Quotes on the nature and scope of the natural sciences

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

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
 
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
 
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

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

Quotes on the communication of ideas in the natural sciences

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
 
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
 
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

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.
Elon Musk
 
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

Quotes on the natural sciences, perspectives, and context

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

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

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

Quotes on the creation of new ideas in the natural sciences

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

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

The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas Huxley

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
Stephen Hawking

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

Quotes on becoming a discerning knower about the natural sciences

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

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Alan Perlis

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