#science

"The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it."

"If Relativity Theory kills our deepest convictions, why not start by finding out why we believed in them for millennia?"

"Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking."

"Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death."

"It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull."

"The four stages of acceptance:1. This is worthless nonsense.2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.3. This is true, but quite unimportant.4. I always said so."(Review of The Truth About Death, in: Journal of Genetics 1963, Vol. 58, p.464)"

"I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."

"One planet, one experiment."

"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike."

"When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,—or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety."

"The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them"

"1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"We are the lucky ones for we shall die, as there is an infinite number of possible forms of DNA all but a few billions of which will never burst into consciousness."

"To say that the first casualty of war is truth is to miss the rather more important point that a principal weapon of war is lies."

"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

"The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable."

"Glendower: I can call the spirits from the vasty deep.Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;But will they come, when you do call for them?"

"Order is heaven's first law."

"Oh juventud nunca dejes de pensar..."

"Each being in the universe yearns for the free energy necessary for survival and development. Each existence resists extinction. The consequent history of violence in the universe is as inevitable as the gravitational pull between the Earth and the Sun."