Science Physics Quotes

• The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

  Isaac Asimov

  Inspirational, Funny, Motivational

  "Betting On a Bass That Belts Them Out; Singing Fish Becomes Season’s Unlikely Hit" by Darragh Johnson, The Washington Post, July 30, 2000.

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• If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Inspirational, Funny

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

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• You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself.

  Dale Carnegie

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Education

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  We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

  Carl Sagan

  Motivational, Education, Knowledge

  "Why We Need To Understand Science". The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3, www.csicop.org. Spring 1990.

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• Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  Albert Einstein (2015). “Bite-Size Einstein: Quotations on Just About Everything from the Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century”, p.31, St. Martin's Press

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  The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Life, Friendship

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.331, Princeton University Press

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• When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second.

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Girl, Funny Inspirational

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• When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.

  Albert Einstein

  Funny, Girl, Witty

  "News Chronicle" (March 14, 1949), as cited by "The Columbia World of Quotations", 1996.

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• Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

  Plato

  Philosophical, Science, Soul

  Plato, Julius A. Sigler (1997). “Education: Ends and Means”, p.27, University Press of America

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• Politics is more difficult than physics.

  Albert Einstein

  Wise, Philosophy, Politics

  Quoted in N.Y. Times, 22 Apr. 1955

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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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• A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

  Max Planck

  Death, Truth, Growing Up

  Scientific Autobiography, and Other Papers "Scientific Autobiography" (1948) (translation by Frank Gaynor)

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• Physics is very muddled again at the moment; it is much too hard for me anyway, and I wish I were a movie comedian or something like that and had never heard anything about physics!

  Wolfgang Pauli

  Science, Comedian, Wish

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• If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Successful

  Address to French Philosophical Society, Paris, 6 Apr. 1922

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• If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

  Carl Sagan

  Inspirational, Nature, Hipster

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.242, Ballantine Books

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• An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

  Max Planck

  Nature, Science, Answers

  Max Planck (2014). “Scientific Autobiography: and Other Papers”, p.58, Open Road Media

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• I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

  Erwin Schrodinger

  Sorry, Apology, Science

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• A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

  George Wald

  Wisdom, Science, Knowing

  Foreword to L. J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment (1958)

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• In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

  Carl Sagan

  Change, Learning, Humility

  Keynote address at CSICOP conference in 1987. "Do Science and the Bible Conflict?" Book by Judson Poling, p. 30, 2003.

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• The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose

  Bill Bryson

  Funny, Knowledge, Science

  Bill Bryson (2014). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.20, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Try not to become a man of success, but a man of value. Look around at how people want to get more out of life than they put in. A man of value will give more than he receives. Be creative, but make sure that what you create is not a curse for mankind.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Motivational, Success

  "Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man". Book by William Hermanns, p. 143, 1983.

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• Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

  Niels Bohr

  Science, Firsts, Physics

  "The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Volume IV: Causality and Complementarity" edited by Jan Faye and Henry J. Folse (1998); later quoted in Karen Michelle Barad "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning" (p. 254), 2007.

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• Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

  Adam Smith

  Science, Flames, Enthusiasm

  The Wealth of Nations Bk V, Ch. 1

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• The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

  Steven Weinberg

  Life, Education, Money

  Steven Weinberg (2012). “Facing Up”, p.42, Harvard University Press

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  Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

  Nikola Tesla

  Inspirational, Nature, Reality

  "Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World". Modern Mechanics and Inventions, July 1934.

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