Science and Reason

Life, they urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all they did by reason and reason only.

Logic is like the sword—those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual, everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.

I understand Jung’s vague, imprecise notions, but I consider them worthless—a lot of talk without any clear direction. If there has to be a psychiatrist, I should prefer Freud. I do not believe in him, but I love very much his concise style and his original, although rather extravagant, mind.

Ptolemy made a universe, which lasted 1400 years. Newton also made a universe, which

The discovery of a nuclear chain reaction need not bring about the destruction of mankind any more than the discovery of matches.

The unified field theory has been put into retirement. It is so difficult to employ mathematically that I have not been able to verify it somehow, in spite of all my efforts. This state of affairs will no doubt last many more years, mostly because physicists have little understanding of logical-philosophical arguments.

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people on Earth would be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start out again, and civilization would be restored.

I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence, for he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions.

The scientist is possessed by a sense of universal causation… His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection… It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.

She knows her way around the family of radioactive substances better than I know the way around my own family.

Science will stagnate if it is made to serve practical goals.

The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of “physical reality” indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final.

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.

A theorist goes astray in two ways: 1) The devil leads him by the nose with a false hypothesis. (For this he deserves our pity.) 2) His arguments are erroneous and sloppy. (For this he deserves a beating.)

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

I do not like to state an opinion on a matter unless I know the precise facts.

An undevout astronomer is mad.

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

Our meddling intellect

And now I see with eye serene

Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;

The statue stood