Science and Reason

I am convinced that He [God] does not play dice.

BOSWELL : Sir, what is poetry?

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

He gave man speech, and speech created thought,

Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.

One defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.

I must distinguish between that which always is and never becomes and which is apprehended by reason and reflection, and that which always becomes and never is and is conceived by opinion with the help of sense.

None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. The religion which based on experience, which refuses dogmatic. If there's any religion that would cope the scientific needs it will be Buddhism.

The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks.

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man…

All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.

Nature never breaks her own laws.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Necessity is a guardian in Nature.

There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.

It is the infinite alone that cannot be attained, for if it could it would become finite.

Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.