Top 100 The Scientist Quotes
#1. The image of the scientist who puts the pursuit of truth before anything else has been shattered and replaced by a man on the make or a quasi-religious enthusiast who wants to prove his case at any cost. Science is becoming the tool of campaigning warfare, in which truth is the first casualty.
Paul Johnson
#2. The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
H.L. Mencken
#3. Technology has developed to a whole other level and theres the scientist part of me that loves that stuff.
Herbie Hancock
#4. [A woman waiting for him in the Kremlin asked Gobachev] "Was communism invented by a politician or a scientist?" [He replied] "Well, a politician." She said, "That explains it. The scientist would have tried it on mice first."
Ronald Reagan
#5. Reality" is defined not as something that exists "out there" for the scientist or anyone else to discover but as a social construction that emerges from and is sustained by social interaction.
Peter Conrad
#6. You can always spot the scientist at a strip club, because he is the only one examining the audience.
Michio Kaku
#7. Discoveries that are anticipated are seldom the most valuable ... It's the scientist free to pilot his vessel across hidden shoals into open seas who gives the best value.
John Charles Polanyi
#8. Art itself shuns commonality: while the scientist may seek the phenomenon that repeats itself, the artist seeks the exception.
Dore Ashton
#9. For the scientist the analytical process does not diminish the splendour of what he or she sees. Every detail added is an extra stanza added to a great epic poem, one that is never complete, nor yet ever tedious in its particulars
Richard Fortey
#10. The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of truth itself, wherever it may lead.
Luther Burbank
#11. What is a good definition? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them; it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that; it is one that can be understood by the pupils.
Henri Poincare
#12. Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.
Jean Rostand
#13. The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.
Ashley Montagu
#14. Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
Carl Sagan
#15. In peace-time the scientist belongs to humanity, in war-time to his fatherland.
Fritz Haber
#16. The scientist's inquiry into the causes of things is providing an ever more extensive understanding of nature.
Kenneth G. Wilson
#17. And envy, envious of a time when the poet, the mystic, the scientist and the statesman were nobler than the merchant.
Soroosh Shahrivar
#18. This attitude of mind - this attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire. It becomes a habit of thought. Once acquired, we cannot retreat from it anymore.
Richard P. Feynman
#19. I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, after having heard it for so many days. Was it the remnants of the scientist in me, trying to regroup, trying to apply logic when all that mattered was survival? If so, it was a very small part. I ran.
Jeff VanderMeer
#20. Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers.
C.S. Lewis
#21. But more than 15 sections in Chapter 8 of the report-the key chapter setting out the scientific evidence for and against a human influence over the climate-were changed or deleted after the scientist charged with examining this question had accepted the supposedly final text ...
Frederick Seitz
#22. And when statesman or others worry [the scientist] too much, then he should leave with his possessions.
Tycho Brahe
#23. The scientist seeks laws; the historian, causes; the artist, freedom.
Marty Rubin
#24. I have learned to have more trust in the scientist than he does in himself.
David Sarnoff
#25. The will to believe has given us our great saints. The will to doubt has given us our great scientists. The goal of the intelligent man is a character in which the will to believe of the saint and the will to doubt of the scientist meet and mingle.
Glenn Frank
#26. The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively from the facts of experience.
Jack London
#27. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly: That's not so ignorant after all. There are two monsters in my story, not one And one of them, the scientist, is indeed named Frankenstein.
Kurt Vonnegut
#28. The narrow slit through which the scientist, if he wants to be successful, must view nature constructs, if this goes on for a long time, his entire character; and, more often than not, he ends up becoming what the German language so appropriately calls a Fachidiot (professional idiot).
Erwin Chargaff
#29. The artist is now giving a first coat of paint to that tautly stretched canvas which the scientist has been so busy stretching that he has forgotten the use he intended to put it to.
Henry Miller
#30. Scientists do not believe in fundamental and absolute certainties. For the scientist, certainty is never an end, but a search; not the ordering of certainty, but its exploration. For the scientist, certainty represents the highest degree of probability.
