Science quotes

Scientists spend their working lives on problems most people will never notice, and when they write well about it, the result is something closer to poetry than instruction. The quotes here come from physicists, biologists, mathematicians, and naturalists who found language equal to their subject matter. They are about curiosity, humility in the face of complexity, and the strange discipline of being willing to be wrong. Read together, they make the case that science is not a collection of facts but a way of seeing the world that the rest of us can learn from too.

• Learning never exhausts the mind.

  Leonardo da Vinci · Notebooks

• The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

  Albert Einstein · The World As I See It

• If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

  Isaac Newton · Letter to Robert Hooke

• Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

  Albert Einstein

• However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

  Stephen Hawking

• For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.

  Carl Sagan · Contact

• Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

  Carl Sagan

• The most damaging phrase in the language is: We've always done it this way.

  Grace Hopper

• Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

  William Bruce Cameron · Informal Sociology

• We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

  Stephen Hawking

• The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

  Carl Sagan · Cosmos

• The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

• It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

  Leon C. Megginson · Paraphrasing Darwin

• Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

  Stephen Hawking

• Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

  Immanuel Kant

• Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

  Albert Einstein · Saturday Evening Post Interview

• I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

  Albert Einstein · Letter to Carl Seelig

• Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited.

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

• The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.

  Albert Einstein