And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.
Haemoglobin is a very large molecule by ordinary standards, containing about ten thousand atoms, but the chances are that your haemoglobin and mine are identical, and significantly different from that of a pig or horse. You may be impressed by how much human beings differ from one another, but if you were to look into the fine details of the molecules of which they are constructed, you would be astonished by their similarity.
Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?
Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but. . . hypotheses may not.
I believe that through its rational evaluation of truth and indifference to personal belief, science transcends religious and political divisions and so does bind us into a greater, more resilient whole.
The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.
I enjoy, and always have enjoyed, disturbing scientists.
It is clear that the earth does not move, and that it does not lie elsewhere than at the center.
In nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place.
I didn't invent forensic science and medicine. I just was one of the first people to recognize how interesting it is.
Poetics is a science for stammering poets.
The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.
Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.
Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.
In scientific matters there was a common language and one standard of values; in moral and political problems there were many. … Furthermore, in science there is a court of last resort, experiment, which is unavailable in human affairs.
We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.
Dogbert: Scientists have discovered the gene that makes some people love golf. Dilbert: How can they tell it's the golf gene? Dogbert: It's plaid and it lies.
It is not therefore the business of philosophy, in our present situation in the universe, to attempt to take in at once, in one view, the whole scheme of nature; but to extend, with great care and circumspection, our knowledge, by just steps, from sensible things, as far as our observations or reasonings from them will carry us, in our enquiries concerning either the greater motions and operations of nature, or her more subtile and hidden works. In this way Sir Isaac Newton proceeded in his discoveries.
