Inspirational Life Science Quotes: Wisdom from the Greatest Minds

"Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity."

- Mae Jemison

"Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet."

- Stephen Hawking

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

- Carl Sagan

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."

- Marie Curie

"Life is like riding a bicycle, in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving."

- Albert Einstein

"There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything in a miracle."

- Albert Einstein

"The truth may be puzzling.  It may take some work to grapple with.  It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices.  It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true.  But our preferences do not determine what's true."

- Carl Sagan

"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.  If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living."

- Jules-Henri Poincare

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."

- Charles Darwin

"If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off... no matter what they say."

- Barbara McClintock

"Above all, don't fear difficult moments. The best comes from them."

- Rita Levi-Montalcini

"If the universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence."

- John O'Keefe

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."

- Galileo

"Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions."

- Vera Rubin

"Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought."

- Albert Szent-Györgyi

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'"

- Isaac Asimov

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

- Albert Einstein

"If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas."

- Linus Pauling

"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense."

- Carl Sagan

"The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them."

- Sir William Lawrence Bragg

"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."

- Stephen Hawking

"Science means constantly walking a tightrope between blind faith and curiosity; between expertise and creativity; between bias and openness; between experience and epiphany; between ambition and passion; and between arrogance and conviction – in short, between and old today and a new tomorrow."

- Henrich Rohrer

"Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world."

- Louis Pasteur

"The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined."

- John N. Bahcall

"The important thing is to never stop questioning [or learning]."

- Albert Einstein

"We cannot solve problems with the same thinking we used to create them."

- Albert Einstein

"I am among those who think that science has great beauty."

- Marie Curie

"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."

- Carl Sagan

"A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things."

- Grace Hopper

"Science is the only self-correcting human institution, but it also is a process that progresses only by showing itself to be wrong."

- Allan Sandage

"One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away."

- Stephen Hawking

"Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe."

- Galileo Galilei

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science."

- Albert Einstein

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."

- Niels Bohr

"The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience. The reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape."

- Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

"Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done."

- Robert A. Heinlein

"The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience."

- Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

"Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination."

- Jonah Lehrer

"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Science is not only a disciple of reason but also one of romance and passion."

- Stephen Hawking

"Life cannot have had a random beginning."

- Fred Hoyle

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

- Isaac Newton

"All outstanding work, in art as well as in science, results from immense zeal applied to a great idea."

- Santiago Ramón y Cajal

"Our bodies actually depend on other stars."

- Jennifer Wiseman

"The human mind is not capable of grasping the universe."

- Albert Einstein

"An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer."

- Max Planck

"What you learn from a life in science is the vastness of our ignorance."

- David Eagleman

"In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs."

- William Osler

"Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated."

- Rosalind Franklin

"When kids look up to great scientists the way they do musicians, actors [and sports figures], civilization will jump to the next level."

- Brian Greene

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

- Isaac Asimov

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

- Albert Einstein

"Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler."

- Albert Einstein

"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in."

- Alan Alda

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

- Carl Sagan

"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure."

- Albert Einstein

"I find it quite improbably that such order came out of chaos."

- Allan Sandage

"Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity."

- Lise Meitner

"There are mysteries that we're still trying to investigate through the gift of science."

- Jennifer Wiseman

"But science has given us new eyes that allow us to see down to the deeper roots of the world's structure, and there all we see is order and symmetry of pristine mathematical purity."

- Stephen M. Barr

"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only find it within yourself."

- Galileo Galilei

"Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."

- Albert Einstein

"Do not undertake a scientific career in quest of fame or money.  There are easier and better ways to reach them.  Undertake it only if nothing else will satisfy you; for nothing else is probably what you will receive.  Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask no other."

- Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

- Carl Sagan

"We can't help it.  Life looks for life."

- Carl Sagan

"All humans are brothers.  They came from the same supernova."

- Allan Sandage

"We must not wait for things to come, believing that they are decided by irrescindable destiny.  If we want it, we must do something about it."

- Erwin Schrodinger

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."

- Albert Einstein

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true."

- Michael Faraday

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."

- Albert Einstein

"A glimpse of this wonder can be the reward of a lifetime."

- Chien-Shiung Wu

"Our virtues and our failures are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more."

- Nikola Tesla

"Never memorize something that you can look up."

- Albert Einstein

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."

- Niels H. D. Bohr

"Any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a 'discovery' of mine, but rather something that has always been there and that I had chanced to pick up."

- P. V. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

"There are a thousand ways to get a problem wrong -- not all of them bad -- and many ways to get a problem right -- not all of them good."

- David J. Griffiths

"Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought."

- Albert Einstein

"In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea occurs."

- Sir Francis Darwin

"The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it is."

- J. Robert Oppenheimer

"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer.  Art is everything else we do."

- Donald Knuth

"We live in a society exquisitely dependent  on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."

- Carl Sagan

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"

- Albert Einstein

"Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand."

- Dan Brown

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."

- Christopher Hitchens

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement.  But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."

- Niels H. D. Bohr

"True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness."

- Albert Einstein

"If all of mathematics disappeared, physics would be set back by exactly one week."

- Richard P. Feynman

"Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach."

- Michael Faraday

"We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming."

- Wernher von Braun

"Impossible only means that you haven’t found the solution yet."