Science and Reason

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light … He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.

Anybody who is not shocked by this subject has failed to understand it.

‘Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.’

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation … The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

[Natural selection] has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Technology … the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it.

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.

The reason is that they utter these words of theirs not by virtue of a skill, but by a divine power - otherwise, if they knew how to speak well on one topic thanks to a skill, they would know how to speak about every other topic too.

I prefer nothing, unless it is true.

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

By doubting we come at truth.

Philosophy is the science which considers truth.

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.

Between the layman’s “ Naturally no human society” and the anthropologist’s “No known human society” lie thousands of detailed and painstaking studies, made by hurricane-lamp and firelight, by explorer and missionary and modern scientists, in many parts of the world.

We have not the reverent feeling for therainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

Ere many generations pass, our machinery willbe driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. . . . Throughout space there is energy . . . it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.

[ Welcoming back the crew of Apollo 11 from the first moon landing :] This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.

Experience never misleads; what you are misled by is only your judgment, and this misleads you by anticipating results from experience of a kind that is not produced by your experiments.

To solve a problem, you need to remove the cause, not the symptom.