No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.
And, after all, the Athanasian Creed is light and comprehensible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.
I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
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.
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!
The faster you go, the shorter you are.
I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely, the physical universe.
Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.
[Science is] a great game. It is inspiring and refreshing. The playing field is the universe itself.
Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection.
But in physics I soon learned to scent out the paths that led to the depths, and to disregard everything else, all the many things that clutter up the mind, and divert it from the essential. The hitch in this was, of course, the fact that one had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examination, whether one liked it or not.
The Lincoln Highway is to be something more than a road. It will be a road with a personality, a distinctive work of which the Americans of future generations can point with pride - an economic but also artistic triumph. (1914)
Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth.
The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe.
Science now finds itself in paradoxical strife with society: admired but mistrusted; offering hope for the future but creating ambiguous choice; richly supported yet unable to fulfill all its promise; boasting remarkable advances but criticized for not serving more directly the goals of society.
The only objections that have occurred to me are, 1st that you have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum so unreservedly. . . . And 2nd, it is not clear to me why, if continual physical conditions are of so little moment as you suppose, variation should occur at all. However, I must read the book two or three times more before I presume to begin picking holes.
As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite ... I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse & misrepresentation which unless I greatly mistake is in store for you... And as to the curs which will bark and yelp - you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often & justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead - I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness.
Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?
Who then can calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?
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