Ashley Montagu
#31. Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the loneliness of the process.
Loren Eiseley
#32. The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.
Erwin Schrodinger
#33. The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#34. The ultimate aim of the scientist is not only knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge with the aim of overcoming that in our environment which he views as hostile. None of the acts of nature (or Nature) is more hostile than death.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#35. Diminish the mass of evils that afflict the human species, increase enjoyment and well-being. And even if the new routes opened up could prolong the average life of mankind by only a few hours, or even a few days, then the scientist, too could aspire.
Antoine Lavoisier
#36. Science" in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the "Laws of Nature" as objective facts to be revered.
William James
#37. Goddamn. Well, let's call that an experiment and chalk it up to experience. All hail Jill Kismet the scientist.
Lilith Saintcrow
#38. Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely to explain than to adore. "It thundered," we exclaim, and go our earthly way.
A.W. Tozer
#39. But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn't as if I were one of them or even competing with them, for heaven's sake, I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. The scientist dropping into the zoo at feeding time. That is what I told myself.
Elaine Dundy
#40. The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it.. but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#41. The scientist-community guy may get a $500,000 grant, and if his equipment works or doesn't work, he still gets a gold star for doing the science experiment. For me, there is no merit in anything for doing an experiment; I have to go home with pictures.
James Balog
#42. The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.
Imre Lakatos
#43. Science, almost from its beginnings, has been truly international in character. National prejudices disappear completely in the scientist's search for truth.
Irving Langmuir
#44. Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses.
Thomas Kuhn
#45. Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe ... I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.
Derek Walcott
#46. The theist and the scientist are rival interpreters of nature, the one retreats as the other advances.
Joseph McCabe
#48. The responsibility of the scientist or journalist is to convey the context. If you're talking about the Arctic Sea ice, you have to embrace the reality that there's a huge number of other things that influence that on a year-to-year basis.
Andrew Revkin
#49. You're the scientist. I think you've got plenty of hard evidence that I don't find you repulsive at all.
Sarah Fine
#50. The vast difference between astrology and other sciences, if I may put it thus, is that astrology deals not with facts but with profundities. The solid ground on which the scientist pretends to rest gives way, in astrology, to imponderables.
Henry Miller
#51. To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.
Arthur Holly Compton
#52. Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.
Eric Kandel
#53. The day when the scientist, no matter how devoted, may make significant progress alone and without material help is past. This fact is most self-evident in our work.
Ernest Lawrence
#54. To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.
H.P. Lovecraft
#55. Indeed, faith is not, nor can it ever be, the necessary outcome of reflection. Rather, it is the necessary presupposition for reflection. Einstein argues that this is as true for the scientist as it is for the believer.
Michael G Harvey
#56. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer.
Leonard Mlodinow
#57. The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain.
Daniel Bell
#58. In Italy the artist is a god. Now if the artist is a god, the scientist is likewise a god.
Josef Albers
#59. I watched in silence as the parts of Matthew I knew and loved - the poet and the scientist, the warrior and the spy, the Renaissance prince and the father - fell away until only the darkest, most forbidding part of him remained. He was only the assassin now. But he was still the man I loved.
Deborah Harkness
#60. The product of scientific achievements should be for sale. The scientist should not.
A.E. Samaan
#61. The scientist knows very well that he is approaching ultimate truth only in an asymptotic curve and is barred from ever reaching it; but at the same time he is proudly aware of being indeed able to determine whether a statement is a nearer or a less near approach to the truth.
Konrad Lorenz
#62. The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living
Jules Henri Poincare
#63. In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish science.
Jacques Monod
#64. The scientist and the artist are both passionate about their exploration. What leads to my work is that I'm equally an artist and an engineer.
Arthur Ganson
#65. Strong, deeply rooted desire is the starting point of all achievement. Just as the electron is the last unit of matter discernible to the scientist. DESIRE is the seed of all achievement; the starting place, back of which there is nothing, or at least there is nothing of which we have any knowledge.
