Inspiring Wisdom: 50 Quotes from Great Scientists

"I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

- Isaac Newton

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

- Albert Einstein

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

- Isaac Asimov

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

- Isaac Newton

"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

"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself."

- Galileo

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

- 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 grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms."

- Albert Einstein

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

- Albert Einstein

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

- Albert Einstein

"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

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

- Albert Einstein

"thought that science was certain ? well, that is just an error on your part."

- Richard Feynman

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

- Albert Einstein

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

- Albert Einstein

"Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s what scientists do every day. If a scientist already knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t be discovering anything, because they already knew what they were doing."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

- Galileo

"Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is always limited."

- Albert Einstein

"Life cannot have had a random beginning ... The trouble is that there are about 2000 enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup."

- Fred Hoyle

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

- Carl Sagan

"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom."

- E. O. Wilson

"To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."

- Nicolaus Copernicus

"We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within."

- Stephen Jay Gould

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

- Galileo Galilei

"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

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

- Albert Einstein

"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

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

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

- Marie Curie

"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

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

- Rita Levi-Montalcini

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

- Galileo Galilei

"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else."

- Donald E. Knuth

"A real scientist solves problems, not wails that they are unsolvable."

- Anne McCaffrey

"It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple."

- Georg C. Lichtenberg

"The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time."

- Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

"A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life."

- Charles Darwin

"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science."

- Edwin Powell Hubble

"The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more."

- Jonas Salk

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature."

- Michael Faraday

"Thanks to my having hit upon the fortunate idea of introducing the relativity principle into physics, you [Arnold Sommerfeld] and others enormously overestimate my scientific abilities, to the point where it makes me somewhat uncomfortable."

- Albert Einstein

"The reality is that the only way change comes is when you lead by example."

- Anne Wojcicki

"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

"There is stardust in your veins. We are literally, ultimately children of the stars."

- Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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

- Nikola Tesla

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

- Santiago Ramón y Cajal

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

- Stephen Hawking

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

- Louis Pasteur

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

- Max Planck

"Nature is made in such a way as to be able to be understood. Or perhaps I should put it - more correctly - the other way around, and say that we are made in such a way as to be able to understand Nature."

- Werner Heisenberg

"Nature is implacable and unalterable, and quite indifferent to whether she’s comprehensible to us or not."

- Galileo

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

- Albert Einstein

"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

"There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."

- Karl Marx

"Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do."

- Benjamin Spock

"That’s the whole problem with science. You’ve got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder."

- Bill Watterson

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

- Carl Sagan

"Great difficulties are felt at first [in research] and these cannot be overcome except by starting from experiments ... and then by conceiving certain hypotheses ... But even so, very much hard work remains to be done and one needs not only great perspicacity but often a degree of good fortune."

- Christiaan Huygens

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

- Sir William Osler

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

- Rosalind Franklin

"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

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act; the rest is merely tenacity."

- Amelia Earhart

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

- Paul Dirac

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

- Albert Szent-Györgyi

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

- Niels H. D. Bohr

"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 an old today and a new tomorrow."

- Henrich Rohrer

"Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: we are here for the sake of others."

- Albert Einstein

"An open mind is prerequisite to an open heart."

- Robert Sapolsky

"It was about three o’clock at night when the final result of the calculation [demonstrating the sensibility of matrix mechanics] lay before me ... At first I was deeply shaken ... I was so excited that I could not think of sleep. So I left the house ... and awaited the sunrise on top of a rock. That was ‘the night of Helgoland.’"

- Werner Heisenberg

"Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe."

- Erwin Schrodinger

"There may be babblers, wholly ignorant of mathematics, who dare to condemn my hypothesis, upon the authority of some part of the Bible twisted to suit their purpose. I value them not, and scorn their unfounded judgment."

- Nicolaus Copernicus

"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind."

- Max Planck

"The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind ... is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart."

- Albert Einstein

"Adopting the right attitude can convert a negative stress into a positive one."

- Hans Selye

"A true adventure begins when imagination collides with reality."

- Karel Capek

"Encouraging students is like building a fire. You can either blow the fire out when you are trying to start it, or you can make the coals glow in such a way that they spontaneously burst into flame."

- Dudley Herschbach

"Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control."

- Steven Pinker

"There is no law except the law that there is no law."

- John Archibald Wheeler

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

- Linus Pauling

"If a tree dies, plant another in its place."

- Carolus Linnaeus

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

- Jonah Lehrer

"Only a fool makes no experiments."

- Charles Darwin

"I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not."

