science

"You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe."

"To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)"

"In every man, there is a child. In every woman, there is a mother."

"So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations."

"One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die."

"The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto."

"Science is the most reliable guide in life."

"One sometimes finds what one is not looking for"

"The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship."

"The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing."

"A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment."

"One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself."

"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 sea-shore, 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."

"If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose"

"while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."

"Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind."

"العلم دقيق أما الفن فصادق. انظر إلى لوحة لوجه إنسان أو منظر طبيعي... كم هما صادقان؟! إن فيهما من الصدق أكثر مما في أي صورة فوتوغرافية للوجة."

"Interviewer: Didn't Sagan want to believe?Druyan: he didn't want to believe. he wanted to know."

"From the scientific view, the theory of karma may be a metaphysical assumption -- but it is no more so than the assumption that all of life is material and originated out of pure chance"

"Faith and science, I have learned, are two sides of the same coin, separated by an expanse so small, but wide enough that one side can't see the other. They don't know they are connected."