Top 100 Sayings About Natural Science
#1. And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting -
In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.
Alberto Caeiro
#2. The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about.
David Attenborough
#3. No despot ever flung forth his legions to die in foreign conquest, no privilege-ruled nation ever erupted across its borders, to lock in death embrace with another, but behind them loomed the driving power of a population too large for its boundaries and its natural resources.
Margaret Sanger
#4. A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance
Richard Dawkins
#5. If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.
Rudy Rucker
#6. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
Charles Darwin
#7. Moreover, the concern of some that moving DNA among species would breach customary breeding barriers and have profound effects on natural evolutionary processes has substantially disappeared as the science revealed that such exchanges occur in nature.
Paul Berg
#8. Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?
John Constable
#9. A famous name has this peculiarity that it becomes gradually smaller especially in natural sciences where each succeeding discovery invariably overshadows what precedes.
Jacobus Henricus Van 't Hoff
#10. Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century.
Ernst W. Mayr
#11. The glories and the beauties of form, color, and sound unite in the Grand Canyon - forms unrivaled even by the mountains, colors that vie with sunsets, and sounds that span the diapason from tempest to tinkling raindrop, from cataract to bubbling fountain.
John Wesley Powell
#12. It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science.
James Henry Breasted
#13. In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together.
Immanuel Kant
#14. Natural science does not consist in ratifying what others have said, but in seeking the causes of phenomena.
Albertus Magnus
#15. He that desireth to acquire any art or science seeketh first those means by which that art or science is obtained. If we ought to do so in things natural and earthly, how much more then in spiritual?
Robert Barclay
#16. My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.
Douglas Adams
#17. It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.
Michael Behe
#18. Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.
Oliver Sacks
#19. The constitution of the universe is total natural law. 'Natural law,' we say from the field of science. 'Will of God,' we say from the field of religion. It's the same thing.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
#20. When people try to use religion to address the natural world, science pushes back on it, and religion has to accommodate the results. Beliefs can be permanent, but beliefs can also be flexible. Personally, if I find out my belief is wrong, I change my mind. I think that's a good way to live.
Lisa Randall
#21. It was, perhaps, the amiable character of this man that inclined me more to that branch of natural philosophy which he professed, than an intrinsic love for the science itself.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#22. We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.
Antoine Lavoisier
#23. First of all a natural talent is required; for when Nature opposes, everything else is in vain; but when Nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place ...
Hippocrates
#24. In Israel, a land lacking in natural resources, we learned to appreciate our greatest national advantage: our minds. Through creativity and innovation, we transformed barren deserts into flourishing fields and pioneered new frontiers in science and technology.
Shimon Peres
#25. The human brain has a natural ability, inherent in its mechanism, to work on many levels, in a process of constant promptings, in a type of self-preservation.
If only humans understood ...
Most ignore it.
Amanda Dubin
#26. In our greatest universities, naturalism - the doctrine that nature is all there is - is the virtually unquestioned assumption that underlies not only natural science but intellectual work of all kinds.
Philip Johnson
#27. Natural science sharpens the discrimination. There is no false logic in nature. All its properties are permanent: the acids and metals never lie; their yea is yea, their nay, nay. They are newly discovered but not new.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#28. From my earliest acquaintance with the science of political economy, it has been evident to my mind that capital was the product of labor, and that therefore, in its best analysis there could be no natural conflict between capital and labor.
Leland Stanford
#29. Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural science. The test of its validity is not experiment.
Richard Feynman
#30. Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.
Edgar Douglas Adrian
#31. Do you not see what damage has been done to science through this: i.e. pedants wishing to be philosophers; to treat of natural things, and mix themselves with and decide about things Divine?
Giordano Bruno
#32. The progress of mankind is due exclusively to the progress of natural sciences, not to morals, religion or philosophy.
Justus Von Liebig
#33. Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy.
Guglielmo Marconi
#34. That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another - that, in fact, has never been observed.
