Great Scientist Quotes - Page 2

• If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it enough.

  Albert Einstein

  Success, Teaching, Data

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• There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Life, God

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• If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Success

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• I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

  Isaac Newton

  Inspirational, Success, Trust

  Quoted in Christian Monitor, and Religious Intelligencer, 4 July 1812. An almost identical quotation by Newton, said to have been uttered "a little before he died," appears in Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men, published in 1820 but extant in manuscript form from around 1730. A paraphrase of Newton's words was printed in a note in a 1797 edition of TheWorks of Alexander Pope.

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• Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Life, Relationship

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• The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.

  Nikola Tesla

  Taken, Hard Work, Science

  Nikola Tesla, David Hatcher Childress (2000). “The Tesla Papers”, p.74, Adventures Unlimited Press

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• I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily.

  Isaac Newton

  Bible, Atheism, Fundamentals

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• History is the same thing over and over again.

  Woody Allen

  Fitness Motivational, Temporary Insanity, Bores You

  "Nothing Pleases Me More than Being Thought of as a European Filmmaker". Interview with Helene Zuber, www.spiegel.de. June 20, 2005.

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• The great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

  Isaac Newton

  Trust, Truth, Ocean

  Quoted in Christian Monitor, and Religious Intelligencer, 4 July 1812. An almost identical quotation by Newton, said to have been uttered "a little before he died," appears in Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men, published in 1820 but extant in manuscript form from around 1730. A paraphrase of Newton's words was printed in a note in a 1797 edition of TheWorks of Alexander Pope.

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• When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level

  Brian Greene

  Kids, Civilization, Musician

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• Louis Pasteur, the great scientist, said "chance favours the prepared mind", which is a posh way of saying 'do your homework', but it's an excellent piece of advice.

  Al Murray

  Advice, Mind, Chance

  Source: www.roland.co.uk

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• All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.

  Karl Pearson

  Science, Artist, Greatness

  Karl Pearson (2007). “The Grammar of Science”, p.30, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Every great artist raises art to a science, and every great scientist raises science to an art, hence we have Michelangelo's David and Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

  Robert Breault

  Art, Greatness, Scientist

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• The great scientist dares to differ from accepted 'facts' - think irrationally - let the artist do likewise.

  Edward Weston

  Artist, Thinking, Facts

  Edward Weston (1971). “Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition: His Photographs Accompanied by Excerpts from the Daybooks & Letters”

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• It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

  Loren Eiseley

  Art, Men, Tragedy

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• It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist for example Vincent Van Gogh, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself.

  Loren Eiseley

  Art, Men, Humanity

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• When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did [Claude Elwood] Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.

  Richard Hamming

  Errors, Small Problems, Tree

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• This is the most important joke I've ever heard. Niels Bohr, the founder of Quantum Physics, had a friend to dinner. As the friend left, he noticed a horseshoe nailed above Bohr's front door. He said to Bohr, accusingly, "Niels, you're a great scientist. You can't believe in superstitions." Bohr answered, "I don't, but apparently it works anyway."As with confirmation bias, we tend to lean toward superstitions that benefit us.

  John Cleese

  Believe, Important, Physics

  Source: bigthink.com

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• How did scientists get money in the past? They were either lucky and independently wealthy, like Darwin, or they had patrons, like Galileo. Universities or governments have become patrons only in the last few generations. Many of the great scientists of the past were in debt to their patrons in the same sense that modern scientists are influenced by what their granting agencies want.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Past, Lucky, Get Money

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Of course, Einstein was a very great scientist indeed, and I have enormous respect for him, and great admiration for the discoveries he made. But he was very committed to a view of the objectivity of the physical world.

  John Polkinghorne

  Objectivity, Discovery, Views

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• Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy , looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.

  Fritz Leiber

  Half, Stones, Pebbles

  "Poor Superman". Book by Fritz Leiber, 1951.

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• Science will always raise philosophical questions like, is any scientific theory or model correct? How do we know? Are unobserved things real? etc. and it seems to me of great importance that these questions are not just left to scientists, but that there are thinkers who make it their business to think as clearly and slowly about these questions as it is possible to. Great scientists do not always make the best philosophers.

  Tim Crane

  Real, Philosophical, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In spite of the fact that religion looks backward to revealed truth while science looks forward to new vistas and discoveries, both activities produce a sense of awe and a curious mixture of humility and arrogance in their practitioners. All great scientists are inspired by the subtlety and beauty of the natural world that they are seeking to understand. Each new subatomic particle, every unexpected object, produces delight and wonderment. In constructing their theories, physicists are frequently guided by arcane concepts of elegance in the belief that the universe is intrinsically beautiful.

  Paul Davies

  Beautiful, Humility, Science

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• Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one-Marie, the famous Madame Curie-and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.

  Isaac Asimov

  Husband, Science, History

  Isaac Asimov (1976). “Asimov on physics”, Doubleday Books

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• We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Mean, Order, Data

  "The Wellspring of Reality". "Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking" by Buckminster Fuller, 1975.

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