Science Philosophy Quotes

While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy, so agreeable to the natural vanity and curiosity of men; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain. ~ David Hume

"Are we alone in the universe?" This is a question which goes back to the dawn of history, but for most of human history it has been in the province of religion and philosophy. Fifty or something years ago, however, it became part of science. ~ Paul Davies

Without the withering criticism by nominalism, medieval Christian philosophy and theology would not have relinquished their claim to the role of knowledge in discovering the nature of things in light of higher principles; instead, it caused them to leave the field of battle without any defense before the onslaught of secularism, rationalism, and empiricism, which were, as a result, able to gain a remarkably easy victory. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy. ~ Jonathan Swift

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science. ~ A.J. Ayer

The senses give both us and the animals access to the natural world, but we humans have superimposed a second world by internalizing a poem, thereby making the two worlds seem equally inescapable. Outside of the natural sciences, reason works within the second world, following paths that the imagination has cleared. But inside those sciences, nature itself shows the way, ~ Richard M. Rorty

[...] throughout the whole history of science most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely teh desire to satisfy their curiosity ~ Abraham Flexner

Art, science, philosophy, religion
each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience. ~ Edward Abbey

With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology. ~ Alan Lightman

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies. ~ Raoul Vaneigem

Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science. ~ George Eliot

Skepticism literally means a thoughtful inquiry, the looking at a problem in a disinterested spirit, the surveying of a question from many sides. In this sense it is the very essence of philosophy and science. ~ Joseph Alexander Leighton

Like many students, I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock, and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science. ~ Paul Nurse

TRUTH, n.: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Every day, I read books on philosophy and science fiction and human consciousness. ~ Tom DeLonge

No non-poetic account of reality can be complete. ~ John Myhill

I look around and see that many - not all, but many - problems we've got could be solved if our culture simply fostered the habit of reading. Reading books of science, philosophy, history. Reading literature of quality, the sort that touches us because of a more profound reason, such as, for instance, because it's got something to say beyond all the futilities and trifles of life, even while depicting the ordinary in life, at the same time that it says it with style, in a unique, admirable manner. An original one.


We are not a county of readers, notwithstanding. We are the country of football turned into a cult, of guile being ranked high as a cardinal virtue, of Carnival made for exportation. A country where there are more letters in political party acronyms than in all many of our politicians have written in a lifetime. A country where ethics has become a joke theme. Where democracy is but a ridiculous puppet theatre.

Yes, I look around and see that many problems could be solved if we had the habit of reading. But I am not even sure whether there is someone reading these words. ~ Camilo Gomes Jr.

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance. ~ Muriel Spark

Christian communication is further impeded by the expectations of a world progressing at a staggering pace in every field of study. It seems as though to deal in spiritual matters, the Christian has to be an authority on every other subject, failing which, he is branded "escapist" or "unrealistic." Thus, science, philosophy, psychology, history, and virtually every other discipline affects religion. In a sense, this ought not to be surprising, because spiritual truth deals with the essence of life. For ~ Ravi Zacharias

What we're starting to see is a quantum biology, it being applied in biology and cosmology and a host of other sciences, because it does really pertain to how we know. It really helps bring epistemology, which is how do we know what we know, out of the realm of philosophy and brings it into the realm of science. ~ Edgar Mitchell

Logic, it is often said, is the study of valid arguments. It is a systematic attempt to distinguish valid arguments from invalid arguments. ~ W.H. Newton-Smith

Philosophy is this amazing technique we've devised for getting reality to answer us back when we're getting it wrong. Science itself can't make those arguments. You actually have to rely on philosophy, on philosophy of science. ~ Rebecca Goldstein

All knowledge that Science has acquired so far, has been through the concentration of the powers of the mind. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Philosophy was once considered science. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Much of what Karl Popper contributed to the philosophy of science has now passed into mainstream thought, into the currency of that nebulous, tricky ontology known as 'common sense.' ~ Liz Williams

I am not offering God as a theory to compete with scientific theories about the universe. Rather I am saying that those self-contained, secular theories provide evidence for theologically neutral premises in philosophical arguments leading to a conclusion that has theistic significance. ~ William Lane Craig

