Top 1200 Great Scientist Quotes & Sayings

If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist.

The books of the great scientists are gathering dust on the shelves of learned libraries. And rightly so. The scientist addresses an infinitesimal audience of fellow composers. His message is not devoid of universality but its universality is disembodied and anonymous. While the artist's communication is linked forever with its original form, that of the scientist is modified, amplified, fused with the ideas and results of others and melts into the stream of knowledge and ideas which forms our culture. The scientist has in common with the artist only this: that he can find no better retreat from the world than his work and also no stronger link with the world than his work.

If a given scientist had not made a given discovery, someone else would have done so a little later. Johann Mendel dies unknown after having discovered the laws of heredity: thirty-five years later, three men rediscover them. But the book that is not written will never be written. The premature death of a great scientist delays humanity; that of a great writer deprives it.

I knew I wanted to be a scientist. Which kind of scientist was the question.

[On Richard P. Feynman's live demonstration of the rigidity of the O-rings when cold that doomed the space shuttle Challenger, killing seven astronauts:] The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.

We affirm the neutrality of Science ... Science is of no country. ... But if Science has no country, the scientist must keep in mind all that may work towards the glory of his country. In every great scientist will be found a great patriot.

I felt that chess... is a science in the form of a game... I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.

In our tiny town, my father wasn't a scientist - he was the scientist, and being a scientist wasn't his job: it was his identity.

It's an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that has happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. One is surprised that a construct of one's own mind can actually be realised in the honest-to-goodness world out there. A great shock, and a great, great joy.

Dad and mom would have preferred that I be a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, or a great humanitarian.

A scientist shouldn't be asked to judge the economic and moral value of his work. All we should ask the scientist to do is find the truth and then not keep it from anyone.

You can wear ruffles; you can be a jock, and you can still be a great computer scientist, or a great technologist, or a great product designer.

I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing.

Science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview. ..even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a law-like order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us.

[My favorite scientist] Michio Kaku. He deals with wormholes. Check him out. He's great.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist or an actress. My daughter really wants to be a scientist. I really want her to be a scientist, not an actress!

Those people on the other side, they will answer any question about climate change by saying, 'I’m not a scientist.' Well, I’m not a scientist either. I’m just a grandmother with two eyes and a brain.

I am a scientist. Mine is a professional world that achieves great things for humanity.

[A woman waiting for him in the Kremlin asked Gobachev] "Was communism invented by a politician or a scientist?" [He replied] "Well, a politician." She said, "That explains it. The scientist would have tried it on mice first."

I have been asked whether I would agree that the tragedy of the scientist is that he is able to bring about great advances in our knowledge, which mankind may then proceed to use for purposes of destruction. My answer is that this is not the tragedy of the scientist; it is the tragedy of mankind.

The image of the disinterested, dispassionate scientist is no less false than that of the mad scientist who is willing to destroy the world for knowledge.

The fact that the great scientist believed in flying machines was the one thing that encouraged us to begin our studies.

Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one-Marie, the famous Madame Curie-and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.

As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.

I wish I was a great writer or a great journalist or a great scientist or a great artist; I'm not.

All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses, and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly in a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness but rather evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again.

If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

If I ask you who is the most famous scientist who ever lived, or the greatest scientist who ever lived you'll say either Einstein or Newton or something like that because their claims were supposed to apply universally. But the claim of somebody who is studying a particular feature of the evolutionary process like whether it's very fast or very slow, or occurs in steps and so on, that's not a universal claim, that's a rather specialised claim and so you can't claim to great fame and great success.

Scientists do not believe in fundamental and absolute certainties. For the scientist, certainty is never an end, but a search; not the ordering of certainty, but its exploration. For the scientist, certainty represents the highest degree of probability.

Since I stayed in a colony where either one was an engineer or a scientist, everybody thought I would be a scientist. This was the expectation everybody had apart from my parents. Honestly, I, too, wanted to be a scientist. I think it was the way Dad would explain us scientific theories and concepts that made the subject more intriguing.

When I was a kid I always wanted to be a mad scientist. I don't know... a regular scientist just was no one.

A humble scientist is a good scientist.

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

If you're a scientist, and you have to have an answer, even in the absence of data, you're not going to be a good scientist.

A scientist works largely by intuition. Given enough experience, a scientist examining a problem can leap to an intuition as to what the solution 'should look like.' ... Science is ultimately based on insight, not logic.

I think the main lesson that I have learned is that a good scientist is a humble scientist who is open-minded to listen to other scientists when they discover something.

Of course, Einstein was a very great scientist indeed, and I have enormous respect for him, and great admiration for the discoveries he made. But he was very committed to a view of the objectivity of the physical world.

The great scientist dares to differ from accepted 'facts' - think irrationally - let the artist do likewise.

When parents watch scientist after scientist describe the dangers of GM foods, I wouldn't want to be a stubborn food service director trying to stand in their way.

There is no greatness without passion to be great, whether it's the aspiration of an athlete or an artist, a scientist, a parent, or a businessperson.

What makes a scientist great is the care that he takes in telling you what is wrong with his results, so that you will not misuse them.

I am very much a scientist, and so I naturally have thought about religion also through the eyes of a scientist. When I do that, I see religion not denominationally, but in a more, let us say, deistic sense. I have been influence in my thinking by the writing of Einstein who has made remarks to the effect that when he contemplated the world he sensed an underlying Force much greater than any human force. I feel very much the same. There is a sense of awe, a sense of reverence, and a sense of great mystery.

Well, I mean, I'm still a scientist, you know. I think once a scientist, always a scientist.

Every great scientist becomes a great scientist because of the inner self-abnegation with which he stands before truth, saying: "Not my will, but thine, be done." What, then, does a man mean by saying, Science displaces religion, when in this deep sense science itself springs from religion?

I just take the Bible for what it is, I guess, and recognize that I am not a scientist, not trained to be a scientist. I'm not a deep thinker on all of this. I wish I was. I wish I was more knowledgeable, but I'm not a scientist.

My dream was to be a 'scientist' even before I knew what a scientist did.

A great scientist is more open to a new idea than almost anybody.

There's no scientist I know who wouldn't rather be a charlatan. And when circumstances allow you to be both, why it's great fun!

It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.

The artist does not illustrate science; ... [but] he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does, and expresses by a visual synthesis what the scientist converts into analytical formulae or experimental demonstrations.

If I was a research scientist, I'd want people to say, 'You know what, he's a great research scientist, that Ricky Gervais. He's really good, really good.' You know, I'd go to award ceremonies for research scientists and go, 'Yeah, I really worked hard, yeah.' It's brilliant.

If I wasn't a professional scientist, I'd be an amateur scientist. But plan B was to go into computers.

The scientist is not much given to talking of the riddle of the universe. "Riddle" is not a scientific term. The conception of a riddle is "something which can he solved." And hence the scientist does not use that popular phrase. We don't know the why of anything. On that matter we are no further advanced than was the cavedweller. The scientist is contented if he can contribute something toward the knowledge of what is and how it is.

Companies are getting bitten by hiring a data scientist who isn't really a data scientist.

If I could relive my life, what I would do is work with scientists. But not one scientist, because they're locked into their little specializations. I'd go from scientist to scientist to scientist, like a bee goes from flower to flower.

We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist for example Vincent Van Gogh, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself.

Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.