
Quotes on the natural sciences
These quotes will kick-start your exploration of the natural sciences, and help you reflect on your own understanding of this area of knowledge.
Which quotes do you find the most and least insightful? Do the quotes challenge or support your understanding of the natural sciences? What do the quotes reveal about the way the natural sciences interlink with the TOK themes, and the other areas of knowledge?
Quotes on the nature and scope of the natural sciences

- These quotes on the natural sciences relate to Big Question 1 (What are the natural sciences, and why do we study them?), the first unit of our BQ approach to TOK
- They also link to the nature and scope of the arts, part of the IB’s knowledge framework for exploring TOK
- Use the link to each thinker as a starting point to find out more about their ideas
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Immanuel Kant
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
Maria Mitchell
Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.
Stephen Hawking
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
H.L. Mencken
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.
Werner von Braun
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
Carl Sagan
Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It’s posing questions and coming up with a method. It’s delving in.
Sally Ride
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Thomas Huxley
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
William Osler
Quotes on the relationship between the natural sciences and values

- These quotes on the natural sciences relate to Big Question 2 (How does our knowledge about the world inform our values?), the second unit of our BQ approach to TOK
- They also link to the arts and ethics, part of the IB’s knowledge framework for exploring TOK
- Use the link to each thinker as a starting point to find out more about their ideas
Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in a time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.
Blaise Pascal
Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.
Jean Rostand
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.
Bertrand Russell
There’s nothing I believe in more strongly than getting young people interested in science and engineering, for a better tomorrow, for all humankind.
Bill Nye
I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy.
Bertrand Russell
The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.
Walter Gilbert
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
W.H. Auden
Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead.
Bertrand Russell
Quotes on the communication of ideas in the natural sciences

- These quotes on the natural sciences relate to Big Question 3 (How is our understanding influenced by the way knowledge is communicated?), the third unit of our BQ approach to TOK
- They also link to methods, tools, and practices of the arts, part of the IB’s knowledge framework for exploring TOK
- Use the link to each thinker as a starting point to find out more about their ideas
But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
Francis Darwin
Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.
Elon Musk
It turns out, all you need to do when you read or hear something that sounds smart, is try to translate it back into ordinary language – or better yet, have the person explain it for you – without using any scientific jargon or terms, and see if it still makes sense.
Richard Feynman
Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Statistics is the grammar of science.
Karl Pearson
Science is a beautiful gift to humanity; we should not distort it.
A.P.J. Abdul Karam
Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.
Albert Einstein
Quotes on the natural sciences, perspectives, and context

- These quotes on the natural sciences relate to Big Question 4 (How do our perspectives and biases shape our knowledge?), the fourth unit of our BQ approach to TOK
- They also link to perspectives & context related to the arts, part of the IB’s knowledge framework for exploring TOK
- Use the link to each thinker as a starting point to find out more about their ideas
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.
Arthur M. Schlesinger
Science is the father of knowledge, but opinion breeds ignorance.
Hippocrates
Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.
William Blake
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
Richard P. Feynman
Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.
Johann von Goethe
Art is I; science is we.
Claude Bernard
There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
Isaac Asimov
Science is the best idea humans have ever had. The more people who embrace that idea, the better.
Bill Nye
Science is global. Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, has to reach everywhere. Science is a beautiful gift to humanity, we should not distort it. Science does not differentiate between multiple races.
Abdul Kalam
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
Adam Smith
Quotes on the creation of new ideas in the natural sciences

- These quotes on the natural sciences relate to Big Question 5 (How is new knowledge about the world created?), the third unit of our BQ approach to TOK
- They also link to methods, tools, and practices of the arts, part of the IB’s knowledge framework for exploring TOK
- Use the link to each thinker as a starting point to find out more about their ideas
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
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
William Lawrence Bragg
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
Isaac Newton
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.
Richard Powers
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
Maria Montessori
Nothing is less predictable than the development of an active scientific field.
Charles Francis Richter
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
Albert Einstein
The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas Huxley
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it.
Robert L. Park
To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.
Evelyn Fox Keller
In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Stephen Jay Gould
It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.
Henri Poincare
When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won’t one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.
Jean Rostand
Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
Stephen Hawking
Quotes on becoming a discerning knower about the natural sciences

- These quotes on the natural sciences relate to Big Question 6 (How do we become discerning knowers?), the final unit of our BQ approach to TOK
- They also link to perspectives & context related to the arts, part of the IB’s knowledge framework for exploring TOK
- Use the link to each thinker as a starting point to find out more about their ideas
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions; that is the heart of science.
Carl Sagan
Reason, Observation, and Experience – the Holy Trinity of Science.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one’s brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.
Roger Bacon
We don’t regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth.
Kenneth R. Miller
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Arthur C. Clarke
Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist.
Albert Einstein
Facts are not science – as the dictionary is not literature.
Martin H. Fischer
In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.
Lord Kelvin
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Alan Perlis
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