Echoes

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.

I know that I know nothing.

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

You are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you.

I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides.

The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and makes real advances in science

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.

To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.

Not-knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease.

One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

Every generation has the obligation to free men's minds for a look at new worlds… to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation.

Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few.

In every systematic inquiry where there are first principles, or causes, or elements, knowledge and science result from acquiring knowledge of these.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.