Taking him for all and all, I think it will be conceded that Michael Faraday was the greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen.
A stone thrown up into the air is bound to fall down, and absolute power is like a huge stone thrown up into the air.
From an early age I was told that I was expected to do more than continue to run a small business. Education was important and seen as a way of moving forward.
People quite often think of the question 'Are we alone in the universe?' in terms of other civilizations out there: life forms that have reached at least our level of technological development.
Good problems and mushrooms of certain kinds have something in common; they grow in clusters.
We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Humans are actually spirit beings who each possess a mind and a body and what we do with them is entirely up to us.
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought.
I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.
If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.
The best that can be said of my life so far is that it has been industrious, and the best that can be said of me is that I have not pretended to what I was not.
Raised in a completely nonreligious family, never attended any church and was a thoroughgoing atheist all his life.
It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it.
Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.
Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.
A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.
Some day we'll move into space and start ensuring the survival of our species beyond Earth, whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand.