Robert J. Sawyer
#35. Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It's posing questions and coming up with a method. It's delving in.
Sally Ride
#36. Hence, even in the domain of natural science the aid of the experimental method becomes indispensable whenever the problem set is the analysis of transient and impermanent phenomena, and not merely the observation of persistent and relatively constant objects.
Wilhelm Wundt
#37. The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]
George Gaylord Simpson
#38. The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.
Francis Maitland Balfour
#39. Health is not an objective condition which can be understood by the methods of natural science alone. It is rather a condition related to the mental attitude by which the individual has to value what is essential for his life.
Ivan Illich
#40. natural science is likely to be soon exhausted. Passing by many particulars of the discipline
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#42. The selfsame procedure which zoology, a branch of the natural sciences, applies to the study of animals, anthropology must apply to the study of man; and by doing so, it enrolls itself as a science in the field of nature.
Maria Montessori
#43. Disputes among natural philosophers are of use to science, as the quarrels of the great, and the clamors of the little, are necessary to freedom of thought and the advancement of learning.
Hal Hellman
#44. There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children, but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion there would be neither mathematics nor natural science.
Albert Einstein
#45. When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#46. The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.
John B. S. Haldane
#47. When you study natural science and the miracles of creation, if you don't turn into a mystic you are not a natural scientist.
Albert Hofmann
#48. As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.
Charles Scott Sherrington
#49. It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths.
James D. Watson
#50. The natural history of science is the study of the unknown. If you fear it you're not going to study it and you're not going to make any progress.
Michael E. DeBakey
#51. The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
Gregory Bateson
#52. Science has sometimes been said to be opposed to faith, and inconsistent with it. But all science, in fact, rests on a basis of faith, for it assumes the permanence and uniformity of natural laws - a thing which can never be demonstrated.
Tryon Edwards
#53. If your child dies, or you witness a terrible natural disaster, yes, you certainly want a scientific explanation as to what's happened. But science can't help you to find meaning, help you deal with that turbulence of your grief, rage, and dismay.
Karen Armstrong
#54. Natural Sciences are all about fascinating causality.
Abhijit Naskar
#55. I hold that the propositions embodied in natural science are not derived by any definite rule from the data of experience, and that they can neither be verified nor falsified by experience according to any definite rule.
Michael Polanyi
#56. Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.
Ronald A. Fisher
#57. But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods.
Ivan Pavlov
#58. Man is a product of nature, a part of the Universe. The Universe is operated under exact natural laws. Man is a product of millions of years of evolution. He adapts himself to the laws of nature or he perishes.
James Hervey Johnson
#59. If it is impossible to judge merit and guilt in the field of natural science, then it is not possible in any field, and historical research becomes an idle, empty activity.
Justus Von Liebig
#60. There is nothing ideal in Nature, because it was not created by some sort of ideal Almighty Being with perfect peerless craftsmanship. Nature as it is, has evolved through millions of years out of the biological drive for survival.
Abhijit Naskar
#61. One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Charles Darwin
#62. I'll tell you something about true love. There's no science to it. It's as natural as the sky.
Lauren DeStefano
#63. Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a supernatural god-creator, and it is definitely not a product of matter having a mind of its own, of an equally miraculous evolutionary process supervised by Lady Natural Selection who would turn rabbits into lions.
Paul Greene
#64. Out of the numbers proceeds that harmony of natural law which it is the aim of science to disclose. We can grasp the tune but not the player. Trinculo might have been referring to modern physics in the words: 'This is the tune of our catch, played by the picture of Nobody.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
#65. Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading.
Maria Montessori
#66. I'm saying that there were many great naturalists before Darwin's time who were very pious people and who knew more about nature than most of us. These were great naturalists; people I would admire for their knowledge of natural science given the time.
Greg Graffin
#67. Our present intricate humanly consciousness evolved after a long journey of struggle. And the beauty of natural selection is that our struggle against nature made us worthy of being rewarded with the 3 lbs. lump of highly advanced biological computer by our Mother Nature herself.
