Great Throughts Treasury

"The teaching of any science, for purposes of liberal education, without linking it with social progress and teaching its social significance, is a crime against the student mind. It is like teaching a child how to pronounce words but now what they mean." - Vernon Carter

"If it weren’t for art, there wouldn’t’ be any science." - Angela Cartwright, fully Angela Margaret Cartwright

"Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"Man's knowledge of science has clearly outstripped his knowledge of man. Our only hope of making the atom servant rather than master lies in education, in a broad liberal education where each student within his capacity can free himself from trammels of dogmatic prejudice and apply his educational accouterment to besetting social and human problems." - Harry Woodburn Chase

"(In war) the latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age." -

"Science has given to this generation the means of unlimited disaster or of unlimited progress. There will remain the greater task of directing knowledge lastingly towards the purpose of peace and human good." -

"Science is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God." - Frances Power Cobbe

"Art is science made clear." - Jean Cocteau

"Science is but the statement of truth found out." - Samuel Coley

"The only worthy end of all learning, of all science, of all life, in fact, is that human beings should love one another better. Culture merely for culture’s sake can never be anything but a sapless root, capable of producing at best a shriveled branch." -

"Take the so called standard of living. What do most people mean by “living”? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives." -

"We are weak today in ideal matters because intelligence is divorced from aspiration. The bare force of circumstance compels us onwards in the daily detail of our beliefs and acts, but our deeper thoughts and desires turn backwards. When philosophy shall have co-operated with the course of events and made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling will be the unforced flowers of life. To further this articulation and revelation of the meanings of the current course of events is the task and problem of philosophy in days of transition." - John Dewey

"Putting on the spectacles of science in expectation of finding the answer to everything looked at signifies inner blindness." - James Frank Dobie

"Science and technology, like all original creations of the human spirit, are unpredictable. If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling with human lives." - Freeman John Dyson

"Science has sometimes been said to be opposed to faith, and inconsistent with it. But all science, in fact, rests on a basis of faith, for it assumes the permanence and uniformity of natural laws - a thing which can never be demonstrated" - Tyron Edwards

"Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone." - Albert Einstein

"Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary." - Albert Einstein

"Science has brought forth this danger [atomic energy], but the real problem is in the minds and hearts of men." - Albert Einstein

"Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought." - Albert Einstein

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstein

"The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a mark of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and makes real advances in science." - Albert Einstein

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and 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... To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men." - Albert Einstein

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." - Albert Einstein

"As Science leads to the Imaginary, so Life leads to the Impossible; without them we cannot reach the heights we are born to scale." - Henry Havelock Ellis

"Science, in the very act of solving problems, creates more of them." - Abraham Flexner

"Universal peace will be realized, not because man will become better, but because a new order of things, a new science, new economic necessities, will impose peace." - Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault

"Government... is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness." - Felix Frankfurter

"Philosophy is not opposed to science; it behaves itself as if it were a science, and to a certain extent it makes use of the same methods; but it parts company with science, in that it clings to the illusion that it can produce a complete and coherent picture of the universe, though in fact that picture must needs fall to pieces with every new advance in our knowledge." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"We know well enough how little light science has so far been able to throw on the problems that surround us. But however much ado the philosophers may make, they cannot alter the situation. Only patient, persevering research, in which everything is subordinated to the one requirement of certainty, can gradually bring about a change." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Science had radically changed the conditions of human life on earth. It has expanded our knowledge and our power but not capacity to use them with wisdom." - James William Fulbright

"What is the true end and aim of science but the discovery of the ultimate power - a seeking after God through the study of his ways." - William Henry Furness

"As soon as any one belongs to a narrow creed in science, every unprejudiced and true perception is gone." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Science and art belong to the whole world, and before then vanish the barriers of nationality." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Without my work in natural science I should never have known human beings as they really are. In no other activity can one come so close to direct perception and clear thought, or realize so fully the errors of the senses, the mistakes of the intellect, the weakness and greatnesses of human character." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"A single mind can acquire a fair knowledge of the whole field of science, and find plenty of time to spare for ordinary human affairs. Not many people take the trouble to do so. But without a knowledge of science one cannot understand current events. That is why our modern our modern literature and art are mostly so unreal." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is by; these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age." - Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton

"Science is teaching man to know and reverence truth, and to believe that only as far as he knows and loves it can he live worthily on earth, and vindicate the dignity of his spirit." - Moses Harvey

"The person who thinks there can be any real conflict between science and religion must be either very young in science or very ignorant in religion." - Philip Henry

"In all human activities, it is not ideas or machines that dominate; it is people. I have heard people speak of “the effect of personality on science.” But this is a backward thought. Rather, we should talk about he effect of science on personalities. Science is not the dispassionate analysis of impartial data. It is the human, and thus passionate, exercise of skill and sense on such date. Science is not an exercise in objectivity, but, more accurately, an exercise in which objectivity is prized." - Philip J. Hilts, fully Philip James Hilts

"Twin-sister of natural and revealed religion, and of heavenly birth, science will never belie her celestial origin, nor cease to sympathize with all that emanates from the same pure home. Human ignorance and prejudice may for a time seem to have divorced what God has joined together; but human ignorance and prejudice shall at length pass away, and then science and religion shall be seen blending their parti-colored rays into one beautiful bow of light, linking heaven to earth and earth to heaven." - Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

"As children we all possess a natural, uninhibited curiosity, a hunger for explanation, which seems to die slowly as we age - suppressed, I suppose, by the high value we place on conformity and by the need not to appear ignorant. It betokens a conviction that somehow science is innately incomprehensible. It precludes reaching deeper, thereby denying the profound truth that understanding enriches experience, that explanation vastly enhances beauty of the natural world in the eye of the beholder." - Mahlon Hoagland

"Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another." - Thomas Hobbes

"God pity the man of science who believes in nothing but what he can prove by scientific methods; for if ever a human being needed divine pity he does." -

"Science is a good piece of furniture for a man to have in an upper chamber, provided he has common sense on the ground floor." -

"Science is the topography of ignorance." -

"As knowledge advances, science ceases to scoff at religion; and religion ceases to frown on science. The hour of mockery by the one, and of reproof by the other, is passing away. Henceforth, they will dwell together in unity and good-will. They will mutually illustrate the wisdom, power, and grace of God. Science will adorn and enrich religion; and religion will ennoble and sanctify science." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"Science is the topography of ignorance." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"Never was there a time, in the history of the world, when moral heroes were more needed. The world waits for such, the providence of God has commanded science to labor and prepare the way for such. For them she is laying her iron tracks, and stretching her wires and bridging the oceans. But where are they? Who shall breathe into our civil and political relations the breath of a higher life? Who shall touch the eyes of a paganized science, and of a pantheistic philosophy, that they may see God? Who shall consecrate to the glory of God the triumphs of science? Who shall bear the life-boat to the stranded and perishing nations." -

"Religion may begin with our love of God, but true science ends there. In the very process of demystifying the world, we discover a new mystery, recognizing and celebrating God in everything." - Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

"Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall mark of true science." - Aldous Leonard Huxley