Quotes by Scientists - Page 2

We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.

Mark Lawrence

Dimly--at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream--she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.

Alastair Reynolds

Now we have so many methods of communication: Land phone, Fax, Pager, Mobile phone, Texting, E mail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram...and the list keeps growing.......But Communication itself has not improved!

Ankala V Subbarao

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.

Francis Bacon

Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young.

David Brin

A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect.

Mark Lawrence

But still try for who knows what is possible!

Michael Faraday

As I write this entry, I touch a saber-tooth tiger skull in my office. Without stars there could be no skulls

Clifford A. Pickover

And then—what?—you graduate from Alice to Frodo to Darth?

Douglas Richards

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called "Damn It".

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Still, perhaps that's all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing.

Mark Lawrence

While science can be many things, above all it is a way for our mistake-making, illusion-prone, storytelling brains to compare different methods for describing nature.

Mike McRae

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The inventor...looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea.

Alexander Graham Bell

It’s as if our bodies know the secret that we don’t wish to admit yet.

Nicky Fox

...it is entirely illogical to consider biology in dichotomous terms of genes and environment—all of biology is based on the continuous interaction of both.

Peter Gluckman

Divide and rule, the politician cries;Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It was a strange trek — the sullen leading the apathetic, followed by the confused, all tailed by the inveterately amused.

David Brin

No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The best inheritance a parent can give his children is a few minutes of his time each day.

O.A. Battista

Actions have consequences. Kids today don’t think about that. It’s like, ‘Hey, wouldn’t this be awesome?!’ Consequences? What are those?

Theodore Jerome Cohen

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no further: and we see the times inclined to atheism (as the time of Augustus Cæsar) were civil times. But superstition hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new primum mobile, that ravisheth all the spheres of government. The master of superstition is the people; and in all superstition wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order.

Francis Bacon

Histories make men wise poets witty the mathematics subtile natural philosophy deep morals grave logic and rhetoric able to contend.

Sir Francis Bacon

The virtue of prosperity is temperance the virtue of adversity is fortitude.

Francis Bacon

The lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes a wrong one ... the more active and swift the latter is the further he will go astray.

Francis Bacon

It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.

Mark Lawrence

Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.

Francis Bacon

to treat a human being as an animal - as a mere space-binder - because humans have certain animal propensities, is an error of the same type and grossness as to treat a cube as a surface because it has surface properties.

Alfred Korzybski

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself. For how would I understand that I doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects?

René Descartes

The more you believe in the power of thought, and the more you listen to your breath, the greater changes you can create in your life.

Stig Åvall Severinsen

But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.

Francis Bacon

We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not some books continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, and cities have been decayed and demolished?

Francis Bacon

Sex ought to be a wholly satisfying link between two affectionate people from which they emerge unanxious rewarded and ready for more.

Alex Comfort

Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over.

Alastair Reynolds

The best slave is the one who thinks he is free.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We have found that the values of the constants of nature have not been fine-tuned for life by accident, but that these values are constrained by and logically follow from the fundamental space-time organization of the Cosmic Tree of Life.

Carl Johan Calleman

I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices.

Heinz von Foerster

Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves.

Alastair Reynolds

I took especially great pleasure in mathematics because of the certainty and the evidence of its arguments.

René Descartes

If you would create something,you must be something.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Suddenly the images in the center of the room became more than images. They solidified.

Stephanie Osborn

Man, when he is re-born, passes through the ages as he who is born; and the preceding state is always as an egg in respect to the subsequent one, thus he is continually conceived and born: and this not only when he lives in the world, but also when he comes into another life to eternity: and still when he cannot be further perfected, then to be as an egg to those things which remain to be manifested, which are indefinite.

Emanuel Swedenborg

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

Francis Bacon

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.

Francis Bacon

Sometimes the only option is to raise the stakes, to throw yourself the other way, to force your opponent further down the path they've chosen, further than they might want to go.

Mark Lawrence

Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.

Alastair Reynolds

The one prejudice it had proved hardest to root out of a society was the one towards people whose social skills were limited.

Alex Lamb

I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

man's sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things; on the contrary, all the perceptions both of the senses and the mind bear reference to man and not to the Universe, and the human mind resembles these uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects, from which rays are emitted and distort and disfigure them.

Francis Bacon

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

René Descartes

Our humanity were a poor thing but for the divinity that stirs within us.

Sir Francis Bacon

It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.

Francis Bacon

Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable—and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.

David Brin

So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.

René Descartes

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