- Peter Medawar

"All sorts of things can happen when you’re open to new ideas and playing around with things."

- Stephanie Kwolek

"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

"I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own everyday desires ..."

- Albert Einstein

"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."

- Wernher von Braun

"In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you."

- Frank Wilczek

"Those [scientists] who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas."

- Max Planck

"Those who do not stop asking silly questions become scientists."

- Leon Lederman

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

- J. Robert Oppenheimer

"The opposite of a right statement is a wrong statement. The opposite of a deep truth can also be a deep truth."

- Niels Bohr

"Say not in grief that he is no more, but live in thankfulness that he was."

- Rabindranath Tagore

"The victory [on the law of refraction] was still with Monsieur Descartes since in effect his opinion was confirmed to be true even by reasoning different from his, after all the most famous conquerors did not consider themselves less happy when victory was obtained by auxiliary troops instead of by their own."

- Pierre de Fermat

"The nature of light is a subject of no material importance to the concerns of life or to the practice of the arts, but it is in many other respects extremely interesting."

- Thomas Young

"It’s of no use whatsoever. This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right - we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there."

- Heinrich Hertz

"We think we understand the regular reflection of light and X rays - and we should understand the reflections of electrons as well if electrons were only waves instead of particles ... It is rather as if one were to see a rabbit climbing a tree, and were to say ‘Well, that is rather a strange thing for a rabbit to be doing, but after all there is really nothing to get excited about. Cats climb trees - so that if the rabbit were only a cat, we would understand its behavior perfectly.’"

- Clinton Davisson

"When God said 'Let there be light' he surely must have meant coherent light."

- Charles Townes

"It's of great advantage to make the mistakes from which one can learn as early as possible."

- Winston Churchill

"One has to do something new in order to be able to see something new."

- Lichtenberg

"There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality."

- Robert Oppenheimer

"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."

- William James

"Only the love of truth brings about miracles."

- Johannes Kepler

"It was an unbearable thought ... for Kepler that, on the one hand, human reason enables insight into the wonders of Nature (and “only science reveals wonders”), into the harmonic order of the world, but, on the other, that human life generally passes in disharmony, driven by quarrel, conflict, hate, and war."

- Walther Gerlach on Johannes Kepler

"Science is what we know and philosophy what we don't."

- Bertrand Russell

"Art enchants, science enlightens."

- Freeman Dyson

"Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future."

- Niels Bohr

"The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained."

- Freeman Dyson

"The science research of today is [a] temporary culmination of a very long, hard-fought struggle by a largely invisible community of our ancestors."

- Gerald Holton

"The main fallacy ... is that the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a "constructionist" one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society."

- Philip Anderson

"The process of creation of the new depends essentially on the transgression of categorization."

- Roald Hoffmann

"I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up and they keep their curiosity."

- Isidor Isaac Rabi

"Physics is an honest craft; only when you learn this can you start philosophising about it."

- Werner Heisenberg to Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

"Have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones."

- Linus Pauling

"The first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’"

- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

"[The soul] of a Shakespeare or a Newton is stupendous. Such men live the best parts of their lives after they shuffle off the mortal coil and fall into the grave. Maxwell was one of those men. His soul will live and grow for long to come, and thousands of years hence, it will shine as one of the bright stars of the past, whose light takes ages to reach us, amongst the crowd of others, not the least bright."

- Oliver Heaviside

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

- Richard Dawkins

"Secrecy hides failure and exaggerates success."

- Freeman Dyson

"The history of the development of ideas is of all subjects that in which we, as thinking men, take the deepest interest."

- James Clerk Maxwell

"If it's not worth doing it, it's not worth doing it well."

- Dan Kleppner

"Life is full of surprises. And almost half of them are good."

- Dan Kleppner

"The best antidote to the philosophy of science is a knowledge of the history of science."

- Steven Weinberg

"We should embrace the notion that the solution to pressing global problems will not be found by ruthless [international] competition but rather by cooperation that ignores [political] borders."

- Helmut Schwarz

"The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight but no vision."

- Helen Keller

"A physicist is a mathematician with a feeling for reality."

- Norman Packard

"[P]atience, patience, patience! Only by persistent, unremitting labor can a lasting outcome be reached."

- Theodore William Richards

"[L]et us hope that yet finer means of research and yet deeper chemical knowledge may make possible further improvements, yielding for mankind a more profound and far-reaching knowledge of the secrets of the wonderful Universe in which our lot is cast."

- Theodore William Richards

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

- Oscar Wilde

"History is the prediction of the present. Historians explain why things turned out the way they did. Since we already know the outcome, this might seem a simple matter of looking back and connecting the dots. But there is a problem: too many dots. Even the dots have dots. Predicting the present is nearly as hard as predicting the future."

- Louis Menand

"Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. But those of us who are not that tall have to choose!"

- Richard Feynman

"Don't squander energy, utilize it!"

- Wilhelm Ostwald

"Physical Chemistry is not just a branch on but the blossom of the tree of knowledge."

- Wilhelm Ostwald

"If you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical."

- Richard Feynman

"An understanding of history destroys innocence."

- Drew Gilpin Faust

"If you are up to something great, start with it now."

- Alexander von Humboldt

"I don't know how man will fight World War III, but I do know how they will fight World War IV; with sticks and stones."

- Albert Einstein

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

- Albert Einstein

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."

- Douglas Adams

"In order to fully appreciate life, one has to indulge in a certain degree of laziness. For those who hurry through life will likely reach their destination, but at the price of overlooking myriads of things passed by on their way."

- Karel Capek

"The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving."

- Albert Einstein

"The fragility of freedom is the simplest and deepest lesson of my life and work."

- Fritz Stern

"Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity."

- Otto Robert Frisch

"The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God ..."

- Leon Lederman

"Science as something already in existence, already completed, is the most objective, most impersonal thing that we humans know. Science as something coming into being, as a goal, however, is just as subjectively, psychologically conditioned, as all other human endeavors."

- Albert Einstein

"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery and today is a gift, that is why it is called the present."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

"Great scientists usually show up when and where in the history of science they are needed."

- Isidor Rabi

"It’s never too late for something good to happen."

- Walther Gerlach

"Although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves."

- Steven Weinberg

"Don’t do anything that someone else can do."

- Edwin Land

"Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible."

- Edwin Land

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

- Albert Einstein

"The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all others, charity."

- Benjamin Franklin

"Falsity in intellectual action is intellectual immorality."

- Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

- Richard Dawkins

"You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept."

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people."

- Dian Fossey

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability."

- Edsger Dijkstra

"Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love."

- Albert Einstein

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true."

- Michael Faraday

"For the theoretical physicist, sunrise is not a physical observable."

- Hans Bethe

"It’s perplexing to see the flexibility of the so-called ‘exact sciences’ which by cast-iron laws of logic and by the infallible help of mathematics can lead to conclusions which are diametrically opposed to one another."

- Vasco Ronchi

"To believe an utter nonsense is the prerogative of humans."

- Konrad Lorenz

"One doesn't journey in order to arrive but in order to journey."

- Johann Wolfgang Goethe

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

- Ernest Rutherford

"Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people."

- Harry S. Truman, 1952

"One must give the highest importance to affairs of the state, that it may be well run. One must not pursue quarrels contrary to right, nor acquire a power contrary to the common good. The well-run state is the greatest protection, and contains all in itself; when this is safe, all is safe; when this is destroyed, all is destroyed."

- Democritus

"Relax. Nothing is under control."

- Mister Booja-Booja

"Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."

- Albert Einstein

"History is a primary way of creating meaning."

- Laurel Ulrich

"In my experience, assistants who are not carefully superintended may be worse than none …The less brilliant ones often fail to understand the force of one’s suggestions, and the more brilliant ones often strike out on blind paths of their own if not carefully watched."

- Theodore William Richards

"The best lack convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

- William Butler Yeats

"The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything."

- Oscar Wilde

"Style is the physiognomy of the mind."

- Arthur Schopenhauer

"What one fool can do, another can."

- Richard Feynman

"Hydrogen is the proper study of man."

- Dan Kleppner

"Life [is] a fugitive from the second law of thermodynamics."

- John Avery

"Unhappy is the land that needs a hero."

- Bertolt Brecht, through the mouth of Galileo

"Alle Dinge erreichen denjenigen, der es versteht zu warten."

- Wolfgang Pauli

"The future isn't what it used to be."

- Karl Valentin

"What we cannot discern in ourselves, becomes glaringly evident in others."

- I. Klotz

"Free will is to mind what chance is to matter."

- Charles Darwin

"A genius is eternal patience."

- Michelangelo

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

"Gratitude turns what we have into enough."

"Molecule 1: I just lost an electron. Molecule 2: Are you sure? Molecule 1: I’m positive."

"Q: Why can't you trust an atom? A: Because they make up everything."

"No love without chemistry."

"π and e are all the irrationality that I need."

"I'm ignorant of science – couldn’t find my way out of a test tube on my own ..."