All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute - and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.
The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge.
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.
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.
Imagination will take you everywhere.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
But science moves forward not when we understand something, it’s when something totally unexpected happens in experiment.
The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. (Sherlock Holmes)
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Fundamental ideas play the most essential role in forming a physical theory. Books on physics are full of complicated mathematical formulae. But thought and ideas, not formulae, are the beginning of every physical theory. The ideas must later take the mathematical form of a quantitative theory, to make possible the comparison with experiment.
Popularity is never a test of truth.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.
Although it is the means by which humankind discovers objective truths in nature, science is and has always been political.
The democratization of ideas sometimes confuses the reader as to what is true and what is not, as all ideas are presented horizontally and as fact, thus positioning the blogger's flippant opinion alongside the scholar's well-researched dissertation.
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
What would beings who are thousands of years ahead of us be capable of? Or millions? As a philosopher in our part of the world once said: 'The artifacts of a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be indistinguishable from magic'.
Wherever a discrepancy seems to exist, either a scientist or a theologian - maybe both - hasn't been doing his job.
What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?
Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. I mean the real universe. All those light-years. All those worlds. I think of the scope of the universe, the opportunities it affords the Creator, and it takes my breath away.
On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament] "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Heredity deals the cards; environment plays the hand.
While the discovery of the Higgs boson was a leap forward for particle physics, many questions still remain that cannot be answered by physics’ Standard Model, the theory that classifies all of the known subatomic particles and describes their interactions. For instance, the Standard Model does not predict the existence of dark matter or dark energy, it doesn't explain how gravity works, it doesn't predict that neutrinos can change their flavor, and it doesn't explain why all the matter in the universe wasn't annihilated by an equal amount of corresponding antimatter.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them
Religion and science have sometimes appeared in conflict. Yet, the conflict can only be apparent, not real, for science seeks truth, and true religion is truth. There can never be conflict between revealed religion and true science. Truth is truth, whether labeled science or religion. All truth is consistent.
Be mindful that there are many phenomena in God’s universe that cannot, to our present human understanding, be explained.
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
Facts which at first seem improbable will even on scant explanation drop the cloak which has hidden them, and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
We may say, the works of God and the word of God both constitute the avenues of human information, and that whoever ignores the one deprives himself of much of the benefits which flow from accepting the other; that there are two doors which open to the temple of truth, and they are both indispensably necessary to engage man’s full capacity and to endow him with the principles of knowledge, and with the purposes of his being here upon the earth, together with his origin and final destiny.
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can safely be exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
He who is content with what has been done is an obstacle in the path of progress.
Analysis is as destructive of emotion as of the flower which the botanist pulls to pieces.
What Induces a child to learn but his delight in knowing?
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.
Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.
Within the Gospel of Jesus Christ there is room and place for every truth thus far learned by man, or yet to be made known.
Good science does not say there is no mechanism for this. Good science says: ‘Is there a phenomenon to explain?’ If so, then we do need to find a mechanism.
We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.
As one of my favorite professors once said, 'The best students are those who never quite believe their professors.'
The life and soul of science is its practical application; and just as the great advances in mathematics have been made through the desire of discovering the solution of problems which were of a highly practical kind in mathematical science, so in physical science many of the greatest advances that have been made from the beginning of the world to the present time have been made in earnest desire to turn the knowledge of the properties of matter to some purpose useful to mankind.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
One who believes himself to have all the answers certainly hasn't asked all the questions.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
If you learn what this world is, how it works, you automatically start getting miracles, what will be called miracles. But of course nothing is miraculous. Learn what the magician knows and it's not magic anymore.
The whole fact is that art and science are so close akin that they might very well be lumped together. They are certainly necessary to each other and the delights of either pursuit should satisfy any man.
Often, very difficult problems in physics require profound jumps, revolutions, or different ways of thinking, and it’s only afterward when we realize that we were asking the question in the wrong way.
If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
Science has a non-negotiable stance of methodological materialism. This means no hidden forces, no aid from God, angels, and demons. No magic. No miracles. Wow. If you're religious that sounds bad; I don't think it is. If you are LDS, then you believe in laws and regularities, and it's in this domain that science does its work.
Science is an ethic that promotes a set of best practices that have been shown to explicate the world using a bunch of tools that have worked so far...Scientists believe there's some reality we are trying to capture, and we want to find that reality...I believe science is the most powerful method ever invented for finding truth about the material world.
Some people think God had to make every little thing, but which programmer is greater? The one who can program every single game ever created or a programmer who can write a program that creates all the video games. That, for me, is why God is not diminished if he's created a universe whereby things proceed along from the beginning to the end.
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Restlessness is discontent, and discontent is the first necessity of progress.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.