Quotes & Sayings About Scientific Discovery

Through scientific discovery and technological innovation, we enlist the forces of the natural world to solve many of the uniquely human problems we face - feeding and providing energy to agrowing population, improving human health, taking responsibility for protecting the environment and the global ecosystem, and ensuring our own Nation's security. Scientific discoveries inspire and enrich us, teaching us about the mysteries of life and the nature of the world. — William J. Clinton

Chance ... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled. — Jean Piaget

The medicines of today are based upon thousands of years of knowledge accumulated from folklore, serendipity and scientific discovery. The new medicines of tomorrow will be based on the discoveries that are being made now, arising from basic research in laboratories around the world. — John Vane

We live in an era of mind-blowing scientific discovery, virtually none of which ever makes the front page, even as every trivial twist and turn in the rococo political drama has a secure place as the lead story. — Timothy Noah

Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes. — Peter Medawar

As religion is now practiced and science is now practiced, there is no intersection between the two. That is for certain. And it's not for want of trying. Over the centuries, many people - theologians as well scientists - have tried to explore points of intersection. And anytime anyone has declared that harmony has risen up, it is the consequence of religion acquiescing to scientific discovery. In every single case. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

So the history of discovery, particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general, scientific discovery, is one where at any given moment, there's a frontier. And there tends to be an urge for people, especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary, into the unknown, lies the handiwork of God. This shows up a lot. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We can distinguish three groups of scientific men. In the first and very small group we have the men who discover fundamental relations. Among these are van't Hoff, Arrhenius and Nernst. In the second group we have the men who do not make the great discovery but who see the importance and bearing of it, and who preach the gospel to the heathen. Ostwald stands absolutely at the head of this group. The last group contains the rest of us, the men who have to have things explained to us. — Wilder Dwight Bancroft

Parkinson's Law is a purely scientific discovery, inapplicable except in theory to the politics of the day. It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow. — C. Northcote Parkinson

In scientific discovery, it's not the subject or object reveals the information to the scientist, but the awareness field of his own mind, reveals the details, at the time of deep focus on the subject or object. — Roshan Sharma

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for mankind. — Marie Curie

... and I submit to you, that science, scientific discovery, especially cosmic discovery, does not become mainstream until the artist embraces the fruits of those discoveries. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The more one observes, the more clearly does he see that it is in the soil of pure science that are found the origins of all our modern industry and commerce. In fact,our civilization is wholly built upon our scientific discoveries. — Herbert Hoover

It is chiefly upon the lay citizen, informed about science but not its practitioner, that the country must depend in determining the use to which science is put, in resolving the many public policy questions that scientific discoveries constantly force upon us. — David Lilienthal

Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that. — Franz Kafka

Michael Faraday, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith, was born in south London in 1791. He was self-educated, leaving school at fourteen to become an apprentice bookbinder. He engineered his own lucky break into the world of professional science after attending a lecture in London by the Cornish scientist Sir Humphry Davy in 1811. Faraday sent the notes he had taken at the lecture to Davy, who was so impressed by Faraday's diligent transcription that he appointed him his scientific assistant. Faraday went on to become a giant of nineteenth-century science, widely acknowledged to have been one of the greatest experimental physicists of all time. Davy is quoted as saying that Faraday was his greatest scientific discovery. — Brian Cox

It is almost impossible for contemporaries to judge the true value of discoveries, or to give the proper position to the men of their own time who make these discoveries. The Surgeon-General of the Public Health Service expected the greatest results to flow from his commission of medical officers, but the conclusions of the Board turned out to be all wrong, while he did not notice the report from his own subordinate, Dr. H. R. Carter, which turned out to be pure gold and was one of the great steps in establishing the true method of the transmission of Yellow Fever. — William Crawford Gorgas

In disputes upon moral or scientific points, ever let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent. So you never shall be at a loss in losing the argument, and gaining a new discovery. — James Burgh

I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence. — Mahatma Gandhi

In so many ways, the same impulse to know the world and our place in it is at the roots of both science and spirituality. Both are attempts to illuminate the mysteries of our world and expand our vision of the greater whole. By charting the history of science, I hope these pages have shown how vital and awesome real science is. Throughout history, scientific discovery has brought us closer to the wonders of life and the universe - and immeasurably deepened our appreciation for creation. It engages the world and inspires the best in us. But the pursuit of truth should not be driven by zealous agenda. Nor should it overreach and speak with righteous authority where it's on unsolid ground. That's not science - and let's not allow those who falsely invoke its name to diminish us. — Amir D. Aczel

