Science Quotes

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until…

(e)
Of Da Capo: “Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”

(f)
“Art like life is an open secret.”

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these…

Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petite tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle…

Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened

Though most of us don’t hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off.

This universe has been described by many, but it just goes on, with its edge as unknown as the bottom of the bottomless sea of the other idea – just as mysterious, just as awe-inspiring, and just as incomplete as the poetic…

We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world. At this moment, you are breathing some of the same molecules once breathed by Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, or Colette. Inhale deeply. Think of The Tempest. Air works…

There is a part of chlorophyll, an important chemical in the oxygen processes in plants, that has a kind of square pattern; it is called a benzine ring. And far removed from the plants are animals…

All too easily does self-criticism poison one’s naivete, that priceless possession, or rather gift which no creative man can be without. At any rate, philosophical criticism has helped me to see that every psychology – my own included…

What is mind, that one can be out of one’s? How can a neuron feel compassion? What is self? Why did automatic, hand-me-down mammals like our ancestors somehow evolve brains with the ability to consider, imagine, project, compare, abstract, think of the future? If our experience of mind is really just the simmering of an easily alterable chemical stew…

I understand the arguments about how the billions of dollars spent to put men on the moon could have been used to fight poverty and hunger on Earth. But, look, I’m a scientist who sees inspiration as the ultimate tool for doing good.

When you use money to fight poverty, it can…