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Quotes about science

558 quotes from 241 people

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For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman1918–1988Rogers Commission Report (1986)
- Technology
There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
Richard Feynman1918–1988What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988), “The Making of a Scientist,” p. 11: video
- Beauty
What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Richard Feynman1918–1988The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. I (1963), lecture 3, “The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences”, p. 3-6
- Poetry
Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel prize.
Richard Feynman1918–1988statement (c. 1965), quoted in “An irreverent best-seller by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman gives nerds a good name”, People Magazine (22 July 1985)
- Comedy
Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.
Richard Feynman1918–1988The Value of Science (1955)
- Knowledge
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
Richard Feynman1918–1988The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 6, “Probability and Uncertainty — the Quantum Mechanical View of Nature,” p. 127-128
That the vegetable creation should restore the air which is spoiled by the animal part of it, looks like a rational system, and seems to be of a piece with the rest.
Benjamin Franklin1706–1790Letter to Joseph Priestley, printed in Priestley’s “Observations on Different Kinds of Air”, Philosophical Transactions, vol. 62 (1772)
- Nature
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Robert Frost1874–1963Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923)In context
- Nature
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost1874–1963Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923)In context
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Robert Frost1874–1963Birches (1915)In context
- Happiness
- Nature
Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
Buckminster Fuller1895–1983
- Nature
We are not going to be able to operate our spaceship earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
Buckminster Fuller1895–1983Presentation to U.S. Congressional Sub-Committee on World Game (1969)
- Nature
Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.
Galileo Galilei1564–1642
- God
If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.
Galileo Galilei1564–1642Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), Salviati
- Beauty
My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope?
Galileo Galilei1564–1642Letter to Johannes Kepler (1610), as quoted in The Crime of Galileo (1955) by Giorgio De Santillana
- Clever Jabs