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#1

“The indescribable pleasure—which pales the rest of life's joys—is abundant compensation for the investigator who endures the painful and persevering analytical work that precedes the appearance of the new truth, like the pain of childbirth. It is true to say that nothing for the scientific scholar is comparable to the things that he has discovered. Indeed, it would be difficult to find an investigator willing to exchange the paternity of a scientific conquest for all the gold on earth. And if there are some who look to science as a way of acquiring gold instead of applause from the learned, and the personal satisfaction associated with the very act of discovery, they have chosen the wrong profession.”
― Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

tags: analytical, applause, compensation, conquest, discovery, gold, investigator, joy, pain, pleasure, profession, satisfaction, scholar, science, scientific, truth, work

9 likes

#2

“If a solution fails to appear ... and yet we feel success is just around the corner, try resting for a while. ... Like the early morning frost, this intellectual refreshment withers the parasitic and nasty vegetation that smothers the good seed. Bursting forth at last is the flower of truth.”
― Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

tags: frost, inspirational, morning, refreshment, rest, science, solution, success, truth

12 likes

#3

“Theism, as religious people typically hold it, does not merely state that some entity created the universe, but that the universe was created specifically with humans in mind as the most important part of creation. If we have any understanding at all of how an intelligent agent capable of creating the material universe would act if it had such an intention, we would say it would not create the huge structure we see, most of it completely irrelevant for life on Earth, with the Earth in such a seemingly random location, and with humans appearing only after a long and rather random course of evolution.”
― Tim Maudlin

tags: atheism, earth, evolution, intelligence, life, meaning, purpose, random, religious-people, science, superstition

6 likes

#4

“The biblical account of the origin of the cosmos in Genesis, for example, posits that a god created the physical universe particularly with human beings in mind, and so unsurprisingly placed the Earth at the center of creation.

Modern cosmological knowledge has refuted such an account. We are living in the golden age of cosmology: More has been discovered about the large-scale structure and history of the visible cosmos in the last 20 years than in the whole of prior human history. We now have precise knowledge of the distribution of galaxies and know that ours is nowhere near the center of the universe, just as we know that our planetary system has no privileged place among the billions of such systems in our galaxy and that Earth is not even at the center of our planetary system. We also know that the Big Bang, the beginning of our universe, occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, whereas Earth didn’t even exist until about 10 billion years later.

No one looking at the vast extent of the universe and the completely random location of homo sapiens within it (in both space and time) could seriously maintain that the whole thing was intentionally created for us. This realization began with Galileo, and has only intensified ever since.”
― Tim Maudlin

tags: atheism, biblical, big-bang, cosmology, creation-myth, earth, evolution, galileo, galileo-galilei, genesis, homo-sapiens, mythology, science, universe

1 likes

#5

“Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were 'agnostic' about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things.

As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the 'minimal view' is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome.”
― Tim Maudlin

tags: agnosticism, atheism, cosmology, deity, evidence, experiment, explanation, god-of-the-gaps, hypothesis, inquiry, philosophy, science, superstition

4 likes

#6

“In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self.”
― Mahavira

tags: ethics, golden-rule, grief, happiness, jainism, joy, morality, selflessness, suffering

18 likes

#7

“The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.”
― John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

tags: conflict, discoveries, history, intellect, narrative, power, record, science, science-vs-religion

21 likes

#8

“But at the same time, there must never be the least hesitation in giving up a position the moment it is shown to be untenable. It is not going too far to say that the greatness of a scientific investigator does not rest on the fact of his having never made a mistake, but rather on his readiness to admit that he has done so, whenever the contrary evidence is cogent enough.”
― William Bayliss, Principles Of General Physiology

tags: evidence, greatness, hesitation, investigation, mistakes, science, scientific

3 likes

#9

“For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you, and to find you pitching into me for being more Darwinian than yourself. However, you have set me going, and must just take the consequences, for I warn you I will stop at no point so long as clear reasoning will take me further.

{Letter of support to Charles Darwin on his theory of evolution}”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1

tags: biology, charles-darwin, consequences, darwin, darwinian, doctrines, reasoning, science, support

7 likes

#10

“History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the Origin of Species with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Lectures and Essays by Thomas Henry Huxley

tags: fate, heresy, history, skepticism, superstition, truths, warning

8 likes

#11

“Euclid's Elements has been for nearly twenty-two centuries the encouragement and guide of that scientific thought which is one thing with the progress of man from a worse to a better state. The encouragement; for it contained a body of knowledge that was really known and could be relied on, and that moreover was growing in extent and application. For even at the time this book was written—shortly after the foundation of the Alexandrian Museum—Mathematics was no longer the merely ideal science of the Platonic school, but had started on her career of conquest over the whole world of Phenomena. The guide; for the aim of every scientific student of every subject was to bring his knowledge of that subject into a form as perfect as that which geometry had attained. Far up on the great mountain of Truth, which all the sciences hope to scale, the foremost of that sacred sisterhood was seen, beckoning for the rest to follow her.”
― William Kingdon Clifford, Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S.

tags: alexandria, application, conquest, elements, encouragement, euclid, geometry, guide, knowledge, math, mathematics, perfect, plato, platonic, progress, relience, sacred, science, scientific, scientific-thought, student, subject, truth

