Quotes by Scientists - Page 16

We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do . For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with the columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent; his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil. For without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced. Nay, an honest man can do no good upon those that are wicked, to reclaim them, without the help of the knowledge of evil.
Francis Bacon
A WORD TO THE WISELet the world pass in its time-ridden race; never get caught in its snare.Remember, the only acceptable casefor being in any particular place is having no business there.
Piet Hein
Behaviour is a mirror in which every one displays his own image.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
Francis Bacon
What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.
Francis Bacon
Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at God's right hand.' Her voice grew faint, the hint of a whisper. 'In the end pride is the only evil, the root of all sins.''Pride is all I have.
Mark Lawrence
But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.
Francis Bacon
We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself; it never cheapens or debases him who reaches for it but ennobles and honors him.
Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi
The dreams we imagine when we are asleep should not in any way make us doubt the truth of the thoughts we have when we are awake.
René Descartes
Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure
Francis Bacon
The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude. In the Press and Encyclopaedias, in Schools and Universities, everywhere Error holds sway, feeling happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is nothing more ancient than the truth.
René Descartes
You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.
René Descartes
It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
René Descartes
My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.
Michael H. Hart
And thus, the actions of life often not allowing any delay, it is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine the most true opinions we ought to follow the most probable.
René Descartes
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
René Descartes
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,—or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety.
Bronowski
We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time as a function of our own action.
J.D. Bernal
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.
René Descartes
although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth.
René Descartes
...if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Don’t reject something just because it seems strange. It’s comfort that will kill you in the end.
Simon Morden
When they have discovered truth in nature they fling it into a book, where it is even worse hands.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The way you see people is the way you treat them and the way you treat them is what they become.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast. - Without haste, but without rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nature, it seems, is the popular namefor milliards and milliards and milliardsof particles playing their infinite gameof billiards and billiards and billiards.
Piet Hein
What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Comprehending and knowing better and deeper are the best guarantees we can have to attain ideas and criteria of our own; i.e. to stop depending on what other people say. In summary, to be freer to choose our own path in life.
Manuel Toharia-Cortés
Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no further: and we see the times inclined to atheism (as the time of Augustus Cæsar) were civil times. But superstition hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new primum mobile, that ravisheth all the spheres of government. The master of superstition is the people; and in all superstition wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order.
Francis Bacon
Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Francis Bacon
It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.
Charles Sanders Peirce
the serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.
Francis Bacon
Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
Francis Bacon
Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.
René Descartes
Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski
I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto 'to live well you must live unseen
René Descartes
We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.
Mark Lawrence
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
René Descartes
I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.
René Descartes
Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Running ain't no bad thing. Leastways if you run in the right direction.
Mark Lawrence
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, where does that leave God?
George Deacon
Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.
René Descartes
When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
Alexander Graham Bell
For great men, religion is a way of making friends; small people make religion a fighting tool.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
Dream, Dream DreamDreams transform into thoughts And thoughts result in action.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
He who moves not forward, goes backward.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If you would create something,you must be something.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
David Brin
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe