QSciSpirit

Quotations on Science, Spirit & Emotion

RESEARCH, SCIENCE, VISION

Quotations Central

Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. But put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave. Claude Bernard The essential philosophic quest in the world is for integration-- which is to say, the need to bring together rational philosophy, spiritual belief, scientific knowledge, personal experience, and direct observation into an organic whole. N. Cousins, The Celebration of Life SKILL, SCIENCE, ART First study the science. Then practice the art which is born of that science. DaVinci, Leonardo Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind. Einstein The most important function of art and science is to awaken the cosmic religious feeling and keep it alive. Einstein The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. Einstein As soon as anybody belongs to a certain narrow creed in science, every unprejudiced and true perception is gone. Goethe Wisdom is a science by which we discriminate between things spiritually good and evil. It is the science of sciences, for alone, it can understand the value, the true price, the real uses, the danger, and the potentialities of the soul. Joubert Science may have found a cure for most human evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of all-- the apathy of human beings. Helen Keller Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. ...No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others. Instead, normal-scientific research is directed to the articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies. Thomas S. Kuhn As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never to be lost, and science can never regress. J. Robert Oppenheimer, in Life mag., 10/10/ 1949 There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. J. Robert Oppenheimer,Life, 10/10/1949 I'm a scientist. We don't talk about the spirit. Soul is a four letter word in our tradition. Candace Pert (speaking tongue in cheek) Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve. Max Planck "Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds,
or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or the Milky Way; Yet simple nature to his hope has given, Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heaven; Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, Some happier island in the watery waste, Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. To be, contents his natural desire;" Pope ,Alexander ,1688-1744, Essay on Man,Swinton 1880 For years, I marched to a music in comparison with which the military music of the streets is noise and discord, I was daily intoxicated, and yet no man could call me intemperate. With all your science can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul. Thoreau, j, 7/16/1851 Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe. ...Stupidity is replicating itself at an astonishing rate. It breeds easily and is self financing. Frank Zappa Research THE VERY BIG STUPID is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department. Frank Zappa BALANCE, EXTREMES "The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought of spirit, of poetry-- a narrow belt." Ralph Waldo Emerson "It shows a curious narrowness of mind to love one science, only to hate all the others." Voltaire, Lettres en vers et en prose, LXI