50 Science, Mathematics and Engineering Quotes

Henry G. Stott

1. "Engineering is the art of organizing and directing men and controlling the forces and materials of nature for the benefit of the human race."
~Henry G. Stott

Grace Murray Hopper

2. “If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.”
~Grace Murray Hopper

Sir Horace Lamb

3. "I am an old man now, and when I die and go to Heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightement. One is quantum electrodynamics and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather more optimistic." ~Sir Horace Lamb

Michael Faraday

4. "The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication."
~Michael Faraday

Charles Darwin

5. "In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."
~Charles Darwin

Isaac Asimov

6. "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
~Isaac Asimov

Bertrand Russell

7. "Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century."
~Bertrand Russell

Douglas Adams

8. "The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
~Douglas Adams

Niels Bohr

9. "An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
~Niels Bohr

Neil deGrasse Tyson

10. "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."
~Neil deGrasse Tyson

Stephen Hawking

11. "One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away."
~Stephen Hawking

Thomas A. Edison

12. "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
~Thomas A. Edison

Albert Einstein

13. "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
~Albert Einstein

George Washington

14. "There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."
~George Washington

Ralph Waldo Emerson

15. "Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marie Curie

16. "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
~Marie Curie

Louis Pasteur

17. "Chance only favours the prepared mind."
~Louis Pasteur

John von Neumann

18. "In mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them."
~John von Neumann

Anne McCaffrey

19. "A real scientist solves problems, not wails that they are unsolvable."
~Anne McCaffrey

Leonardo Da Vinci

20. "Therefore O students study mathematics and do not build without foundations."
~Leonardo Da Vinci

Nikola Tesla

21. "The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter—for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way."
~Nikola Tesla

Maria Mitchell

22. "Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow."
~Maria Mitchell

Henri Poincare

23. "Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house."
~Henri Poincaré

Roger Bacon

24. "For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics."
~Roger Bacon

Freeman Dyson

25. "A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible."
~Freeman Dyson

Isidor Isaac Rabi

26. "My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, 'So? Did you learn anything today?' But not my mother. 'Izzy,' she would say, 'did you ask a good question today?' That difference - asking good questions - made me become a scientist."
~Isidor Isaac Rabi

Robert G. Ingersoll

27. "The glory of science is, that it is freeing the soul, breaking the mental manacles, getting the brain out of bondage, giving courage to thought, filling the world with mercy, justice, and joy."
~Robert G. Ingersoll

Hypatia

28. "Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all."
~Hypatia

Lise Meitner

29. "Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist."
~Lise Meitner

Werner Heisenberg

30. "Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think."
~Werner Heisenberg

Sir Alexander Fleming

31. "For the birth of something new, there has to be a happening. Newton saw an apple fall; James Watt watched a kettle boil; Roentgen fogged some photographic plates. And these people knew enough to translate ordinary happenings into something new..."
~Sir Alexander Fleming

Vera Rubin

32. "Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions."
~Vera Rubin

Edwin Powell Hubble

33. "Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science."
~Edwin Powell Hubble

Wernher von Braun

34. "Our two greatest problems are gravity and paper work. We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming."
~Wernher von Braun

Gustave Eiffel

35. "Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid and long lasting structures? Aren't the genuine functions of strength always in keeping with unwritten conditions of harmony? ... Besides, there is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do not apply."
~Gustave Eiffel

Carl Sagan

36. "Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home."
~Carl Sagan

James Clerk Maxwell

37. "In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating."
~James Clerk Maxwell

Plato

38. "Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another."
~Plato

Rene Descartes

39. "As I considered the matter carefully it gradually came to light that all those matters only were referred to mathematics in which order and measurements are investigated, and that it makes no difference whether it be in numbers, figures, stars, sounds or any other object that the question of measurement arises. I saw consequently that there must be some general science to explain that element as a whole which gives rise to problems about order and measurement, restricted as these are to no special subject matter. This, I perceived was called 'universal mathematics'."
~René Descartes

Cornelius Bernardus Van Niel

40. "In essence, science is a perpetual search for an intelligent and integrated comprehension of the world we live in."
~Cornelius Bernardus Van Niel

Sir Isaac Newton

41. "Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica verita. Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth."
~Sir Isaac Newton

Gertrude B. Elion

42. "Don't be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don't let others discourage you or tell you that you can't do it. In my day I was told women didn't go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we couldn't."
~Gertrude B. Elion

Carl Friedrich Gauss

43. "I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
~Carl Friedrich Gauss

Charles Babbage

44. "The first steps in the path of discovery, and the first approximate measures, are those which add most to the existing knowledge of mankind."
~Charles Babbage

Erwin Schrodinger

45. "The task is ... not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees."
~Erwin Schrödinger

John Maynard Keynes

46. "The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds."
~John Maynard Keynes

Andrew Wiles

47. "I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind." (Recalling the degree of focus and determination that eventually yielded the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.)
~Andrew Wiles