The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.
No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.
There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.
Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one's own way at all hazards.
Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.
If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.
The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.
