science

"The history of science is the saga of nature defying common sense."

"He’s a scientist. He’s never cried. He flips through Googled image searches of burn victims while he touches himself."

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this 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."

"Is there any conflict between science and religion? There is no conflict in the mind of God, but often there is conflict in the minds of men."

"Science is all about proving theories and understanding the universe. Science folds everything into neat logical well-explained packages. The fey are magical capricious illogical and unexplainable. Science cannot prove the existence of faeries so naturally we do not exist. That type of nonbelief is fatal to faries."

"If you see an antimatter version of yourself running towards you, think twice before embracing."

"The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small."

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

"We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are."

"We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power."

"Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice."

"Truth is not as pompous and romantic as myth ... but it has the immeasurable value of being the Truth."

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature."

"In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth."

"Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation."

"There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."

"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts."

"God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs."

"The scientific method is nothing more than a system of rules to keep us from lying to each other."

"The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion."