Scientific Work Quotes

#1. Many have gone on to do important scientific work but all remember those wonderful times when we and our science were young and our excitement in meeting new challenges knew no bounds.

Sydney Brenner

#2. One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.

David Hilbert

#3. Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'

Max Planck

#4. My scientific work is motivated by an irresistible longing to understand the secrets of nature and by no other feeling. My love for justice and striving to contribute towards the improvement of human conditions are quite independent from my scientific interests.

Albert Einstein

#5. Success in science and scientific work come not through the provision of unlimited or big resources, but in the wise and careful selection of problems and objectives. Above all, what is required is hard sustained work and dedication.

Lal Bahadur Shastri

#6. But though the professed aim of all scientific work is to unravel the secrets of nature, it has another effect, not less valuable, on the mind of the worker. It leaves him in possession of methods which nothing but scientific work could have led him to invent.

James Clerk Maxwell

#7. If I am to be remembered, I hope it will not be primarily for my specialized scientific work, but as a generalist; one to whom, enlarging Terence's words, nothing human and nothing in external nature was alien.

Julian Huxley

#8. In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

Thomas Huxley

#9. Scientific work will never stop, and it would be terrible if it did. If there were no more problems, you would put your hands in your pockets and your head on a pillow and would work no more. In science rest is stagnation, rest is death.

Max Planck

#10. Time is the best appraiser of scientific work, and I am aware that an industrial discovery rarely produces all its fruit in the hands of its first inventor.

Louis Pasteur

#11. A conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order.

Albert Einstein

#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. The aim of scientific work is truth. While we internally recognise something as true, we judge, and while we utter judgements, we assert.

Gottlob Frege

#14. It is a popular delusion that the scientific enquirer is under an obligation not to go beyond generalisation of observed facts ... but anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond the facts, rarely get as far.

Thomas Huxley

#15. We would like to carry out 100 percent, or maybe more, of our scientific program; I would like to devote some of my spare time toward extra scientific work.

John L. Phillips

#16. There is always the danger in scientific work that some word or phrase will be used by different authors to express so many ideas and surmises that, unless redefined, it loses all real significance.

Gilbert N. Lewis

#17. I started my scientific work by putting forward a hypothesis on the arrangement of atoms in nitrogen-containing molecules.

Alfred Werner

#18. It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.

Marie Curie

#19. The basis of all scientific work is the conviction that the world is an ordered and comprehensive entity, which is a religious sentiment. My religious feeling is a humble amazement at the order revealed in the small patch of reality to which our feeble intelligence is equal.

Albert Einstein

#20. For one thing, I think that there are questions which philosophers raise which, although science bears on them, are not typically the central focus of those who work in the sciences. At the same time, I don't have a view of philosophy which marks it out as different in kind from scientific work

Hilary Kornblith

#21. What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.

Werner Heisenberg

#22. Intuitive powers played a central role in my scientific work, not wild speculation, yet a valued resource when no other approach was available.

Albert Einstein

#23. It is fair to say that science provides no method of controlling the mind. Scientific work on the brain does not explain the mind-not yet.

Wilder Penfield

#24. I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.

Albert Einstein

#25. The latest scientific studies have revealed extraordinary findings. The brain is much more flexible and adaptable than previously thought. It can evolve and creatively work around limitations and nullify them.

James Morcan

#26. The flight of most members of a profession to the high empyrean, where they can work peacefully on purely scientific problems, isolated from the turmoil of real life, was perhaps quite appropriate at an earlier stage of science; but in today's world it is a luxury we cannot afford.

Gerald Holton

#27. It seems to me that-at least in our scientific theories of behavior-we have failed to accept the simple fact that human relations are inherently fraught with difficulties and that to make them even relatively harmonious requires much patience and hard work.

Thomas Szasz

#28. Freeman Dyson said: "It is characteristic of scientific life that it is easy when you have a problem to work on. The hard part is finding your problem.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#29. For all I know, entire scientific reputations may have been built on the work of students and colleagues! I don't know what can be done to combat this dishonesty.

Richard Dawkins

#30. The people who work in the scientific field, they need help to convey what it's about.

Edward Norton

#31. So that's the way you scientific detectives work. My god! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you've got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.

Dashiell Hammett

#32. Publicly and among themselves biologists rightly celebrate the diversity of life on Earth ... At the end of the day, however, their confession is heard by no one: they work with a single scientific sample-life on Earth.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#33. That there is no such thing as the scientific method, one might easily discover by asking several scientists to define it. One would find, I am sure, that no two of them would exactly agree. Indeed, no two scientists work and think in just the same ways.

Joel Henry Hildebrand

#34. Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
[sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.

Ian Hacking

#35. A determined Yankee book drummer once told a Southerner that 'a set of books on scientific agriculture' would teach him to 'farm twice as good as you do.' To which the Southerner replied: 'Hell, son, I don't farm half as good as I know how now.

Grady McWhiney

#36. I take what I see work. I'm a strict believer in the scientific principle of believing nothing, only taking the best evidence available at the present time, interpreting it as best you can, and leaving your mind open to the fact that new evidence will appear tomorrow.

Adam Osborne

#37. Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

John Irving

#38. To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

P. J. O'Rourke

#39. We still have too much air and water pollution and we still need to work to reduce it. But we also need to put the problem of pollution into a historical as well as scientific perspective ...

Ronald Reagan

#40. [The blame for the future 'plight of civilization] must rest on scientific men, equally with others, for being incapable of accepting the responsibility for the profound social upheavals which their own work primarily has brought about in human relationships.

Frederick Soddy

#41. The work I was involved in had no obvious therapeutic benefit. It was purely of scientific interest. I hope the country will continue to support basic research even though it may have no obvious practical value.

John Gurdon

#42. Theories, for me, are just about freeing your mind. It doesn't mean the theory is going to work like a scientific theory works. It's about freeing your mind and making you think a different way.

Steve Martin

#43. You have to tell your children about the world they live in, about the discrepancies, about the things that don't work ... So you have to bring it up with a scientific orientation so they learn to ask questions, and learn how to say the most difficult thing in the world: 'I don't know'.

Jacque Fresco

#44. Through this additional support, we must renew our commitment to provide talented young people with the opportunity to build scientific careers based on their curiosity, the same opportunity that was provided to me when I began my work.

Kenneth G. Wilson

#45. Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and instruments, but in the ened your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.

Michael Crichton

#46. Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

Aldous Huxley

#47. Evolution has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator - an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work.

Rodney Stark

#48. True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.

Charles Sanders Peirce

#49. Scientific reality is the modern human condition, and you can see that in the symbolic nature of my work.

Thom Mayne

#50. Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise.

H.P. Lovecraft

#51. I'm a humanist. I'm an observer. I have a very scientific mind. I believe metaphysics and science absolutely blended are more the truth for me. It doesn't work just believing in what somebody says.

Meredith Brooks

#52. It makes sense to invest in new work. It's almost like having a research department in a scientific laboratory. You have to try things out. You'll make some bad mistakes. Some things will fail but at least you'll energise the organisation.

Gavin Bryars

#53. The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality.

Robert M. Pirsig

#54. The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.

Terence McKenna

#55. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse." It isn't.

Jimmy Wales

#56. The popular scientific books by our scientists aren't the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#57. I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.

Ken Thompson

#58. To be sure, it is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive.

Albert Einstein

#59. Bill by bill, and letter by letter, his scientific imagination was slowly choked by administrative work.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#60. Honesty is the precondition for genuine scientific and scholarly work.

Leo Baeck

#61. When you start using test audiences, it becomes more scientific than it is about the work itself, and that's boring.

Amanda Seyfried

#62. It is on record that when a young aspirant asked Faraday the secret of his success as a scientific investigator, he replied, 'The secret is comprised in three words- Work, Finish, Publish.'

Michael Faraday

#63. The trouble is that all the investigators proceeded in exactly the same spirit, the spirit that is of scientific curiosity, and with no possibility of telling whether the issue of their work would prove them to be fiends, or dreamers, or angels.

Robert Strutt, 4th Baron Rayleigh

#64. Through years of secret work, scientific and basic ground work was laid, in order to be ready again to work the German Armed Forces at the appointed hour, without loss of time or experience.

Gustav Krupp

#65. There is probably nothing more sublime than discontent transmuted into a work of art, a scientific discovery, and so on.

Eric Hoffer

#66. If the artist succeeds in producing the impression of a movement which takes several moments for accomplishment, his work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image, where time is abruptly suspended.

Auguste Rodin

#67. As Minister of Foreign Affairs. I will work on deepening Haiti's links with its traditional partners from the North and the South, while exploring all the opportunities for economic, cultural, scientific and technological cooperation that may benefit my country.

Laurent Lamothe

#68. The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure principles.

Ronald Fisher

#69. I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment ...

David

#70. The residue of religion in my work appears as a modified transcendentalism, and the positivist scientific side of my thought appears as concreteness and realism. The effort to reconcile the two is at the core of all my poetry.

Louis Dudek

#71. My scientific studies have afforded me great gratification; and I am convinced that it will not be long before the whole world acknowledges the results of my work.

Gregor Mendel

#72. In science, moreover, the work of the individual is so bound up with that of his scientific predecessors and contemporaries that it appears almost as an impersonal product of his generation.

Albert Einstein

#73. 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.

Nikola Tesla