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Quotes about science

558 quotes from 241 people

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Nature has but one judgment on wrong conduct — if you can call that a judgment which seemingly has no reference to conduct as such — the judgment of death.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.1841–1935Address at the dedication of the Northwestern University Law School Building, Chicago, Illinois (20 October 1902); republished in Holmes’ Collected Legal Papers (1937), p. 272.
- Nature
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.1809–1894Often credited to Oliver Wendell Holmes
Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines. Even so is it with the generations of mankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away.
Homer900–800 BCThe Iliad (8th century BC), Book VIIn context
- Life & Death
- Nature
Glory be to God for dappled things
Gerard Manley Hopkins1844–1889Pied Beauty (1877)In context
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.
Gerard Manley Hopkins1844–1889God’s Grandeur (1877)In context
- God
- Nature
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
Gerard Manley Hopkins1844–1889God’s Grandeur (1877)In context
- Nature
Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Gerard Manley Hopkins1844–1889Spring and Fall (1880)In context
- Children
- Nature
My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,⁠—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Gerard Manley Hopkins1844–1889The Windhover (1877)In context
- Animals
- Nature
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough
A. E. Housman1859–1936Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now (1896)In context
- Beauty
- Nature
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Langston Hughes1901–1967The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)In context
- History
- Nature
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.
Zora Neale Hurston1891–1960Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Ch. 10: Research, p. 143
- Knowledge
Reason, Observation and Experience — the Holy Trinity of Science — have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us.
Robert G. Ingersoll1833–1899“The Gods” (1876) as published in The Gods and Other Lectures (1879)
- Happiness
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
William James1842–1910Collected Essays and Reviews (1920), Ch. 11—Clifford’s Lectures and Essays (1879)
- Poetry
Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘scientific’ bounds.
William James1842–1910The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lecture XX, “Conclusions”
If you are obliged to neglect any thing, let it be your chemistry. It is the least useful and the least amusing to a country gentleman of all the ordinary branches of science.
Thomas Jefferson1743–1826