Quotes to inspire and reflect

Faith is a fine invention / When Gentlemen can see— / But Microscopes are prudent / In an Emergency.

Don’t set out to teach theism from your natural history.... You spoil both.

We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; / Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—/We murder to dissect.

Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.

Science has zipped the atom open in a dozen places, it can read the scrawlings on the Rosetta stone as glibly as a literary critic explains Hart Crane, but it doesn’t know anything about playwrights.

Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous.

The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

Science, by itself, cannot supply us with an ethic. It can show us how to achieve a given end, and it may show us that some ends cannot be achieved.

In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man.

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon / he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to that.

Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth.

One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.

Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.

The scholar is early acquainted with every department of the impossible. v

Everything that’s prose isn’t verse and everything that isn’t verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!

Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art.

The mind of the scholar, if you would have it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds. It is better that his armor should be somewhat bruised by rude encounters even, than hang for ever rusting on the wall.

Don’t appear so scholarly, pray. Humanize your talk, and speak to be understood. Do you think a Greek name gives more weight to your reasons?

The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.

The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars—the scholar of nature.

Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.

It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.

Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.

In truth man is made rather to eat ices than to pore over old texts.

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.

How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.

A great man will find a great subject, or which is the same thing, make any subject great.

A scholar is a man with this inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.

When nature exceeds culture, we have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature, we have the pedant.

We want a Society for the Suppression of Erudite Research and the Decent Burial of the Past. The ghosts of the dead past want quite as much laying as raising.

Erudition, n. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Things take indeed a wondrous turn / When learned men do stoop to learn.

Learning is the property of those who fear to do disagreeable things.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar.

The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man’s ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.

There never was a scandalous tale without some foundation.

The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.

A lie has no leg, but a scandal has wings.

From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair.

If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.

Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.

Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.