What is your favourite scientific quote? - “God is in the details” --Gustave Flaubert (Jan/09/2007 )

Hey All,
Say your favourite scientific quote(s).
Mine is “God is in the details” --Gustave Flaubert
Now its your turn...

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

"I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying."

"If everything is under control, you are going too slow."

"The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don’t."

I know it's more than 1, but I think they're all cool....and 1 more, which I just think is great in general:

"I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?"

Sorry they're not referenced, they were just sent to me one day.

Hi Goldie,
Nice quotes!!!!

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Newton

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
- Winston Churchill, 1874-1965

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field."
-Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962)

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."
- George W. Bush

“Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.”
- Howard Aiken

“I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.”
- Paul Anderson

If your experiment needs statistics, then you ought to have done a better experiment.
-- Lord Rutherford

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.
--George Orwell

Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don't worship it. Feed it.
- Aubrey Eben

Man can't help hoping even if he is a scientist. He can only hope more accurately.
- Dr. Karl Menninger

If you make it idiot-proof, nature will make a better idiot.
- Anon

The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice.
- unknown

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then is an empty desk?"
-- Albert Einstein

If it's green, it's biology, If it stinks, it's chemistry, If it has numbers, it's math, If it doesn't work, it's technology.
- Unknown

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
- G. C. Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799), German physicist, philosopher.

"There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea."
-Percy Williams Bridgman (1882-1961) U. S. physicist, Nobel Prize, 1946

The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see.
- Huang Po

"We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?"
-Jean Cocteau (1889-1963).

If you don't do what you love you are not going to be good at it. And if you are not good at it you are not going to make any money doing it.
- Donald Trump

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances – it was somebody's name,
or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then, and another day would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one can do inspired work without genuine interest in his subject and understanding of its characteristics.
- Andreas Feininger

Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them.
- Ann Landers

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.
- John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908), U.S. economist.

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
- Thomas Edison

As always, dogma is the enemy of progress, and a properly validated, executed, analyzed, and interpreted…assay…is infinitely preferable to a poorly designed, hastily executed, inappropriately analyzed…assay.
--Stephen A Bustin

I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: "No good in a bed, but fine against a wall."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

The world is full of willing people. Some willing to work, the rest are willing to let them.
--Robert Frost

Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data? i.e. the already given) and in no senses a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion.
- Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist.

Every experiment proves something. If it doesn't prove what you wanted it to prove, it proves something else.
Prof. Anon

"Frodo failed...Bush has The Ring"
- bumper sticker

“If you haven’t got anything nice to say, come sit by me.”
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth

The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.
- Mahatma Gandhi

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.
- Publilius Syrus (1908 - 1944)

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.
--George Bernard Shaw

When I was in my teens, I had formulated the idea that the greatest advances in science arise where there has been resistance to progress. This is not so much due to the intrinsic intellectual difficulty, but rather the fact that it might threaten the current ideology, whatever it might be.
--Celia Green

The world is full of strange phenomena that cannot be explained by the laws of logic or science. Dennis Rodman is only one example.
--Dave Barry

"For centuries, we have embraced the pursuit of scientific knowledge as one of the noblest and worthiest of human endeavors, one leading to the enrichment of mankind both today and for future generations. However, a breakthrough discovery is challenging our long-held perceptions about our discipline—the discovery that science is really, really hard."
-NSF chairman Louis Farian. The Onion: National Science Foundation: Science Hard June 5, 2002 38:21.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is a great deal of difference.
-Chernicoff's Law

A person never really understands something unless he can explain it to his Grandmother.
- Albert Einstein

Only two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the former.
- Albert Einstein

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.
- Albert Einstein

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
- Chinese proverb

There aren't any rules around here. We're trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison

"The wonderful thing about science is that it can even explain things that nobody needs to know."
-Robert L. Wolke

Data is not information, and information is not knowledge: knowledge is not understanding, and understanding is not wisdom.
-Philip Adams

People don't watch enough. They think. It's not the same thing.
-Henri Cartier-Bresson

Scientists are the easiest to fool. They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors — they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident.
- James P. Hogan

There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
- Bill Gates

It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
- Henrik Ibsen

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
- James D. Watson

Fact of the Day:
Technology is not infallible. An estimated two million lab mistakes are made in the 100,000 laboratories in the U.S. every day.
- Red Nova website 10.13.05

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
- Alexander Graham Bell

It has been said that the primary function of schools is to impart enough facts to make children stop asking questions. Some, with whom the schools do not succeed, become scientists.
- Knut Schmidt-Nielson

Science is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.

Chemists are, on the whole, like physicists, only 'less so'. They don't make quite the same wonderful mistakes, and much what they do is an art, related to cooking, instead of a true science. They have their moments, and their sources of legitimate pride. They don't split atoms, as the physicists do. They join them together, and a very praiseworthy activity that is.
- Anthony Standen, (1958).

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
- H. L. Mencken

Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.
- R. de Gourmont (1858 - 1915)

Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.
- Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), British biologist and author.

timing is everything

here we say the devil is in the detail

Quite an impressive list, tfitzwater but you forgot some from Isaac Asimov's. My favorite:

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka" (I found it!) but 'That's funny...''. I find even myself using this one very often..has nothing to do with new discoveries though...(drats- those tubes and pipettors keep disappearing on me, I could have sworn they were there a few seconds ago ).

casandra

it's in my signature maybe not so sceintific

Wow!
tfitzwater had given very nice reply.
Thanks a lot for that!!!!