2 likes

#12

“… scientific thought does not mean thought about scientific subjects with long names. There are no scientific subjects. The subject of science is the human universe; that is to say, everything that is, or has been, or may be related to man.”
― William Kingdon Clifford, Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S.

tags: everything, relation, science, scientific, scientific-thought, subjects, thought, universe

2 likes

#13

“The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.”
― William Kingdon Clifford, Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S.

tags: aim, events, evidence, experience, inference, information, instrument, past, science, scientific, scientific-thought, transcending, truth, uniformitarianism, uniformity

3 likes

#14

“Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.”
― William Kingdon Clifford, Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S.

tags: action, error, fear, guide, human-progress, progress, science, scientific, scientific-thought, truth

4 likes

#15

“In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”
― William Kingdon Clifford, Ethics of Belief and Other Essays

tags: actions, belief, credulity, danger, evidence, harm, inquiry, savagery, society, true

21 likes

#16

“Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a distance one upon another, but this action is so slight at great distances that their trajectories are rectilineal; nevertheless, from time to time, two of them may come near enough together to be deviated from their course, like a comet that passed too close to Jupiter. In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.”
― Henri Poincaré, Science and Method

tags: astronomy, atoms, awe, comet, comparison, cosmology, galaxy, giant, jupiter, milky-way, science, size, stars, suns

12 likes

#17

“The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows... It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence... Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays

tags: biology, cosmic, ethics, evolution, evolution-of-morality, evolution-of-morals, existence, gladiatorial, goodness, respect, restraint, ruthless, science, selfishness, struggle, success, theory, virtue

5 likes

#18

“The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Collected Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley

tags: error, hamr, irrationality, reason, science, scientific, truth, value

18 likes

#19

“The publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 1858, and still more that of the 'Origin' in 1859, had the effect upon them of the flash of light, which to a man who has lost himself in a dark night, suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way. That which we were looking for, and could not find, was a hypothesis respecting the origin of known organic forms, which assumed the operation of no causes but such as could be proved to be actually at work. We wanted, not to pin our faith to that or any other speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite conceptions which could be brought face to face with facts and have their validity tested. The 'Origin' provided us with the working hypothesis we sought.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, On the Reception of the 'Origin of Species'

tags: alfred-russel-wallace, alfred-wallace, biology, charles-darwin, darwin, effect, evolution, facts, hypothesis, origin-of-species, science, validity, wallace

7 likes

#20

“Very few, even among those who have taken the keenest interest in the progress of the revolution in natural knowledge set afoot by the publication of the 'Origin of Species'; and who have watched, not without astonishment, the rapid and complete change which has been effected both inside and outside the boundaries of the scientific world in the attitude of men's minds towards the doctrines which are expounded in that great work, can have been prepared for the extraordinary manifestation of affectionate regard for the man, and of profound reverence for the philosopher, which followed the announcement, on Thursday last, of the death of Mr Darwin.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Collected Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley

tags: affection, astonishment, charles-darwin, darwin, doctrines, interest, knowledge, manifestation, obituary, origin-of-species, philosopher, progress, regard, reverence, science, scientific

4 likes

#21

“There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said: 'he expressed everybody's thoughts better than anyone.' But there are other men who attain greatness because they embody the potentiality of their own day and magically reflect the future. They express the thoughts which will be everybody's two or three centuries after them. Such as one was Descartes.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley

tags: descartes, expression, future, great, greatness, potential, rene-descartes, rené-descartes, science, voltaire

21 likes

#22

“Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.”
― Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

tags: benefit, contrast, corpses, crown, death, desecration, effort, extreme, heroes, history, humanity, inspirational, judgement, love, opposite, pain, patriot, pedestal, prestige, ruins, sacrifice, scholars, science, statue, struggle, time, triumph

31 likes

#23

“In truth, people can generally make time for what they choose to do; it is not really the time but the will that is wanting.”
― John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life

tags: advice, choice, inspirational, personality, time, truth, wanting, will

11 likes

#24

“If we succeed in giving the love of learning, the learning itself is sure to follow.”
― John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life

tags: advice, inspirational, learning, love, science, success

8 likes

#25

“If we are ever in doubt what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.”
― John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life

tags: advice, decisions, doubt, future, inspirational, planning, rule, science, tomorrow

12 likes

#26

“I cannot, however, but think that the world would be better and brighter if our teachers would dwell on the Duty of Happiness as well as the Happiness of Duty; for we ought to be as cheerful as we can, if only because to be happy ourselves is a most effectual contribution to the happiness of others.”
― John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life

tags: better, contribution, duty, happiness, improvement, pleasure, science, society, teacher

10 likes

#27

“Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.”
― John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life

tags: education, enlightenment, happiness, learning, life, nature-art, pleasure, purity, science, training

547 likes

#28

“A wise system of education will at least teach us how little man yet knows, how much he has still to learn.”
― John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life

tags: education, honesty, knowledge, learning, science, teach, wisdom, wise

7 likes

#29

“When we have done our best, we should wait the result in peace.”
― John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life

tags: advice, best, inspirational, motivational, peace, result

9 likes

#30

“The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.”
― John Lubbock, Peace and Happiness

tags: haven, heaven, hell, inspirational, motivational, personality, prison, punishment, repose, sanctuary, science, self-determination, solitude, value

83 likes

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