Abhijit Naskar
#68. Said to physicist John Bahcall. I don't believe in natural science.
Kurt Godel
#69. I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct
if God works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#70. There is no counting the unsolved problems of Natural History.
J. Arthur Thomson
#71. Natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality.
Thomas Huxley
#72. Astronomy is, not without reason, regarded, by mankind, as the sublimest of the natural sciences. Its objects so frequently visible, and therefore familiar, being always remote and inaccessible, do not lose their dignity.
Benjamin Silliman
#73. Once a molecule is asymmetric, its extension proceeds also in an asymmetrical sense. This concept completely eliminates the difference between natural and artificial synthesis. The advance of science has removed the last chemical hiding place for the once so highly esteemed vis vitalis.
Hermann Emil Fischer
#74. Unless we proceed cautiously, there might well arise a few generations of mystics who conceive of the orgone metaphysically, divorced from non-living nature and who do not comprehend it from the standpoint of natural science. And it seems to me that we have more than enough mysticism as it is.
Wilhelm Reich
#75. It is necessary, first of all, to find a correct logical starting point, one which can lead us to a natural and sound interpretation of the empirical facts.
Ernst Cassirer
#76. The fundamental claim of intelligent design is straightforward and easily intelligible: namely, there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence.
William A. Dembski
#77. natural language will always remain the basic interpretation of, and reservoir for, the development of the artificial formalized languages of science.
Doris Bradbury
#78. In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge.
C. V. Raman
#79. Science advances through tentative answers to a series of more and more subtle questions which reach deeper and deeper into the essence of natural phenomena.
Louis Pasteur
#80. The nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.
Francis Bacon
#81. I'll tell you something about love. It's no science to it. I'ts natural as the sky
Lauren DeStefano
#82. If I were entering adulthood now instead of in the environment of fifty years ago, I would choose a career that kept me in touch with nature more than science ... Too few natural areas remain; both by intent and by indifference we have insulated ourselves from the wilderness that produced us.
Charles Lindbergh
#83. It is not always the magnitude of the differences observed between species that must determine specific distinctions, but the constant preservation of those differences in reproduction.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
#84. Informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#85. Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.
Friedrich Engels
#86. Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation.
Ernst W. Mayr
#88. Hersesy is denying the word of God, and the word of God is much more reliably expressed in the natural world as it's revealed through reason and science than in what I have heard described wonderfully as the giant book of Jewish fairy stories
Iain Banks
#89. The most vitally characteristic fact about mathematics is, in my opinion, its quite peculiar relationship to the natural sciences, or more generally, to any science which interprets experience on a higher than purely descriptive level.
John Von Neumann
#90. Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.
Michael Shermer
#91. Scientists do not simply read nature to find truths to apply in the social world. Instead, they use truths taken from our social relationships to structure, read, and interpret the natural
Anne Fausto-Sterling
#92. It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.
Alfred North Whitehead
#93. I find the science behind major natural events almost more interesting than the way in which those same events wreak their effects on human society.
Simon Winchester
#94. It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.
Maurice Wilkins
#95. The Russian Federation and the United States of America, the two biggest nuclear powers in the world, but apart from nuclear-wise, we have a lot in common. We have huge territories, natural resources, technologies, science, education, and of course human capital.
Sergei Lavrov
#96. I was, from early on, interested in science. And my parents were very obliging about that. My father used to take me to the museum of natural history, and I knew much more scientific stuff early on. From the time I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be a mathematician.
Whitfield Diffie
#97. Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.
Carl Sagan
#98. Investing is not a natural science but rather a social science. So, it's never purely empirical; what you are trying to do is everything you possibly can to enhance your probabilities of being right more often than being wrong.
William Browne
#99. Science works as a way to make sense of life and the universe. Hard SF as my preferred fictional genre just feels natural.
Edward M. Lerner
#100. I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth.
Rachel Carson
