Exact Sciences Quotes

• Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

  Samuel Butler

  Life, Art, Bad Ass

  Samuel Butler (2014). “The Notebooks of Samuel Butler”, p.440, The Floating Press

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• In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it is the exact opposite.

  Paul Dirac

  Science, Opposites, People

  "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists". Book by by Robert Jungk, as translated by James Cleugh, p. 22, 1958.

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• All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Education, Math, Numbers

  "The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell".

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• Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man.

  Bertrand Russell

  Math, Men, Ideas

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• The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand.

  Werner Heisenberg

  Nature, Environmental, May

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• Music is not an exact science so depending on the time and the mode and the energy when we do it that will determine what happens with it.

  Talib Kweli

  Energy, Music Is, Determine

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• If you ask ... the man in the street ... the human significance of mathematics, the answer of the world will be, that mathematics has given mankind a metrical and computatory art essential to the effective conduct of daily life, that mathematics admits of countless applications in engineering and the natural sciences, and finally that mathematics is a most excellent instrumentality for giving mental discipline... [A mathematician will add] that mathematics is the exact science, the science of exact thought or of rigorous thinking.

  Cassius Jackson Keyser

  Art, Science, Thinking

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• Many persons entertain a prejudice against mathematical language, arising out of a confusion between the ideas of a mathematical science and an exact science. ...in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Reality, Ideas, Confusion

  William Stanley Jevons (1879). “Political Economy”

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• That the fundamental aspects of heredity should have turned out to be so extraordinarily simple supports us in the hope that nature may, after all, be entirely approachable. Her much-advertised inscrutability has once more been found to be an illusion due to our ignorance. This is encouraging, for, if the world in which we live were as complicated as some of our friends would have us believe we might well despair that biology could ever become an exact science.

  Thomas Hunt Morgan

  Believe, Ignorance, Simple

  Thomas Hunt Morgan (1919). “The Physical basis of heredity”

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• The science of genetics is in a transition period, becoming an exact science just as the chemistry in the times of Lavoisier, who made the balance an indispensable implement in chemical research.

  Wilhelm Johannsen

  Science, Balance, Transition

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• Engineering training deals with the exact sciences. That sort of exactness makes for truth and conscience. It might be good for the world if more men had that sort of mental start in life even if they did not pursue the profession.

  Herbert Hoover

  Life, Science, Men

  Herbert Hoover (1952). “Memoirs: Years of adventure, 1874-1920”

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• Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support ... The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.

  Walt Whitman

  Encouragement, Art, Science

  Walt Whitman (1868). “Poems”, p.46

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• This splendid subject [mathematics], queen of all exact sciences, and the ideal and norm of all careful thinking.

  G. Stanley Hall

  Queens, Thinking, Mathematics

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• All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Determination, Science, Law

  James Clerk Maxwell, W. D. Niven (2003). “The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell”, p.156, Courier Corporation

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• Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man. Every careful measurement in science is always given with the probable error ... every observer admits that he is likely wrong, and knows about how much wrong he is likely to be.

  Bertrand Russell

  Truth, Science, Men

  "The Scientific Outlook".

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• The weeds of a seemingly learned and brilliant but actually trivial and empty philosophy of Nature which, after having been replaced some 50 years ago by the exact sciences, is now once more dug up by pseudo scientists from the lumber room of human fallacies, and like a trollop, newly attired in elegant dress and make-up, is smuggled into respectable company, to which she does not belong.

  Hermann Kolbe

  Weed, Nature, Philosophy

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• Politics is not an exact science.

  Otto von Bismarck

  Military, Political, Politics

  Expression in the Reichstag in 1884, "The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When". Book by Ralph Keyes, 2006.

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• Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story ... Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it.'' —Sherlock Holmes on John Watson's "pamphlet", "A Study in Scarlet".

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Stories, Causes, Facts

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• I proved to you that psychiatry is an exact science!" "An exact science?!" "Yes, you owe me exactly one hundred and forty-three dollars!

  Charles M. Schulz

  Dollars, Three, Hundred

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• Plainly it isn't an exact science, despite it being a complex interaction of micro-decisions and corresponding thought; perhaps it doesn't always work and we pass by some potential soulmates like the proverbial ships in the night, never quite connecting. Then again, perhaps the system is tenacious and continues to run like a computer program on infinite loop, so that if at first you don't meet, you are drawn back together for another try.

  Simon Pegg

  Running, Soulmate, Night

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• There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Flower, Smell, Rose

  "The Naval Treaty" (1893)

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• Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Humorous, Sarcasm, Science

  The Sign of the Four ch. 1 (1890)

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• It is a common observation that a science first begins to be exact when it is quantitatively treated. What are called the exact sciences are no others than the mathematical ones.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Science, Firsts, Common

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.142, Indiana University Press

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• By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.

  H. L. Mencken

  Philosophy, Knowledge, Science

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• The application of algebra to geometry ... has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.

  John Stuart Mill

  Science, Names, Progress

  John Stuart Mill (1865). “An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings”, p.531

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