Pure Science Quotes

#1. Around 1960, I moved back to Europe, attracted by the newly founded European Organization for Nuclear Research where, for the first time, the idea of a joint European effort in a field of pure science was to be tried in practice.

Carlo Rubbia

#2. As I visualize it, the business of the future will be a scientific, social and economic unit. It will be vigorously creative in pure science where its contributions will compare with those of the universities.

Edwin Land

#3. It is only in the realm of pure science that truth is an absolute criterion. When we deal with applied science, with technology - we deal with people. And when we deal with people, considerations other than truth enter the question.

Ayn Rand

#4. The more one observes, the more clearly does he see that it is in the soil of pure science that are found the origins of all our modern industry and commerce. In fact,our civilization is wholly built upon our scientific discoveries.

Herbert Hoover

#5. [Parker J.] Palmer points out that knowledge today is driven by two motives, curiosity and control. Curiosity gives us pure science, and control gives us technology. Then he asserts that there is a third component that is regularly disregarded but essential to true knowledge--compassion, or love.

Albert Greene

#6. The aims of pure basic science, unlike those of applied science, are neither fast-flowing nor pragmatic. The quick harvest of applied science is the useable process, the medicine, the machine. The shy fruit of pure science is understanding.

Lincoln Barnett

#7. As history has shown, pure science research ultimately ends up applying to something. We just don't know it at the time.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#8. I appreciate both ... for me, I think 'Star Wars' is more science fantasy and is based on a lot of great legendary heroes and morality plays and stuff. And 'Star Trek' is just pure fun. Pure science fun. And I've always appreciated both.

Ming-Na Wen

#9. The mathematicians are well acquainted with the difference between pure science, which has only to do with ideas, and the application of its laws to the use of life, in which they are constrained to submit to the imperfections of matter and the influence of accidents.

Samuel Johnson

#10. Mysticism is like pure science; it has no use. Mysticism is just the human longing to know ... Occult is not science. Occult is just technology.

Jaggi Vasudev

#11. All day Marie-Laure lies on her stomach and reads. Logic, reason, pure science: these, Aronnax insists, are the proper ways to pursue a mystery. Not fables and fairy tales.

Anthony Doerr

#12. 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.

Marie Curie

#13. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.

Aldous Huxley

#14. I thought it must be pure science fiction. But when I checked it out I found a lot of magazine articles that actually supported the theory behind the book which was incredible. That's when I decided to acquire the rights of the book and everything went from there.

Roland Emmerich

#15. The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.

Thomas Sowell

#16. History proves abundantly that pure science, undertaken without regard to applications to human needs, is usually ultimately of direct benefit to mankind.

Irving Langmuir

#17. The purpose of pure science is to observe phenomena and to trace their laws; the purpose of art is to produce, modify, or destroy. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as applied science, for, the moment the attempt is made to apply, science passes into the realm of art.

Joseph William Mellor

#18. The recognition of the art that informs all pure science need not mean the abandonment for it of all present art, rather it will mean the completion of the transformation of art that has already begun.

John Desmond Bernal

#19. Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.

Edward Abbey

#20. Pure science - this vision of the universe as 15 billion light years across - I am bedazzled and awed by it.

Huston Smith

#21. There is no such thing as applied science, only the application of pure science.

Louis Pasteur

#22. There is only one proved method of assisting the advancement of pure science-that of picking men of genius, backing them heavily, and leaving them to direct themselves.

James Bryant Conant

#23. Star Trek, I thought, was a very inconsistent show, which at times sparkled with true ingenuity and pure science fiction approaches, and other times was more carnival-like, and very much more the creature of television than the creature of a legitimate literary form.

Rod Serling

#24. Both pure and applied science have gradually pushed further and further the requirements for accuracy and precision. However, applied science, particularly in the mass production of interchangeable parts, is even more exacting than pure science in certain matters of accuracy and precision.

Walter A. Shewhart

#25. Moonshots live in that place between audacious projects and pure science fiction.

Astro Teller

#26. What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression
of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#27. They had not yet learned to draw the significant but often very fine distinction between smut and pure science.

Aldous Huxley

#28. Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.

Vivienne Westwood

#29. Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.

Shaun Tan

#30. Throughout history, people have studied pure science from a desire to understand the universe rather than practical applications for commercial gain. But their discoveries later turned out to have great practical benefits.

Stephen Hawking

#31. To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.

