Quotes by Scientists - Page 3

Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.
Sir Francis Bacon
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon
The lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes a wrong one ... the more active and swift the latter is the further he will go astray.
Francis Bacon
Reading makes a full man conference a ready man and writing an exact man.
Sir Francis Bacon
It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers we outgrow acquaintances libraries principles etc. at times before they're worn out and times-and this is the worst of all-before we have new ones.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.
Francis Bacon
Things alter for the worse spontaneously if they be not altered for the better designedly.
Francis Bacon
Some books are to be tasted others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.
Sir Francis Bacon
Some books are to be tasted others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon
A healthy body is a guest-chamber for the soul a sick body is a prison.
Sir Francis Bacon
As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen so are all innovations which are the births of time.
Francis Bacon
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Francis Bacon
The best work and of greatest merit for the public has proceeded from the unmarried or childless men.
Sir Francis Bacon
Anger makes dull men witty but it keeps them poor.
Francis Bacon
I feel age like an icicle down my back.
Dyson Carter
Old wood best to burn old wine to drink old friends to trust and old authors to read.
Sir Francis Bacon
Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.
Francis Bacon
The virtue of prosperity is temperance the virtue of adversity is fortitude.
Francis Bacon
The virtue of prosperity is temperance the virtue of adversity is fortitude which in morals is the heroical virtue.
Francis Bacon
Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
Francis Bacon
One's first step in wisdom is to question everything one's last is to come to terms with everything.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.
Charles Sanders Peirce
A sensible man may fear certain possibilities, but don’t let fear turn possibility into certainty.
Mark Lawrence
Yes, I was scared, vulnerable, and fragile and lived in books more than real life. Yet there was nothing Mom could do to make things easier for me, just worse by grounding me for life at the slightest hint of truth. Why? Because in spite of what she said she did not trust me or, to put it in her words, I did not know what was good for me.Being a teenager sucks! I might as well have been in prison.
Gaia B. Amman
[About Pierre de Fermat] It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.
René Descartes
You don't usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That's because you've only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.
Alastair Reynolds
Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea can never possess an idea of the world, and of their relation to it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A picture is worth a thousand words.......and a video is worth a million pictures.....
Ankala Subbarao
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush......unless the bird has the flu!
Ankala Subbarao
What's foreign one can't always keep quite clear of,For good things, oft, are not so near;A German can't endure the French to see or hear of,Yet drinks their wines with hearty cheer.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
...reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us only the best of their thoughts
René Descartes
Keep still and your troubles find you. I might not have known much about the unborn, but I sure as hell knew about running!
Mark Lawrence
Your body will argue that there is no justifiable reason to continue. Your only recourse is to call on your spirit, which fortunately functions independently of logic.
Tim Noakes
You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps.
Mark Lawrence
It’s always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public.
Mark Lawrence
Every day that we read the news we have the possibility of being confronted with a fact about our world that is wildly different from what we thought we knew.
Samuel Arbesman
One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I wonder why it is that the countries with the most nobles also have the most misery?
Francis Bacon
Why did it have to be such a shameful secret? Hadn’t I been potty-trained and taught to chew with my mouth closed? So what was the freaking big deal about having sex? Wasn’t it essential to the survival of our darn, hypocritical species?
Gaia B. Amman
There is nothing harder than telling your own mother you’re everything she hoped you were not.
Gaia B. Amman
Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
René Descartes
There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that.
Alastair Reynolds
I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.' He held out his hand, palm open. 'Free will has to be taken,' I said.
Mark Lawrence
The surest way to prevent seditions...is to take away the matter of them.
Francis Bacon
The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases. From the love of splendour, from the indulgences of luxury, and from his fondness for amusement he has familiarised himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have been intended for his associates.The wolf, disarmed of ferocity, is now pillowed in the lady's lap. The cat, the little tiger of our island, whose natural home is the forest, is equally domesticated and caressed. The cow, the hog, the sheep, and the horse, are all, for a variety of purposes, brought under his care and dominion.
Edward Jenner
There are a lot of things animals do that we can't," she says, "like flying and camouflage, and we've adapted, through technology ... It's funny when people say something is natural, or not. Compared with what? Compared with when? It's this vanity of humans to think of themselves as special, as being at the height of evolution. We're not. We're obviously still adapting.
Aarathi Prasad
It is often thought that the life of the hunter-gatherer was one of feast and famine. But most available data suggest that they were surprisingly healthy and had a fairly stable diet and lifestyle. Not so the primitive farmers. In years when the crops failed, in settlements where the population density was high and where disease weakened the ability to cope even further, life would have been very hard indeed. The settled population could not migrate to follow the food supply as could hunter-gatherers. They were trapped.
Peter Gluckman
...it is entirely illogical to consider biology in dichotomous terms of genes and environment—all of biology is based on the continuous interaction of both.
Peter Gluckman
One way of emphasizing the singularity of the recent past is [..] to observe that the total number of humans ever to have lived is estimated at around (a bit less than) 100 billion. One of Walt Whitman's poems has a memorable image—thinking of all past people lined up in orderly columns behind those living—‘row upon row rise the phantoms behind us’. Actually, looking over our shoulder, we would see only around 15 rows.
Robert M. May
Similarities are read into nature by our nervous system, and so are structurally less fundamental than differences. Less fundamental, but no less important, as life and 'intelligence' would be totally impossible without abstracting. It becomes clear that the problem which has so excited the s.r. of the people of the United States of America and added so much to the merriment of mankind, 'Is the evolution a ''fact'' or a ''theory''?, is simply silly. Father and son are never identical - that surely is a structural 'fact' - so there is no need to worry about still higher abstractions, like 'man' and 'monkey'. That the fanatical and ignorant attack on the theory of evolution should have occured may be pathetic, but need concern us little, as such ignorant attacks are always liable to occur. But that biologists should offer 'defences' based on the confusions of orders of abstractiobs, and that 'philosophers' should have failed to see the simple dependence is rather sad. The problems of 'evolution' are verbal and have nothing to do with life as such, which is made up all through of different individuals, 'similarity' being structurally a manufactured article, produced by the nervous system of the observer.
Alfred Korzybski
The inventor...looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea.
Alexander Graham Bell
Sometimes the only option is to raise the stakes, to throw yourself the other way, to force your opponent further down the path they've chosen, further than they might want to go.
Mark Lawrence
Those were great big angry men with sharp swords actually wanting to cut pieces off me. It’s not until you’ve seen a red gaping wound and all the complex little bits inside a man all broken up and sliced open, and known that they weren’t ever getting back together again, and vomited your last two meals over the rocks . . . it’s not until then that you understand the business of swords properly and, if you’re a sensible man you vow to have nothing to do with it ever again.
Mark Lawrence
And then—what?—you graduate from Alice to Frodo to Darth?
Douglas Richards
We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don't often get a glimpse of what we could have been
Alastair Reynolds
As to Science, she has never sought to ally herself to civil power. She has never attempted to throw odium or inflict social ruin on any human being. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torture, least of all to death, for the purpose of upholding or promoting her ideas. She presents herself unstained by cruelties and crimes. But in the Vatican—we have only to recall the Inquisition—the hands that are now raised in appeals to the 'Most Merciful' are crimsoned. They have been steeped in blood!
John William Draper
Mathematics is a terrible calling. It’s as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There’s a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That’s what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit.
Alastair Reynolds
Mathematics should be studied if only for that it puts the mind in order.
Mikhail Lomonosov