Favorite quotations - science

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

– Albert Einstein

You can’t do ordinary stuff and expect unique results.

-- Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin

If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without knowing or feeling it, this apparent barren effort has brought more light into the soul.

– Simone Weil

In our thinking…we attribute to this concept of the bodily object a significance, which is to high degree independent of the sense impression which originally gives rise to it. This is what we mean when we attribute to the bodily object a real existence. …By means of such concepts and mental relations between them, we are able to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of sense impressions. These notions and relations…appear to us as stronger and more unalterable than the individual sense experience itself, the character of which as anything other than the result of an illusion or hallucination is never completely guaranteed.

-Albert Einstein

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

– Marie Curie

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

– Richard Feynman

Don’t look back in anger or look forward in fear but look around you in awareness.

-- James Thurber

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

– Baruch Spinoza

He who finds a thought that enables him to obtain a slightly deeper glimpse into the eternal secrets of nature has been given great grace.

– Albert Einstein

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then to learn.

Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.

– T. H. White, in The Once and Future King

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

– Baruch Spinoza

The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of “physical reality” indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these notions – that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics – in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way logically.

-Albert Einstein

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

– John Louis von Neumann

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. One seeks the most general ideas of operation which will bring together in simple, logical and unified form the largest possible circle of formal relationships. In this effort toward logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.

– Albert Einstein

Every intellectual has a very special responsibility. He has the privilege and opportunity of studying. In return, he owes it to his fellow men (or "to society") to represent the results of his study as simply, clearly and modestly as he can.

The worst thing that intellectuals can do – the cardinal sin – is to try to set themselves up as great prophets vis-a-vis their fellow men and to impress them with puzzling philosophies. Anyone who cannot speak simply and clearly should say nothing and continue to work until he can do so.

– Karl Popper

Technology is the reason we get old enough to complain about technology.

— Garry Kasparov

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.

– Marie Curie