All science is concerned with the relationship of cause and effect. Each scientific discovery increases man's ability to predict the consequences of his actions and thus his ability to control future events. — Laurence J. Peter

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. — Jared Diamond

Scientists are human - they're as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process. — Cyril Ponnamperuma

In chemistry, our theories are crutches; to show that they are valid, they must be used to walk ... A theory established with the help of twenty facts must explain thirty, and lead to the discovery of ten more. — Jean-Baptiste Dumas

I believe there exists, & I feel within me, an instinct for the truth, or knowledge or discovery, of something of the same nature as the instinct of virtue, & that our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them. — Charles Darwin

There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. — Bill Bryson

The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis. — William Kingdon Clifford

No discovery of modern psychology is, in my opinion, so important as its scientific proof of the necessity of self-sacrifice (or discipline) to self-realization and happiness. — Henry C. Link

From laboratories employing complex apparatus, poetry often emerges into the outside world after a long lapse of time, just as some scientific discoveries become common property only after they have entered the blood stream of the generations. — Mieczyslaw Jastrun

I have put [the word] "discoveries" in inverted commas because scientific results, perhaps as much at least as artistic achievements, are a product of contemporary taste, driven by momentary appetites rather than eternal verities. — Stephen Bayley

The history of scientific and technical discovery teaches us that the human race is poor in independent and creative imagination. Even when the external and scientific requirements for the birth of an idea have long been there, it generally needs an external stimulus to make it actually happen; man has, so to speak, to stumble right up against the thing before the idea comes. — Albert Einstein

Our inheritance of well-founded, slowly conceived codes of honor, morals and manners, the passionate convictions which so many hundreds of millions share together of the principles of freedom and justice, are far more precious to us than anything which scientific discoveries could bestow. — Winston Churchill

The highest heaven is not in the sky, it is in the human mind. — Abhijit Naskar

[A]ll knowledge is one. When a light brightens and illuminates a corner of a room, it adds to the general illumination of the entire room. Over and over again, scientific discoveries have provided answers to problems that had no apparent connection with the phenomena that gave rise to the discovery. — Isaac Asimov

I have a firm belief in such things as, you know, the water, the Earth, the trees and sky. And I'm wondering, it is increasingly difficult to find those elements in nature, because it's nature I believe in rather than some spiritual thing.
Interviewer: You're not a religious man?
No. And I do suppose that science has taken, to a large extent and for a number of people, has taken the place of religion.
Interviewer: What do you mean by that?
That one can have more belief in scientific cures or scientific miracles than you do in God miracles. It's inevitable that we will eventually diffuse into nothingness ... — Bill Blass

One of the things that always fascinated me about the Renaissance was that it was a time both of great scientific discovery and also of superstition and belief in magic. And so it was a period in which Galileo invented the telescope, but also a time when hundreds were burned at the stake because people thought they were witches. — Marie Rutkoski

My own beliefs are that the road to a scientific discovery is seldom direct and that it does not necessarily require great expertise. In fact, I am convinced that often a newcomer to a field has a great advantage because he is ignorant and does not know all the complicated reasons why a particular experiment should not be attempted. — Ivar Giaever

Memorizing and regurgitating are not science. Real science is a constant investigation of the unknown. — Abhijit Naskar

Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it-and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting. — Carlo Rubbia

As the Nation's primary supporter of research in the physical sciences, the DOE Office of Science led the way in creating a unique system of large-scale, specialized, often one-of-a-kind facilities for scientific discovery. — Judy Biggert

Research at the subatomic quantum level reveals an invisible connection between all particles and all members of a given species. This oneness is being demonstrated in remarkable scientific discoveries. The findings show that physical distance, what we think of as empty space, does not preclude a connection by invisible forces. Obviously there exist invisible connections between our thoughts and our actions. We do not deny this, even though the connection is impervious to our senses. — Wayne Dyer

Oppenheimer's theorizing was so startlingly original - so far in advance of the corroborating observations and so far off the beaten track of astrophysical research - that his colleagues' ignorance cost him the recognition he deserved. — Algis Valiunas

If Watson and I had not discovered the [DNA] structure, instead of being revealed with a flourish it would have trickled out and that its impact would have been far less. For this sort of reason Stent had argued that a scientific discovery is more akin to a work of art than is generally admitted. Style, he argues, is as important as content. I am not completely convinced by this argument, at least in this case. — Francis Crick