Napoleon Hill
#66. The artist's conception of his art or the scientist's of his science is usually as great as his conception of his own worth is small.
Giacomo Leopardi
#67. We are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game.
Murray Gell-Mann
#68. 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.
Harmony Korine
#69. If, as the scientist say, sex is such a driving force, why is so much of it nowadays found parked?
Henny Youngman
#70. Anyone can win the Nobel Prize if the scientist works hard on his research subject.
Tim Hunt
#71. The scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge.
Percy Williams Bridgman
#73. There is more in this heaven and earth than what the scientist knows and is revealed in the x-ray.
Ray Davies
#74. The particular thing about science is to combine that [the dreams of obtaining power] with a retreat from the world. Other people want to obtain power by going out into the world, but the scientist really wants to obtain power by retreating from the world.
Max Delbruck
#75. In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all 'poetic' in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist.
Saint-John Perse
#76. The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibility of application to which any discovery may lead.
Albert Einstein
#77. The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity.
Terence McKenna
#78. Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#79. What we learn is that the scientist is as important a part of this experiment as the electron, and that the scientist and the electron are in fact connected. This experiment is the cornerstone of the holistic universe theory.
Danny Scheinmann
#80. Scientific greatness is less a matter of intelligence than character; if the scientist refuses to compromise or accept incomplete answers and persists in grappling the most basic and difficult questions.
Albert Einstein
#81. Science is the study of what Is, Engineering builds what Will Be. The scientist merely explores that which exists, while the engineer creates what has never existed before.
Theodore Von Karman
#82. The mystic sees God in everything; the scientist, atoms; the poet, poetry.
Marty Rubin
#83. Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.
Anais Nin
#84. But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have
on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist.
J.D. Salinger
#85. The end of surprise would be the end of science. To this extent, the scientist must constantly seek and hope for surprise.
Robert Friedel
#86. Human intelligence is a function of man's evolutionary urge; the scientist and the philosopher hunger for truth because they are tired of being merely human.
Colin Wilson
#87. Sing a song of justice, why don't you, but remember there are many ways of measuring the worth of a man. Or a woman. Not just the poet's way. Not just the scientist's way. But a bit of both, and then some. And all of us have to tread the paths that are most suited to us.
Mitra Phukan
#88. Yet there is a difference between scientific and artistic observation. The scientist observes to turn away and generalize; the artist observes to seize and use reality in all its individuality and peculiarity.
Edmund Blair Bolles
#89. Some veil between childhood and the present is necessary. If the veil is withdrawn, the artistic imagination sickens and dies, the prophet looks in the mirror with a disillusioned and cynical sneer, the scientist goes fishing.
Margaret Mead
#90. 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.
Tycho Brahe
#91. For those of us who have been diagnosed with cancer, time is a precious commodity. The time and distance from the scientist's lab bench to the patient's bedside must be shortened.
Larry Lucchino
#92. The scientist is motivated primarily by curiosity and a desire for truth.
Irving Langmuir
#93. The scientist is also a composer ... You could think of science as discovering one particular thing - a supernova or whatever. You could also think of it as discovering this whole new way of seeing the world.
Lisa Randall
#94. Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.
Jacob Bronowski
#95. There's nothing within science per se that says medical researchers must not experiment on human subjects; it is the imposition of ethical dogma that constrains the scientist.
Jonah Goldberg
#96. It is not meant that the artist, in arriving at truth, must follow the way of the scientist, or, in stating it, the way of the philosopher.
George Edward Woodberry
#97. The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
Marshall McLuhan
#98. What we need to do is to humanize the scientist and simonize the humanist.
C.P. Snow
#99. Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly.
Carl Sagan
#100. I have been asked whether I would agree that the tragedy of the scientist is that he is able to bring about great advances in our knowledge, which mankind may then proceed to use for purposes of destruction. My answer is that this is not the tragedy of the scientist; it is the tragedy of mankind.
Leo Szilard
