Quotes about scientist

He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God but he who really thinks has to believe in God.

My mission is to make the external God of human society obsolete in front of humanity’s internal Godliness.

As a scientist I have come to learn that information isonly as valuable as its source.

The text-book is rare that stimulates its reader to ask, Why is this so? Or, How does this connect with what has been read elsewhere?

I have learned to have more trust in the scientist than he does in himself.

I am a great scientist.

As science is more and more subject to grave misuse as well as to use for human benefit it has also become the scientist's responsibility to become aware of the social relations and applications of his subject, and to exert his influence in such a direction as will result in the best applications of the findings in his own and related fields. Thus he must help in educating the public, in the broad sense, and this means first educating himself, not only in science but in regard to the great issue

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter—for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.

But men are funny about their wars, they act as if they own them, and perhaps they do, for I don't think women ever start them.

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

I believe it to be of particular importance that the scientist have an articulate and adequate social philosophy, even more important than the average man should have a philosophy. For there are certain aspects of the relation between science and society that the scientist can appreciate better than anyone else, and if he does not insist on this significance no one else will, with the result that the relation of science to society will become warped, to the detriment of everybody.

And when statesmen or others worry him [the scientist] too much, then he should leave with his possessions. With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland.

The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.

Science is the human endeavor to elevate the self and the society from the darkness of ignorance into the light of wisdom.

The perfect being, huh? There is no such thing as perfect in this world. That may sound cliché, but it’s the truth. The average person admires perfection and seeks to obtain it. But, what’s the point of achieving perfection? There is none. Nothing. Not a single thing. I loathe perfection! If something is perfect, then there is nothing left. There is no room for imagination. No place left for a person to gain additional knowledge or abilities. Do you know what that means? For scientists such as o

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist.

Be naive and curious. That's all you need to become a scientist.

How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I sense it from many more, that they feel this way. I cannot share this sentiment. When I think about the ablest students whom I have encountered in my teaching, that is, those who distinguish themselves by their independence of judgment and not merely their quick-wittedness, I can affirm that they had a

I am a monk at heart - a scientist at brain - a philosopher at conscience.

Sophistication is not science people, simplicity is.

A scientist shouldn't be asked to judge the economic and moral value of his work. All we should ask the scientist to do is find the truth and then not keep it from anyone.

Science can't prove everything! Say, a scientist saw a fish splashing in the pond. On the next day he shared it with someone. But, the listener wanted proof. How would the scientist prove that he was speaking the truth?

Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates.

Even a great philosophical idea when mixed with mysticism, turns into a dangerous weapon that becomes an impediment in the path of progress of developing communities.

It is not possible to be intellectually honest and believe in gods. And it is not possible to believe in gods and be a true scientist.

How many beers do y'all think it takes before one internationally scientist turns to another and says, 'Dude, bet you twenty bucks I can levitate a frog with a magnet?' ' Sam drawled.

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

My final remark to young women and men going into experimental science is that they should pay little attention to the speculative physics ideas of my generation. After all, if my generation has any really good speculative ideas, we will be carrying these ideas out ourselves.

A common fallacy in much of the adverse criticism to which science is subjected today is that it claims certainty, infallibility and complete emotional objectivity. It would be more nearly true to say that it is based upon wonder, adventure and hope.

So a scientist and an engineer are tossed into separate rooms, stocked with tools and parts, and told that they aren't allowed out until they've produced a working prototype for a radio receiver. After two days, the scientist has covered the walls in scribbling and looks like a mad man, raving about how not only is it impossible to build a receiver with the parts given but that he's proven that radio is theoretically impossible anyway. When they check on the engineer, they find that he'd built t

As a scientist, I can not help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation. None is perfect or inspired.The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me. I don't want to have anything to do with such a God.

This man [Alexander von Humboldt] is as knowledgeable as a whole academy.

I consider him [Alexander von Humboldt] the most important scientist whom I have met.

He [Alexander von Humboldt] was to science what Shakespeare was to the drama.

This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.

The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of truth itself, wherever it may lead.

Whereas Nature does not admit of more than three dimensions ... it may justly seem very improper to talk of a solid ... drawn into a fourth, fifth, sixth, or further dimension.

I should like to preface my remarks with a personal statement in order that my later remarks will not be misunderstood. I consider myself an atheist.

In the last four days I have got the (results) given by Tantalum, Chromium, Manganese, Iron , Nickel, Cobalt and Copper ... The chief result is that ... the result for any metal (is) quite easy to guess from the results for the others. This shews that the insides of all the atoms are very much alike, and from these results it will be possible to find out something of what the insides are made up of.

If a problem is clearly stated, it has no further interest to the physicist.

All of us,' he said, 'have hopes of being poet, artist, discoverer, philospoher, scientist; of possessing the attributes of all these simultaneously. Few are permitted to achieve any of them in daily life. But in travel we attain them all. Then we have our day of glory, when all our dreams come true, when we can be anything we like, as long as we like, and, when we are tired of it, pull up stakes and move on. Travel -- the solitude of the mountains, the emptiness of the desert, the delicacy of t

I have indeed lived and worked to my taste either in art or science. What more could a man desire? Knowledge has always been my goal. There is much that I shall leave behind undone…but something at least I was privileged to leave for the world to use, if it so intends…As the Latin poet said I will leave the table of the living like a guest who has eaten his fill. Yes, if I had another life to spend, I certainly would not waste it. But that cannot be, so why complain?

Interestingly enough, whenever I cite examples from superhero comic books in a lecture, my students never wonder when they will use this information in their "real life". Apparently they all have plans, post-graduation, that involve protecting the City from all threat while wearing spandex. As a law-abiding citizen, this notion fills me with a great sense of security, knowing as I do how many of my scientist colleagues could charitably be termed "mad".

A scientist has to be neutral in his search for the truth, but he cannot be neutral as to the use of that truth when found. If you know more than other people, you have more responsibility, rather than less.

A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.

I felt a new wave of irritation, squelched it as I kicked into scientist mode. First rule: block mind-set. Don’t suspect, don’t fear, don’t hope for any outcome. Observe, weigh, measure, and record.Second rule: block emotion. Leave sorrow, pity, and outrage for later. Anger or grief can lead to error and misjudgment. Mistakes do your victim no good.

In some strange way, any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a “discovery” of mine, but rather something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up.

The intention (of an artist) is (the same as a scientist)...to discover and reveal what is unsuspected but significant in life.

Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.

Much as I admired the elegance of physical theories, which at that time geology wholly lacked, I preferred a life in the woods to one in the laboratory.

I'm all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the next step and concludes that two idiots are better than one genius.

[On Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz]The answer is unknowable, but it may not be unreasonable to see him, at least in theological terms, as essentially a deist. He is a determinist: there are no miracles (the events so called being merely instances of infrequently occurring natural laws); Christ has no real role in the system; we live forever, and hence we carry on after our deaths, but then everything — every individual substance — carries on forever.

Evolution on the large scale unfolds, like much of human history, as a succession of dynasties.

Conor, I could search the world for another swashbuckling scientist, but I doubt if I would find one like you.

I often asked Laplace what he thought of God. He owned that he was an atheist.

There were many women in the Soviet scientific community, proportionately more so than in the United States. But they tended to occupy menial middle-level positions, and male Soviet scientists, like their American counterparts, were puzzled about a pretty woman with evident scientific competence who forcefully expressed her views.

Life is not found in atoms or molecules or genes as such, but in organization; not in symbiosis but in synthesis.

When I was a child, it was cool to be a scientist.

A scientist doesn't know all the answers. Nobody does, not even teachers. But a scientist keeps on trying to find the answers.

For any scientist the real challenge is not to stay within the secure garden of the known but to venture out into the wilds of the unknown.

And envy, envious of a time when the poet, the mystic, the scientist and the statesman were nobler than the merchant.