Our schools offer no conception of the scientific process of discovery. They do not encourage creative thought, in fact, they stifle it through too much rigidity in teaching. If we set out to give as little help as possible to originality in science, we could hardly devise a better plan than our education system. Youngsters ought to be told what is unknown about ourselves and our universe as well as what is known. — William Lipscomb

This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans. — Brian Swimme

Although technology often leads science in discovery, the philosophy of technology is usually drawn from the scientific philosophy of its time. In our time, the technology of machines has drawn its inspiration from mechanics, dealing with complexity by reducing the number of relevant parts. The technology of government, on the other hand, has drawn upon statistical mechanics, creating simplicity by dealing only with people in the structureless mass, as interchangeable units, and taking averages. — Gerald M. Weinberg

I could not possibly have been placed in circumstances more highly favorable for study and exploration than those which I now enjoy. I am free from the distractions constantly arising in civilized life from social claims. Nature offers unceasingly the most novel and fascinating objects for learning. The only drawbacks to this solitude are the want of information on the progress of scientific discovery in Europe and the lack of all the advantages arising from an interchange of ideas. — Alexander Von Humboldt

This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity. — Antoine Lavoisier

God is discovered entirely through creation - the brilliance of a sunset, the powerful roar of a waterfall, the symphony of sounds you hear in the heart of the forest, or the vastness of space and its countless stars. God is the mastermind behind all matter - every earth shattering scientific discovery and mystery that is yet to be unraveled was dreamed and enacted by God. — Benjamin F Sullivan

The story of scientific discovery has its own epic unity-a unity of purpose and endeavour-the single torch passing from hand to hand through the centuries; and the great moments of science when, after long labour, the pioneers saw their accumulated facts falling into a significant order-sometimes in the form of a law that revolutionised the whole world of thought-have an intense human interest, and belong essentially to the creative imagination of poetry. — Alfred Noyes

Accurate and minute measurement seems to the non-scientific imagination, a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long-continued labour in the minute sifting of numerical results. — Lord Kelvin

The discovery of HIV in 1983 and the proof that it was the cause of AIDS in 1984 were the first major scientific breakthroughs that provided a specific target for blood-screening tests and opened the doorway to the development of antiretroviral medications. — Anthony Fauci

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike. — Jacob Bronowski

Some of the most rewarding scientific pursuits begin with the discovery of a paradox. Nature does not go out of its way to befuddle us, and if some phenomenon seems to make no sense no matter how we look at it, we are probably in ignorance of deep and far-ranging principles. — Steven Pinker

It was toffee; they were advertising toffee, a nursemaid told Rezia. Together they spell t ... o ... f ...
"K ... R ... " said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say "Kay Arr" close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! — Virginia Woolf

I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell ... The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art. — Ernest Rutherford

Oliver, my professor, was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas, - he was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific world. I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I went on working, I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment, a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my work upon the world with crushing effect and become famous at a blow. I took up the question of pigments to fill up certain gaps. And suddenly, not by design but by accident, I made a discovery in physiology. — H.G.Wells

In other studies you go as far as other have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder. — Mary Shelley

We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made. — Albert Einstein

Scientific discovery may not be better than sex, but the satisfaction lasts longer. — Stephen Hawking

Stigler's Law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. — George Stigler

It is clear that while science provides insights into the complexity of the world around us, those insights ... present a fractured mosaic rather than a seamless whole. There are profound limits to science that must be recognized if we are to minimize the destructive consequences of using the powers provided by scientific discovery. — David Suzuki

The imagination is a healthy thing, and a great many scientific discoveries could not have been made without it, but it need to be harnessed to some serious object if it is to come to anything. — Diane Setterfield

Think of a "discovery" as an act that moves the arrival of information from a later point in time to an earlier time. The discovery's value does not equal the value of the information discovered but rather the value of having the information available earlier than it otherwise would have been. A scientist or a mathematician may show great skill by being the first to find a solution that has eluded many others; yet if the problem would soon have been solved anyway, then the work probably has not much benefited the world [unless having a solution even slightly sooner is immensely valuable or enables further important and urgent work]. — Nick Bostrom

which I hoped to make. None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder. A mind of moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study; and — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place. One immediately sees how many previously puzzling facts are neatly explained by the new hypothesis. One could kick oneself for not having the idea earlier, it now seems so obvious. Yet before, everything was in a fog. — Francis Crick

