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Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.
Sep 10, 2025
The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.
Much of good science and perhaps all of great science has its roots in fantasy.
A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.
I am among those who think that science has great beauty.
Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts.
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it.
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
Curiosity is the starting point for great science.
Crash programs fail because they are based on theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby in a month.
I'm not a great science fiction fan myself. I probably feel that way about Westerns. Like I used to play Cowboys and Indians, they can act out Will and the Robot.
I'm not the best audience for that because I'm not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Savoir souffrir sans se plaindre, ça c'est la seule chose pratique, c'est la grande science, la leçon à apprendre, la solution du problème de la vie.[Knowing how to suffer without complaining is the only practical thing, it's the great science, the lesson to learn, the solution to the problem of life.]
Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living
The great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
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.
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions.
[Mystery] is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
For no sooner had I begun to read this great work [Frasier, The Golden Bough ], than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact sister studies, and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology.
He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing.
You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.
The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.
We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves.
Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.
My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. Izzy, she would say, did you ask a good question today? That difference - asking good questions - made me become a scientist.
After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
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.
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken..."
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
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...'
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.