Is the conclusion that the universe was designed - and that the design extends deeply into life - science, philosophy, religion, or what? In a sense it hardly matters. By far the most important question is not what category we place it in, but whether a conclusion is true. A true philosophical or religious conclusion is no less true than a true scientific one. Although universities might divide their faculty and courses into academic categories, reality is not obliged to respect such boundaries. ~ Michael J. Behe

You can't do science in a novel, but you can do philosophy. Or, if you're really lucky, you can manage to pose a question in such a way that other people will take it on. ~ Scarlett Thomas

For eighteen centuries every engine of destruction that human science, philosophy, wit, reasoning or brutality could bring to bear against a book has been brought to bear against that book to stamp it out of the world, but it has a mightier hold on the world today than ever before. If that were man's book it would have been annihilated and forgotten hundreds of years ago ... ~ R.A. Torrey

I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language. ~ Natasha Trethewey

After the day's active life, we spend at least a few hours quietly to develop our aesthetic, theoretical, and spiritual understanding of the way of life. By either reading, writing, performing, or thinking and meditating, we should continuously refine our personality and deepen our understanding of art, literature, science, philosophy, religion, and various other arts. ~ Michio Kushi

I don't think there's an interesting boundary between philosophy and science. Science is totally beholden to philosophy. There are philosophical assumptions in science and there's no way to get around that. ~ Sam Harris

Philosophy is regarded by many as inseparable from speculation ... Philosophy has proceeded from speculation to science. ~ Hans Reichenbach

Science without respect for human life is degrading to us all and reflects a hollow and deceptive philosophy, a philosophy that we as a people should never condone. ~ Nathan Deal

Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy. ~ Ilana Mercer

When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. ~ Denis Diderot

Human knowledge is but a ripple on the water's surface. To go deeper, we must accept the fact that we don't know everything ~ Stewart Stafford

Not only dowomen sufferindignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them. ~ Wallace Stevens

Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science. ~ William Poundstone

The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science. ~ Freeman Dyson

Ultimately there can be no disagreement between history, science, philosophy, and theology. Where there is disagreement, there is either ignorance or error. ~ Mortimer Adler

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story. ~ Jose Saramago

So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all. ~ Gilles Deleuze

Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science. ~ Edward Abbey

If we can't use science to uplift all humans everywhere, then what's the use of such science! ~ Abhijit Naskar

[W]hen one has a religious experience, what is 'true' is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality. To determine that, one needs a way to verify the contents of a revelation, and that means science. ~ Jerry A. Coyne

The special task of philosophy must always be to oppose the intellectual division of labour, no matter how useful and even indispensable it may be to the progress of science. Philosophy can never deny its own universal character, and if it yields to the spirit of mere facts, if it ceases to be systematic and "encyclopedic," it will really have renounced itself. ~ Ernst Cassirer

Kant was surely right that our minds "cleave the air" with concepts of substance, space, time, and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: non, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law. And as we shall see in the next chapter, they are a source of the metaphors by which we comprehend many other spheres of life. ~ Steven Pinker

Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science. ~ Karl Marx

Was the excellence of Socrates or of Shakespeare normal? Was it not rather abnormal, extraordinary? It is, I think, obvious in the first place, that not all that is good is normal; that, on the contrary, the abnormal is often better than the normal... ~ G.E. Moore

It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become a small power itself. ~ G.K. Chesterton

In the garden of humanity every baby is a fresh new flower. ~ Debasish Mridha

life is a tug of war between memories and dreams ~ memories define your past and dreams mystify your future. ~ Subhralin Thakuria

Many people are afraid to teach because they don't think they know enough. I hope I've put the lie to that. But also consider this: work in brain science has shown that nothing is better for maintaining your memory and critical thinking skills as you age than continuous learning. And remember, there's no better way to learn than to teach. This is not to mention the threat of obsolescence. As the pace of technological change has quickened, the pace of change throughout all of work life has been cranked up, and those who don't constantly work out on the cognitive treadmill find themselves lapped by the new young things right out of college. Finally, ~ Richie Etwaru

Vacations are the best time to find your true self deep inside. ~ Debasish Mridha

...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value. ~ G.E. Moore

As part of his long-winded bullshit, Baby fell into a genre trope that he had avoided in his first two novels.

He started inventing new words.

This was a common habit amongst Science Fiction writers. They couldn't help themselves. They were always inventing new words.

Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein's vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok.

To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing.

A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink.

They'd groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking.

People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking.

With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing.

In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok.

Baby had always been popula ~ Jarett Kobek

Why am I doing this? Why do I want to know the names and functions of all the beautiful structures I've spent my years violating? Because I don't deserve to keep them anonymous. I want the pain of knowing them, and by extension myself: who and what I really am. Maybe with that scalpel, red hot and sterilized in tears, I can begin to carve out the rot inside me. ~ Isaac Marion

Really, some of the best 'X-Files' stories come right out of science. And you just apply that 'what-if' idea. Oh, what if this were true? And that's why so many times the show is scarier because it was not necessarily improbable. ~ Chris Carter

God, she was beautiful. Hair a tangled mess, clothes torn, lips pale and swollen, skin streaked in dirt. And she was so damn beautiful and flawed and perfect. ~ G.S. Jennsen

Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science. ~ Allan Bloom

Here, then, is the genesis of two of the most important historical premises of Western science. The first is that there is a law of nature, an order of things and events awaiting our discovery, and that this order can be formulated in thought, that is, in words or in some type of notation. The second is that the law of nature is universal, a premise deriving from monotheism, from the idea of one God ruling the whole world. ~ Alan W. Watts

You are from alone in the community of scientists, and here is a professional secret to encourage you: many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate. A metaphor will clarify the paradox in this statement. Where elite mathematicians often serve as architects of theory in the expanding realm of science, the remaining large majority of basic and applied scientists map the terrain, scout the frontier, cut the pathways, and raise the first buildings along the way. They define the problems that mathematicians, on occasion, may help solve. They think primarily in images and facts, and only marginally in mathematics. ~ Edward O. Wilson

Notice how every science fiction movie or television show starts with a shot of the location where the story is about to occur. Movies that take place in outer space always start with a shot of stars and a starship. Movies that take place on another world always start with a shot of that planet. This is to let you know where you are. Novels and stories start the same way. You have to give the reader a sense of where he is and what's happening as quickly as possible. You don't want to start the story by confusing the reader. ~ David Gerrold

In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. ~ George Orwell

Better to head off into the unknown than stay here, where death was most certain ~ James Rollins

One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term 'duty. ~ Ayn Rand

The registering of doubts hath two excellent uses: the one, that it saveth philosophy from errors and falsehoods; when that which is not fully appearing is not collected into assertion, whereby error might draw error, but reserved in doubt: the other, that the entry of doubts are as so many
suckers or sponges to draw use of knowledge; insomuch as that which, if doubts had not preceded, a man should never have advised, but passed it over without note, by the suggestion and solicitation of doubts, is made to be attended and applied. ~ Francis Bacon

Kindness can be short, sweet, transient, and random, but its effects echo forever. ~ Debasish Mridha

science, of a kind, is no less a precursor and a cause of civilization than it is a consequent. ~ Henry Smith Williams

This is an age of intellectual sauces, of essence, of distillation. We have conclusions without deductions, abridgments of history and abridgments of science without leading facts. We have animals for literature, Cabinet Encyclopaedias, Family Libraries, Diffusion Societies, and heaven knows what else! What is all this for? Not to add knowledge to the learned, but to tell points to the ignorant, without giving them the trouble to acquire the links. Oh! it is sad work. And the result will be injurious to all classes. ~ Benjamin Haydon

Expect nothing but be ready for everything. ~ Debasish Mridha

God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton. ~ Martin J. Rees

Give yourself freedom to grow through love, as love is the most natural direction for humans to grow, just as every tree grows upward towards the sky. Don't try to control the way that love moves, as any attempt will be futile, for love grows like the branches, wildly growing by the laws of nature, rather than by human rational. Let love grow by her own nature. ~ Forrest Curran

When you dream with optimism and trust, it becomes a reality fast. ~ Debasish Mridha

If you dare to dream you can create yourself again and again. ~ Debasish Mridha

Where there is speech there was once silence.
Where there is motion there was once rest.
Where there is matter there was once space.
Where there is order there was once chaos.
Where there is energy there was once potential.
Where there is reality there was once perception.
Where there is belief there was once ignorance.
Where there is fact there was once opinion.
Where there is knowledge there was once truth.
Where there is evidence there was once theory.
Where there is certainty there was once speculation.
Where there is intuition there was once insight.
Where there is prudence there was once understanding.
Where there is pleasure there was once pain.
Where there is compassion there was once grief.
Where there is peace there was once strife.
Where there is faith there was once doubt.
Where there is hope there was once apathy.
Where there is caution there was once fear.
Where there is judgement there was once suspicion.
Where there is freedom there was once duty.
Where there is good there was once evil.
Where there is love there was once affection.
Where there is right there was once wrong.
Where there is now there was once before.
Where there is tomorrow there was once today.
Where there is death there was once life.
Where there is existence there was once oblivion. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

It's always interesting to see what judges do when their legal philosophy conflicts with their political views. ~ Jeffrey Toobin

It is not beside the point to note that, in the thought which will inspire our
revolutions, the supreme good does not, in reality, coincide with existence, but with an arbitrary facsimile.
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest
of universal prestige and absolute power. It is, in its essence, imperialist. We are far from the gentle
savage of the eighteenth century and from the Social Contract. In the sound and fury of the passing
centuries, each separate consciousness, to ensure its own existence, must henceforth desire the death of
others. Moreover, this relentless tragedy is absurd, since, in the event of one consciousness being
destroyed, the victorious consciousness is not recognized as such, in that it cannot be victorious in the
eyes of something that no longer exists. In fact, it is here the philosophy of appearances reaches its limits. ~ Albert Camus

The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning. ~ Rodolfo R. Llinas

Is it hot in here? I'm sweating like a Christian in science class. ~ Aaron B. Powell

Quite recently the human descent theory has been stigmatized as the 'gorilla theory of human ancestry.' All this despite the fact that Darwin himself, in the days when not a single bit of evidence regarding the fossil ancestors of man was recognized, distinctly stated that none of the known anthropoid apes, much less any of the known monkeys, should be considered in any way as ancestral to the human stock. ~ Henry Fairfield Osborn

Patience is the river that finds its way to the sea, by flowing through many confluences. ~ Mladen Đorđević

The physicist Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones. This is true not only of science. Think for a moment about your own workplace. No matter whether you are a scholar, journalist, cook or football player, how would you feel if your boss were 120, his ideas were formulated when Victoria was still queen, and he was likely to stay your boss for a couple of decades more? ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Science of mind teaches you how to realize how much control you have over your own life. It teaches you that we have the ability to change our lives at any point we choose. ~ Marla Gibbs

He's a scientist. He's never cried. He flips through Googled image searches of burn victims while he touches himself. ~ Christy Leigh Stewart

The Difference Engine stands - for a replica works today, in the Science Museum in London - as a milestone of what could be achieved in precision engineering. In the composition of its alloys, the exactness of its dimensions, the interchangeability of its parts, nothing surpassed this segment of an unfinished machine. Still, it was a curio. And it was as far as Babbage could go. ~ James Gleick

Most 20th century academic physicists, and academia as a whole, simply did not want to touch the subject of consciousness. We have seen psychology grow up, and we've seen the development of neurophysiology and other much more sophisticated science, but only in the recent years have the tools of quantum mechanics been applied to anything representing human scale size. ~ Edgar Mitchell

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains. ~ David Eagleman

But a wife ... "
" ... is an individual who can be interesting when one makes use of her, but one must know how to detach oneself firmly when serious reasons separate one from her."
"That is a harsh statement."
"Not at all ... it is philosophy ... it is the tone of the day, it is the language of reason, one must adopt it or be taken for a fool."
"This supposes some fault in your wife, explain it to me: some natural defect, or a failure to comply, or bad conduct."
"A little of everything ... a little of everything, sir, but let us change the subject, I beg you, and return to that dear Madam: damn me, I don't understand how you can have been in Orleans without amusing yourself with that creature ... but everyone has her. ~ Marquis De Sade