Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Certainty ends inquiry.
Dissent is the mark of freedom.
The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Power is the by-product of understanding.
A genius is a man who has two great ideas.
Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.
Progress is the exploration of our own error.
Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.
Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.
All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.
A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.
Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.
The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual
The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.
Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.
I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.
Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.
The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.
The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.
The world is full of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.
We are all shot through with enough motives to make a massacre, any day of the week that we want to give them their head.
To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.
The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.
The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.
The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.
Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.
The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.
Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different.
It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
The idea that the universe is running down comes from a simple observation about machines. Every machine consumes more energy than it renders.
The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.