Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
We don't devote enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
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.
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.
Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of Nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being.
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
May every young scientist remember and not fail to keep his eyes open for the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to give consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important discovery.
It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
or simply:
