Science Quotes for Inquiring Minds

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Curious about science? These science quotes show the importance of science and scientific endeavors in our daily lives.

From the first wheel to the International Space Station, scientific inquiry has advanced the human condition and pushed us to new frontiers.

The search for knowledge, advancement, and satisfaction of curiosity have all shaped the broad field of science and continue to do so today.

So here are the best quotes about science, scientists, and scientific fields to encourage you to find new ways to think and explore the world and beyond.

Top 15 Science Quotes

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.

Edward Teller

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

George Henry Lewes
Herbert Spencer quote "Science is organized knowledge"
“Science is organized knowledge.” – Herbert Spencer

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.

Edwin Powell Hubble

The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Thomas Huxley
Plato science quote "Science is nothing but perception"
“Science is nothing but perception.” – Plato

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Carl Sagan

Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.

Stephen Hawking

The heart of science is measurement.

Erik Brynjolfsson

Science is magic that works.

Kurt Vonnegut
Douglas Preston quote "Hubris and science are incompatible"
“Hubris and science are incompatible.” – Douglas Preston

Science is not finished until it is communicated.

Mark Walport

Science does not permit exceptions.

Claude Bernard

Quotes about Science

What is science? Find out what it is, how it’s done, and why it’s important with the best quotes about science. At it’s heart, science is about asking questions and applying data to draw conclusions with the Scientific Method.

Sure, we may have had a class or two that tripped us up in high school, but science is also fun! From paper mache volcanoes to model rockets, we can all remember a time when we enjoyed putting our minds to scientific thought.

Science is a beautiful gift to humanity; we should not distort it.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It’s posing questions and coming up with a method. It’s delving in.

Sally Ride

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.

Louis Pasteur

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.

Gregory Bateson

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

Jacob Bronowski

Science without conscience is the death of the soul.

Francois Rabelais

In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.

Horace Walpole

In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to whom the idea first occurs.

Francis Darwin
Francis Bacon quote "Science is but an image of the truth"
“Science is but an image of the truth.” – Francis Bacon

Science is not, despite how it is often portrayed, about absolute truths. It is about developing an understanding of the world, making predictions, and then testing these predictions.

Brian Schmidt

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Hippocrates

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question ‘How?’ but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question ‘Why?’

Erwin Chargaff

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

Edgar Allan Poe

I am among those who think that science has great beauty.

Marie Curie

Science and technology are the keys to both our longevity and our demise. Our entire existence on this planet is a double-edged sword.

Rhys Darby

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Will Durant

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

Robert A. Heinlein

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

John Dewey

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

Jules Verne

Scientific research is one of the most exciting and rewarding of occupations.

Frederick Sanger
Kary Mullis quote "Science grows like a weed every year"
“Science grows like a weed every year.” – Kary Mullis

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

Gertrude Stein

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Thomas Huxley

Art is I; science is we.

Claude Bernard

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

Jean Rostand

I believe there are no questions that science can’t answer about a physical universe.

Stephen Hawking

Science is like a love affair with nature; an elusive, tantalising mistress. It has all the turbulence, twists and turns of romantic love, but that’s part of the game.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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

Albert Einstein

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

Thomas Huxley

Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.

John F. Kennedy

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

Isaac Asimov

The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.

Walter Gilbert
"Science does not know its debt to imagination"
“Science does not know its debt to imagination.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

Adam Smith

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

Ashley Montague

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

When science finally locates the center of the universe, some people will be surprised to learn they’re not it.

Bernard Bailey

Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more.

George Bernard Shaw

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Carl Sagan

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Isaac Asimov

Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable – a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional.

Brian Greene

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Aldous Huxley

Scientist Quotes

If I could remember the names of all these tiny particles, I’d be a botanist.

Albert Einstein

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

Richard P. Feynman

To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science.

Isaac Newton

What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.

Louis Pasteur

The scientist is motivated primarily by curiosity and a desire for truth.

Irving Langmuir
"There is no complete theory of anything"
“There is no complete theory of anything.” – Robert Anton Wilson

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

Thomas Huxley

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

Albert Einstein

I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

David Eagleman

Statistics is the grammar of science.

Karl Pearson

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a ‘failed experiment.’ Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

Adam Savage

In science, nothing is ever 100% proven.

Michio Kaku

Science is the search for truth, that is the effort to understand the world: it involves the rejection of bias, of dogma, of revelation, but not the rejection of morality.

Linus Pauling

A true scientist would never put away a dirty test tube or falsify a report.

Virginia L. Mullen

Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.

John Carmack

But I don’t see myself as a woman in science. I see myself as a scientist.

Donna Strickland

Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow’s problems flow.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Quotes about Scientists

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

Stephen Hawking

Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired.

Donald Cram

Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.

Linus Pauling

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Arthur C. Clarke

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

Henrik Ibsen

No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.

Thomas Browne

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.

Jacques Yves Cousteau
Roger Penrose quote "Science and fun cannot be separated"
“Science and fun cannot be separated.” – Roger Penrose

If your science experiment needs a statistician, you need to design a better experiment.

Ernest Rutherford

Defintiion of a scientist: a man who understood nothing, until there was nothing left to understand.

Anthony Zerbe, The Omega Man

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

Galileo Galilei

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Albert Einstein

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.

Ray Bradbury

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

W. H. Auden

Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.

John Polanyi

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

Thomas Huxley

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Arthur C. Clarke

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

Nikola Tesla

A first-rate laboratory is one in which mediocre scientists can produce outstanding work.

Patrick M.S. Blackett

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Scientific Quotes

These scientific quotes celebrate the soundness and structure of the scientific method and the values it brings to different fields like chemistry and physics.

