Exact Sciences Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

  Northrop Frye

  Art, What If, Criticism

  Northrop Frye (2015). “Anatomy of Criticism”, p.7, Princeton University Press

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• Nevertheless, scientific method is not the same as the scientific spirit. The scientific spirit does not rest content with applying that which is already known, but is a restless spirit, ever pressing forward towards the regions of the unknown, and endeavouring to lay under contribution for the special purpose in hand the knowledge acquired in all portions of the wide field of exact science. Lastly, it acts as a check, as well as a stimulus, sifting the value of the evidence, and rejecting that which is worthless, and restraining too eager flights of the imagination and too hasty conclusions.

  Archibald Garrod

  Science, Hands, Imagination

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• Logic is not only an exact science, but is the most simple and elementary of all sciences; it ought therefore undoubtedly to find some place in every course of education.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Simple, Logic, Courses

  William Stanley Jevons (1870). “Elementary Lessons in Logic: Deductive and Inductive : with Copious Questions and Examples and a Vocabulary of Logical Terms”, p.6

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• Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information - is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.

  Paul Samuelson

  Information, Computer, Macroeconomics

  Interview with Conor Clarke, www.theatlantic.com. June 17, 2009.

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• We are not so brazen as to believe that we can perfectly calibrate valuation; determining risk and return for any investment remains an art not an exact science

  Seth Klarman

  Art, Believe, Risk

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• Hindsight is an exact science. Hold fast to your dreams, for it dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Dream, Pain, Evil

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• Healing does not come through intense affirmation of divinity, or by simply pouring out love and the expression of a vague mysticism.It comes through mastering an exact science of contact, impression, of invocation plus an understanding of the subtle apparatus of the etheric vehicle.

  Alice Bailey

  Healing, Expression, Understanding

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• There is no need to express art in terms of nature. It can perfectly well be expressed in terms of geometry and the exact sciences.

  Georges Vantongerloo

  Art, Expression, Needs

  Georges Vantongerloo (1948). “Paintings, sculptures, reflections”

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• [Dr. Constain James] refuted so well the aberrations of Darwinism.... [A system] which is repugnant at once to history, to the tradition of all people, to exact science, to observed facts, and even to reason itself, would seem to need no refutation. But the corruption of this age, the machinations of the perverse, the danger of the simple, demand that such fancies, altogether absurd though they are, should - since they borrow the mask of science - be refuted by true science.

  Pope Pius IX

  Simple, People, Scary

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• It is always observable that the physical and the exact sciences are the last to suffer under despotisms.

  Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

  Suffering, Lasts, Despotism

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• At bottom each “exact” science is, and must be speculative, and its chief tool of research, too rarely used with both courage and judgement, is the regulated imagination.

  Reginald Aldworth Daly

  Imagination, Judgement, Tools

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• I learned that economics was not an exact science and that the most erudite men would analyze the economic ills of the world and derive a totally different conclusion.

  Edith Summerskill, Baroness Summerskill

  Men, Different, World

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• An exact science is one that admits loss.

  Genesis P-Orridge

  Loss

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• It is perplexing to see the flexibility of the so-called 'exact sciences' which by cast-iron laws of logic and by the infallible help of mathematics can lead to conclusions which are diametrically opposite to one another.

  Vasco Ronchi

  Science, Law, Opposites

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• By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics. Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.

  M. C. Escher

  Teaching, Math, Artist

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• For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure? ...Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is none the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas... it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith.

  Adolf Hitler

  Religious, Character, Sacrifice

  "Mein Kampf". Book by Adolf Hitler, Volume II, Chapter 5 - Philosophy and Organization, 1926.

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• All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

  Bertrand Russell

  Math, Science, Ideas

  Bertrand Russell (2001). “The Scientific Outlook”, p.45, Psychology Press

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• Hindsight is an exact science.

  Guy Bellamy

  Motivational, Science, Hindsight

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• Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937.

  Charles Proteus Steinmetz

  New York, Science, Men

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• Hitting is an art, but not an exact science.

  Rod Carew

  Art, Hitting

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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