Science and Reason

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements.

If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, 25 then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings.

The instant the atmosphere is illuminated it will be filled with an infinite number of images which are produced by the various bodies and colors assembled in it. And the eye is the target, a lodestone, of these images.

He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars; General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer: For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

You know my methods. Apply them.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.

The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

Gonzo journalism . . . is a style of “reporting” based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism—and the best journalists have always known this.

I have taken great care not to deride, bewail, or execrate human actions, but to understand them.

Drawing is based upon perspective, which is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.

It is useful to constantly observe, note, and consider.

Many people have the reasoning facility, but no one uses it in religious matters .

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.