Edmund Husserl

#32. It is my inner conviction that the development of science seeks in the main to satisfy the longing for pure knowledge.

Albert Einstein

#33. The science of nonviolence can alone lead one to pure democracy.

Mahatma Gandhi

#34. All the ancient churches were churches representative of spiritual things; the rites, and also the statutes, according to which their worship was established, consisted of pure correspondence.

Emanuel Swedenborg

#35. From the scientific view, the theory of karma may be a metaphysical assumption
but it is no more so than the assumption that all of life is material and originated out of pure chance

Dalai Lama XIV

#36. What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

Northrop Frye

#37. I say it is impossible that so sensible a people [citizens of Paris], under such circumstances, should have lived so long by the smoky, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles, if they had really known that they might have had as much pure light of the sun for nothing.

Benjamin Franklin

#38. Once again confirms that there is no such thing as genetically pure classification into different races.

Bryan Sykes

#39. People tend not to disassociate the technological issues from pure scientific research, so that science sometimes gets a bad name for things that science doesn't deserve having a bad name for.

George Coyne

#40. Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#41. Pure earth does not petrify, because the predominance of dryness over [i.e. in] the earth endows it not with coherence but rather with crumbliness. In general, stone is formed in two ways only (a) through the hardening of clay, and (b) by the congelation [of waters].

Avicenna

#42. The alien reached out her hands to hold Alex's tightly. "Please. Some of what I want to express, it may be difficult to locate the right words."

"Of course."

Pure alabaster eyes stared back at her. "Child, there is a hole in your mind.

G.S. Jennsen

#43. We must ... maintain that mathematical geometry is not a science of space insofar as we understand by space a visual structure that can be filled with objects - it is a pure theory of manifolds.

Hans Reichenbach

#44. Not that science is particularly pure, except compared to politics.

Orson Scott Card

#45. Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon, which was developed under various names as early as the eighteenth century without being clarified, is what we shall have to deal with first of all.

Edmund Husserl

#46. The successful development of science requires a proper balance to be maintained between the method of building up from observations and the method of deducing by pure reasoning from speculative assumptions.

Paul A.M. Dirac

#47. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, or spirit, or poetry,
a narrow belt.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#48. The first successes were such that one might suppose all the difficulties of science overcome in advance, and believe that the mathematician, without being longer occupied in the elaboration of pure mathematics, could turn his thoughts exclusively to the study of natural laws.

Joseph Louis Francois Bertrand

#49. The hardest problems of pure and applied science can only be solved by the open collaboration of the world-wide scientific community.

Kenneth G. Wilson

#50. The fine structure constant is undoubtedly the most fundamental pure (dimensionless) number in all of physics. It relates the basic constants of electromagnetism (the charge of the electron), relativity (the speed of light), and quantum mechanics (Planck's constant).

David J. Griffiths

#51. Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.

Charles Stross

#52. There are a multitude of allied branches of knowledge connected with mans condition; the relation of these to political economy is analogous to the connexion of mechanics, astronomy, optics, sound, heat, and every other branch more or less of physical science, with pure mathematics.

William Stanley Jevons

#53. I regarded as quite useless the reading of large treatises of pure analysis: too large a number of methods pass at once before the eyes. It is in the works of application that one must study them; one judges their utility there and appraises the manner of making use of them.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange

#54. When the conscience runs pure and strong in the heart of thinking humanity, there is not power in any fundamentalism to take hold of the human civilization and drag it back to the medieval days of barbarianism.

Abhijit Naskar

#55. Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

H.L. Mencken

#56. Science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programed to collect pure information.

Stephen Jay Gould

#57. One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.

Simon Newcomb

#58. Not only for science, but for any kind of research work and studies--isolation, pure ambience, and peace of mind is a must. Urban ambience is full of destructions and everyday's cacophony further hampers the research aptitude of a student.

Bhaskar Sharma

#59. In the hands of a genius, engineering turns to magic, philosophy becomes poetry, and science pure imagination.

Benjamin Disraeli

#60. Put glibly:
In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it.
In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.
Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state.

Richard Hamming

#61. The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Alfred North Whitehead

#62. Science is the pursuit of pure truth, and the systematizing of it.

P.T. Barnum

#63. Babbage ... gave the name to the [Cambridge] Analytical Society, which he stated was formed to advocate 'the principles of pure d-ism as opposed to the dot-age of the university.'

W. W. Rouse Ball

#64. GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear

Tom Stoppard

#65. I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.

