do know things that I need to know.
Hope Jahren
People always want to know things . . . until they hear them, and then it's too late. Knowledge is a rug of a certain size, and the world is larger. It's not what remains uncovered at the edges that should worry you, rather what is swept beneath.
Mark Lawrence
To satisfy our doubts . . . it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency -- by something upon which our thinking has no effect. . . . Our external permanency would not be external, in our sense, if it was restricted in its influence to one individual. It must be something which affects, or might affect, every man. And, though these affections are necessarily as various as are individual conditions, yet the method must be such that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same. Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion. The new conception here involved is that of Reality.
Charles Sanders Peirce
We humans, through old habits, and because of the inherent structure of human knowledge have a tendency to make static, definite, and, in a way, absolutistic one-valued statements. But when we fight absolutism, we quite often establish, instead, some other dogma equally silly and harmful. For instance, an active atheist is psycho-logically as unsound as a rabid theist.
Alfred Korzybski
Now there are four chief obstacles in grasping truth, which hinder every man, however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to learning, namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge.
Roger Bacon
Nothing is more beautiful than to know all.
Athanasius Kircher
I would address one general admonition to all, that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or for fame, or power, or any of these inferior things, but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity. For it was from lust of power that the Angels fell, from lust of knowledge that man fell, but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man come in danger by it.
Francis Bacon
Neglect of mathematics work injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or things of this world. And what is worst, those who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance, and so do not seek a remedy.
Roger Bacon
Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life
Peter M Senge
I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When learning is purposeful, creativity blossoms. When creativity blossoms, thinking emanates. When thinking emanates, knowledge is fully lit. When knowledge is lit, economy flourishes.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
So far as we know, the tiny fragments of the universe embodied in man are the only centers of thought and responsibility in the visible world. If that be so, the appearance of the human mind has been so far the ultimate stage in the awakening of the world; and all that has gone before, the striving of myriad centers that have taken the risks of living and believing, seem to have all been pursuing, along rival lines, the aim now achieved by us up to this point. They are all akin to us, for all these centers - those which led up to our own existence and the far more numerous others which produced different lines of which many are extinct - may be seen engaged in the same endeavor towards ultimate liberation. We may envisage then a cosmic field which called forth all these centers by offering them a short-lived, limited, hazardous opportunity for making some progress of their own towards an unthinkable consummation. And that is also, I believe, how a Christian is placed when worshiping God.
Michael Polanyi
Humans are a story telling species. Throughout history we have told stories to each other and ourselves as one of the ways to understand the world around us. Every culture has its creation myth for how the universe came to be, but the stories do not stop at the big picture view; other stories discuss every aspect of the world around us. We humans are chatterboxes and we just can't resist telling a story about just about everything.However compelling and entertaining these stories may be, they fall short of being explanations because in the end all they are is stories. For every story you can tell a different variation, or a different ending, without giving reason to choose between them. If you are skeptical or try to test the veracity of these stories you'll typically find most such stories wanting. One approach to this is forbid skeptical inquiry, branding it as heresy. This meme is so compelling that it was independently developed by cultures around the globes; it is the origin of religion—a set of stories about the world that must be accepted on faith, and never questioned.
Nathan Myhrvold
When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he exposed the world to a momentous discovery . For the first time in history, human beings were seen not as creatures of divine origin, but instead, as a product of nature, an animal like every other on the planet. Imagine yourself back in that amazing year. The day before Darwin’s book was published, you wake up thinking yourself the image of God; the next morning you realize you have the face of a monkey. Not everybody immediately embraced this rude demotion from god to goat.
Jeff Schweitzer
...where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.
David Brin
We do not accept a religion because it offers us certain rewards. The only thing that a religion can offer us is to be just what it, in itself, is: a greater meaning in ourselves, in our lives, and in our grasp of the nature of things...a religion exists for us only if, like a piece of poetry, it carries us away. It is not in any sense a 'hypothesis.
Michael Polanyi
I've never had much use for religion, except when it comes to swearing or begging for mercy.
Mark Lawrence
Sex is the most important sort of adult play. If you can't relax here you never will
Alex Comfort
If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
While I have the floor, here's a question that's been bothering me for some time. Why do so few writers of heroic or epic fantasy ever deal with the fundamental quandary of their novels . . . that so many of them take place in cultures that are rigid, hierarchical, stratified, and in essence oppressive? What is so appealing about feudalism, that so many free citizens of an educated commonwealth like ours love reading about and picturing life under hereditary lords?, such as flush toilets, movable type, or electricity for every home in the kingdom? Given half a chance, the sons and daughters of peasants would rather not grow up to be servants. It seems bizarre for modern folk to pine for a way of life our ancestors rightfully fought desperately to escape.
David Brin
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
Francis Bacon
The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Lovers meander in prose and rhyme,trying to say-for the thousandth time-what's easier done than said.
Piet Hein
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Let's go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces.
Mark Lawrence
A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Just when you think you're in the cat-bird's seat, the Angel of Death calls "dibs" on shotgun.
P.L. Reiter
Death was kind.” He drew a sharp breath. “But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child.
Mark Lawrence
No man should go to Valhalla with brothel rash.
Mark Lawrence
Many are less fortunate than you’ may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans became almost a planetary disease organism. But it has taken [Earth] 2.5 billion years to evolve an animal that can think and communicate its thoughts. If we become extinct she has little chance of evolving another.
James E. Lovelock
Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
Francis Bacon
My fingers are wet. I haven’t even got passed your panties yet.
Nicky Fox
Hunter Westley, you can’t just go around kissing people. She’s so cute.Not people Lenora, just you. Only you.
Nicky Fox
It’s as if our bodies know the secret that we don’t wish to admit yet.
Nicky Fox
That kiss was amazing. Our lips were meant to meet and do wicked things to each other.
Nicky Fox
...nothing is more dangerous than solitude: there our imagination, always disposed to rise, taking a new flight on the wings of fancy, pictures to us a chain of beings of whom we seem the most inferior. All things appear greater than they really are, and all seem superior to us. This operation of the mind is quite natural: we so continually feel our own imperfections, and fancy we perceive in others the qualities we do not possess, attributing to them also all that we enjoy ourselves, that by this process we form the idea of a perfect, happy man,—a man, however, who only exists in our own imagination.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If you Fail, never Give Up because FAIL means First Attempt In Learning!End is not the End, it meansEffort Never Dies!If you get No as an answer; remember NOmeans Next Opportunity!
APJ Abdul Kalam
To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.
René Descartes
Dreams are not those which comes while we are sleeping, but dreams are those when u don't sleep before fulfilling them.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
Crafty men condemn studies; Simple men admire them; And wise men use them: For they teach not their own use: but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.
Francis Bacon