Over the decades, great scientists have shaped scientific discourse with their rigorous standards, ethics, and respect for the consequences of their work.

These opinions help us to share the reverence for the sciences with those who worked in them.

Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.

Wilhelm Reich

Scientific advancement should aim to affirm and to improve human life.

Nathan Deal

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

Gaston Bachelard
"Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse"
“Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.” – Jean-Francois Lyotard

Science and mindfulness complement each other in helping people to eat well and maintain their health and well-being.

Thich Nhat Hanh

A 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.

Max Planck

Every time tiny particles swing through time and space, something is changing.

Neale Donald Walsch

All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one’s brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

Roger Bacon

Science is about knowing; engineering is about doing.

Henry Petroski

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is less predictable than the development of an active scientific field.

Charles Francis Richter

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: ‘Ye must have faith.’

Max Planck

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant.

Miguel de Unamuno

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

Galileo Galilei

This means that to entrust to science – or to deliberate control according to scientific principles – more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

Friedrich August von Hayek

It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics.

Gabriel Marcel

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

William Osler

Science and technology are going to be the basis for many of the solutions to social problems.

Frances Arnold

Science is exploration. The fundamental nature of exploration is that we don’t know what’s there. We can guess and hope and aim to find out certain things, but we have to expect surprises.

Charles H. Townes

America’s space program is a symbol of our success as a scientifically and technologically advanced nation.

Randy Forbes

Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.

Jonathan Sacks
"We don't regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth"
“We don’t regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth.” – Kenneth R. Miller

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Paul Valery

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

Jacob Bronkowski

Chemistry Quotes

Chemistry is not torture but instead the amazing and beautiful science of stuff, and if you give it a chance, it will not only blow your mind but also give you a deeper understanding of your world.

Hank Green

Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.

David Christian

Chemistry was always my weakest subject in high school and college.

Eric Betzig

Our cells engage in protein production, and many of those proteins are enzymes responsible for the chemistry of life.

Randy Schekman

Chemical synthesis is uniquely positioned at the heart of chemistry, the central science, and its impact on our lives and society is all pervasive.

Elias James Corey

I believe that the science of chemistry alone almost proves the existence of an intelligent creator.

Thomas Edison

Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts.

Michael Faraday

Every man who receives a liberal education now counts chemistry among the most indispensable objects of his studies.

Antoine Francois Fourcroy

The country which is in advance of the rest of the world in chemistry will also be foremost in wealth and in general prosperity.

William Ramsay

The laws of physics and chemistry must be the same in a crucible as in the larger laboratory of Nature.

Alfred Harker

All theoretical chemistry is really physics, and all theoretical chemists know it.

Richard P. Feynman

Chemistry, unlike other sciences, sprang originally from delusions and superstitions, and was at its commencement exactly on a par with magic and astrology.

Thomas Thomson

To my disappointment, not many young people seem to be interested in science, especially chemistry.

Akira Suzuki

Physics Quotes

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

Ernst Mach

Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.

Edward Teller
Katherine Johnson quote "Everything is physics and math"
“Everything is physics and math.” – Katherine Johnson

In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.

Lord Kelvin

Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists.

David Hilbert

A person who isn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory doesn’t understand what has been said.

Neils Bohr

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

Isaac Newton

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

Albert Einstein

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.

Niels Bohr

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics.

Elon Musk

We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.

David Russell

Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe.

Erwin Schrodinger

Studying physics, mathematics, and chemistry is worshipping God.

Fethullah Gulen

Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.

Max Born

Funny Science Quotes

One thing to be said for scientists is despite the seriousness and meticulous nature of their work, many of them haven’t lost their senses of humor.

From Albert Einstein to Neil deGrasse Tyson, these fun lines show even the best scientists know how to bring some levity to their fields.

Even if you think the Big Bang created the stars, don’t you wonder who sent the flowers?

Robert Breault

Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.

Wernher von Braun

If I were ever abducted by aliens, the first thing I’d ask is whether they came from a planet where people also deny science.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program.

Larry Niven

A bacteriologist is a man whose conversation always starts with the germ of an idea.

Evan Esar

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.

Albert Einstein

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

George Bernard Shaw

Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break.

Earl Wilson

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

George Bernard Shaw

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

Pope John Paul II

Facts are not science – as the dictionary is not literature.

Martin H. Fischer

Great moments in science: Einstein discovers that time is actually money.

Gary Larson

Still looking for laughs? Check out more funny quotes here!

Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me.

Craig Ferguson

Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.

Dan Brown

Hypotheses, like professors, when they are seen not to work any longer in the laboratory, should disappear.

Henry Edward Armstrong

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.

Evan Esar

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

Neils Bohr

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

Steven Wright

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan

Scientists are toms, peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity in human stupidity.

Arthur Koestler

We hope these quotes from great scientists gave you a new appreciation for the scientific method and all science has given humanity.

Science allowed the most intrepid minds to go from gazing at stars to soaring among them. The curiosity and experimentation of great scientific minds is a cornerstone of all our advances as a species.

While it takes time for ideas to form, hypotheses to be tested, and thoughts to develop into technologies, science is how it happens.

So the next time you use that iPhone, visit the doctor, or even flick a light switch, remember to be thankful for the science that provided it.

Photo of author

Quincy Seale

Quincy is KIM's editor, and has collected and shared inspiring quotes and stories since 2005. Quincy holds an MBA from the University of Dundee and an MSc from the University of Edinburgh, and lives in San Antonio with his wife Natalie, son Alex, and his dog Oban.