James Cameron

#66. The Z-particle Pure energy - no mass at all. It may well be the
smallest building block in nature. Matter is nothing but trapped energy.

Dan Brown

#67. Science is not separate from politics. As much as I would like it to be a pure thing, existing only in some intellectual realm unsullied by human struggle, it will always be entangled with the world we live in.

Marie Brennan

#68. I remember in 1967, when there was that terrible fire on NASA's Apollo 1 rocket that killed three astronauts, my father made pure oxygen and we lit this tiny cup and burned it. Suddenly, we had an unbelievable jet and a fire. You just could see exactly what had happened.

Jack W. Szostak

#69. We call metaphysics the Science of Life, because to know pure metaphysics is to renew the life and make death and accident impossible.

Emma Curtis Hopkins

#70. Pure logic could never lead us to anything but tautologies; it can create nothing new; not from it alone can any science issue.

Henri Poincare

#71. The world is colors and motion, feelings and thoughts and what does math have to do with it? Not much, if 'math' means being bored in high school, but in truth mathematics is the one universal science. Mathematics is the study of pure pattern and everything in the cosmos is a kind of pattern.

Rudy Rucker

#72. A mind which has once imbibed a taste for scientific enquiry, and has learnt the habit of applying its principles readily to the cases which occur, has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations.

John Herschel

#73. A popular cliche in philosophy says that science is pure analysis or reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis, putting the rainbow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by analyzing nature.

Jacob Bronowski

#74. The 'Gnani' is in the form of an instrument to attain the goal (Experience of Pure Soul). The goal is the scientific form of Soul (vignan swarup atma).

Dada Bhagwan

#75. The task of science is investigation pure and simple," he said quietly. "Not to try to prove this or that." He

Thor Heyerdahl

#76. Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world. All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

Albert Einstein

#77. This is a collection of dexterous, loving, beautifully optimistic work that left me breathless and delighted ... Hannu Rajaniemi's magnificent science fiction - as is paradoxically appropriate - is pure magic.

Amal El-Mohtar

#78. I think he saw his checklist as something pure - innocent as only science can be - but the humans who administered it as masses of weird prejudices and crazy predispositions. When

Jon Ronson

#79. The world of strict naturalism in which clever mathematical laws all by themselves bring the universe and life into existence, is pure (and, one might add, poor) fiction. To call it science-fiction would besmirch the name of science.

John C. Lennox

#80. This queer crotchet [of Hamilton's] that algebra is the science of pure time has attracted many philosophers, and quite recently it has been exhumed and solemnly dissected by owlish metaphysicians seeking the philosopher's stone in the gall bladder of mathematics.

Eric Temple Bell

#81. Artificial Intelligence is creating a mind, hopefully as pure a mind as possible, for a computer.

Frederick Lenz

#82. [Pure research] is worth every penny it costs.

Harold Urey

#83. For quite a while I have set for myself the rule if a theoretician says 'universal' it just means pure nonsense.

Wolfgang Pauli

#84. Science offers no brief for the telekinetic powers of Darth Vader and hardly any greater justification for the faster-than-light travel that makes his empire possible. And yet what is 'Star Wars' if not pure quill SF?

Paul Di Filippo

#85. No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events.

Samuel Johnson

#86. The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience

Immanuel Kant

#87. Without my attempts in natural science, I should never have learned to know mankind such as it is. In nothing else can we so closely approach pure contemplation and thought, so closely observe the errors of the senses and of the understanding, the weak and strong points of character.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#88. What you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.

Norton Juster

#89. Mathematics is pure language - the language of science. It is unique among languages in its ability to provide precise expression for every thought or concept that can be formulated in its terms.

Alfred Adler

#90. This doctrine of prenatal influence is now slowly being recognized, and science as well as religion calls out: 'Keep yourself holy, and pure.' So deeply has this been recognized in India, that there we even speak of adultery in marriage, except when marriage is consummated in prayer.

Swami Vivekananda

#91. All science is a two-edged sword. It is pure only in the mind, at conception, as an idea, an equation, or just some new way of looking at things. But once it's out there in the world, it becomes whatever the world wants it to be. Germ warfare, nuclear holocaust, or a cure for cancer.

David Ambrose

#92. The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.

William H Gass

#93. You can see the meaning of the statement that "Literature is a living art" most easily and clearly, perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes - say Pure Mathematics and Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man's thought and emotion about things.

Arthur Quiller-Couch