Science and Reason

Things that are separate shall be united and acquire such virtue that they will restore to man his lost memory.

There is no higher or lower knowledge, but one only, flowing out of experimentation.

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones and Meridian Lines?” So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, “They are merely conventional signs!”

The main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavours, in all branches of knowledge—theology, philosophy, history, art, science—to see the object as in itself it really is.

God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.

The grand aim of all science [is] to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms.

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

‘Change’ is scientific, ‘progress’ is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

Science is organized knowledge.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop.

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art.

No prejudice has even been able to prove its case in the court of reason.

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

Men say that we ought not to enquire into the supreme God and the nature of the universe, nor busy ourselves in searching out the causes of things, and that such enquiries are impious; whereas the very opposite is the truth.

No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated.