Men Quotes - Page 14

• Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or thought of the course of nature; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.

  Francis Bacon

  Nature, Knowledge, Science

  Francis Bacon, Rose-Mary Sargent (1999). “Selected Philosophical Works”, p.89, Hackett Publishing

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• Science emerges from the other progressive activities of man to the extent that new concepts arise from experiments and observations, and that the new concepts in turn lead to further experiments and observations.

  James Bryant Conant

  Science, Progressive, Arise

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• Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.

  Jacques Maritain

  Mean, Science, Religion

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• The first man who said "fire burns" was employing scientific method, at any rate if he had allowed himself to be burnt several times. This man had already passed through the two stages of observation and generalization. He had not, however, what scientific technique demands - a careful choice of significant facts on the one hand, and, on the other hand, various means of arriving at laws otherwise than my mere generalization.

  Bertrand Russell

  Mean, Science, Hands

  "The Scientific Outlook".

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• The history of men of science has one peculiar advantage, as it shows the importance of little things in producing great results. Smeaton learned his principle of constructing a lighthouse, by noticing the trunk of a tree to be diminished from a curve to a cyclinder ... and Newton, turning an old box into a water-clock, or the yard of a house into a sundial, are examples of those habits of patient observation which scientific biography attractively recommends.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Science, Curves, Water

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• To study men, we must look close by; to study man, we must learn to look afar; if we are to discover essential characteristics, we must first observe differences.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Science, Discovery, Differences

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• Human behaviour reveals uniformities which constitute natural laws. If these uniformities did not exist, then there would be neither social science nor political economy, and even the study of history would largely be useless. In effect, if the future actions of men having nothing in common with their past actions, our knowledge of them, although possibly satisfying our curiosity by way of an interesting story, would be entirely useless to us as a guide in life.

  Vilfredo Pareto

  Knowledge, Science, Past

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• It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Life, Nature, Heart

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1979). “Emile: Or, On Education”, p.169, Basic Books

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• Know thyself! This is the source of all wisdom, said the great thinkers of the past, and the sentence was written in golden letters on the temple of the gods. To know himself, Linnæus declared to be the essential indisputable distinction of man above all other creatures. I know, indeed, in study nothing more worthy of free and thoughtful man than the study of himself. For if we look for the purpose of our existence, we cannot possibly find it outside ourselves. We are here for our own sake.

  Karl Ernst von Baer

  Science, Thoughtful, Past

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• Placed as the fossils are in their several tiers of burial-places the one over the other; we have in them true witnesses of successive existences, whilst the historian of man is constantly at fault as to dates and even the sequence of events, to say nothing of the contradicting statements which he is forced to reconcile.

  Roderick Murchison

  Science, Events, Fossils

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• Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core. Not only science, but man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised he easily becomes a kind of tragic caricature of himself.

  Max Wertheimer

  Fall, Science, Essentials

  Max Wertheimer, Lothar Spillmann (2012). “On Perceived Motion and Figural Organization”, p.262, MIT Press

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• We cannot see how the evidence afforded by the unquestioned progressive development of organised existence-crowned as it has been by the recent creation of the earth's greatest wonder, MAN, can be set aside, or its seemingly necessary result withheld for a moment. When Mr. Lyell finds, as a witty friend lately reported that there had been found, a silver-spoon in grauwacke, or a locomotive engine in mica-schist, then, but not sooner, shall we enrol ourselves disciples of the Cyclical Theory of Geological formations.

  George Julius Poulett Scrope

  Witty, Science, Progress

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• ...the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity-that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product-predictable if not indispensable-of the evolution of the universe.

  Jacques Monod

  Religious, Attitude, Science

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• He had seen too much of the cosmos to have any great faith in man's ability to understand it.

  Poul Anderson

  Science, Too Much, Cosmos

  Poul Anderson (2015). “Starfarers”, p.483, Open Road Media

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• I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.

  Charles Darwin

  Dog, Believe, Science

  The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II C. Darwin to Asa Gray May 22nd [1860] (p. 105)

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• If a man will comprehend the richness and variety of the universe, and inspire his mind with a due measure of wonder and awe, he must contemplate the human intellect not only on its heights of genius but in its abysses of ineptitude.

  A. E. Housman

  Science, Inspire, Mind

  Marcus Manilius, A. E. Housman (2011). “Astronomicon”, p.19, Cambridge University Press

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• It is in scientific honesty that I endorse the presentation of alternative theories for the origin of the universe, life and man in the science classroom. It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happening by chance.

  Wernher von Braun

  Life, Honesty, Science

  Letter to California State board of Education, September 14, 1972.

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• Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Science, Groups, Individual

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.390, Penguin

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• Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.

  Mary McCarthy

  Science, Discovery, Earth

  Mary McCarthy (1964). “The Humanist in the Bathtub”

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• Perhaps the best reason for regarding mathematics as an art is not so much that it affords an outlet for creative activity as that it provides spiritual values. It puts man in touch with the highest aspirations and lofiest goals. It offers intellectual delight and the exultation of resolving the mysteries of the universe.

  Morris Kline

  Spiritual, Art, Science

  Morris Kline (2013). “Mathematics for the Nonmathematician”, p.551, Courier Corporation

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• Religious leaders and men of science have the same ideals; they want to understand and explain the universe of which they are part; they both earnestly desire to solve, if a solution be ever possible, that great riddle: Why are we here?

  Arthur Keith

  Religious, Science, Leader

  Sir Arthur Keith (1927). “Concerning man's origin: being the presidential address given at the meeting of the British association held in Leeds on August 31, 1927, and recent essays on Darwinian subjects”

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• The influence of modern physics goes beyond technology. It extends to the realm of thought and culture where it has led to a deep revision in man's conception of the universe and his relation to it

  Fritjof Capra

  Science, Technology, Culture

  "The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism". Book by Fritjof Capra, 1975.

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• There has been no discovery like it in the history of man. It puts into man's hands the key to using the fundamental energy of the universe.

  Frederick Soddy

  Science, Discovery, Hands

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• There ought not to be anything in the whole universe that man can't poke his nose into-that's the way we're built and I assume that there's some reason for that.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Science, Noses, Way

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• We find it hard to picture to ourselves the state of mind of a man of older days who firmly believed that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. He could feel beneath his feet the writhings of the damned amid the flames; very likely he had seen with his own eyes and smelt with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissure in the rocks. Looking upwards, he beheld ... the incorruptible firmament, wherein the stars hung like so many lamps.

  Anatole France

  Stars, Eye, Science

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