What struck me most in England was the perception that only those works which have a practical tendency awake attention and command respect, while the purely scientific, which possess far greater merit are almost unknown. And yet the latter are the proper source from which the others flow. Practice alone can never lead to the discovery of a truth or a principle. In Germany it is quite the contrary. Here in the eyes of scientific men no value, or at least but a trifling one, is placed upon the practical results. The enrichment of science is alone considered worthy attention. — Justus Von Liebig

The Darwinian approach to sex is often attacked as being antifeminist, but that is just wrong. Indeed, the accusation is baffling on the face of it, especially to the many feminist women who have developed and tested the theory. The core of feminism is surely the goal of ending sexual discrimination and exploitation, an ethical and political position that is in no danger of being refuted by any foreseeable scientific theory or discovery. — Steven Pinker

Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. At — Bill Bryson

The discovery of America was the foundational event of the Scientific Revolution. It not only taught Europeans to favour present observations over past traditions, but the desire to conquer America also obliged Europeans to search for new knowledge at breakneck speed. If they really wanted to control the vast new territories, they had to gather enormous amounts of new data about the geography, climate, flora, fauna, languages, cultures and history of the new continent. Christian Scriptures, old geography books and ancient oral traditions were of little help. — Yuval Noah Harari

Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always. "The scientists want it that way. They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can't just watch. They can't just appreciate. They can't just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist's job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific." He sighed, — Michael Crichton

When you believe you have found an important scientific fact, and are feverishly curious to publish it, constrain yourself for days, weeks, years sometimes, fight yourself, try and ruin your own experiments, and only proclaim your discovery after having exhausted all contrary hypotheses. But when, after so many efforts you have at last arrived at a certainty, your joy is one of the greatest which can be felt by a human soul. — Louis Pasteur

Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of
licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind.
Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmen
and tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as their
pupils might after half a year of competent drills. Experimentsconducted by Angel Quintero in Puerto Rico
suggest that many young teen-agers, if given the proper incentives, programs, and access to tools, are better than
most schoolteachers at introducing their peers to the scientific exploration of plants, stars, and matter, and to the
discovery of how and why a motor or a radio functions. — Ivan Illich

In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity - and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution. — E. O. Wilson

If the joy of scientific discovery is one-shot per discovery, then, from a fun-theoretic perspective, Newton probably used up a substantial increment of the total Physics Fun available over the entire history of Earth-originating intelligent life. That selfish bastard explained the orbits of planets and the tides. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon provided we observe nature as a child does, without prejudices and preconceptions, but with that clear and candid vision which adults lose and scientists must strive to regain. — Peter Medawar

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded ... in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

scientific discovery requires the boldness of provisional commitment to a point of view, while remaining aware that this may require subsequent modification in the light of further experience. — John Polkinghorne

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.
Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war. — Nikola Tesla

For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo'a demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Sir Humphrey Davy's invention of the safety lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post. — George Bernard Shaw

Her core discovery, made with a co-author, Erik M. Conway, was twofold. They reported that dubious tactics had been used over decades to cast doubt on scientific findings relating to subjects like acid rain, the ozone shield, tobacco smoke and climate change. And most surprisingly, in each case, the tactics were employed by the same group of people. — Anonymous

The Christian church has a long history of gradually absorbing scientific perspectives and new discoveries. It seems to me that, in fact, that has been one of the strengths of Christianity - it has ultimately had great flexibility in absorbing new information about the world that we get from science. — George Coyne

Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery - the frontier that drives the economies of the future - would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Scientific discovery is a private event, and the delight that accompanies it, or the despair of finding it illusory, does not travel. One scientist may get great satisfaction from another's work and admire it deeply; it may give him great intellectual pleasure; but it gives him no sense of participation in the discovery, it does not carry him away, and his appreciation of it does not depend on his being carried away. If it were otherwise the inspirational origin of scientific discovery would never have been in doubt. — Peter Medawar

America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way. — Ayn Rand

I am very excited about Quantum Forgiveness. The pioneers of quantum physics overturned and transcended Newtonian physics and the scientific method. Quantum physicists worked down to the smallest units and realized that everything they thought they knew about the world was not true. The world is about potentiality. In superposition, for example, things appear where we believe they will appear. And that is exciting because it is a science discovery that does not have to stay in the lab. It actually has everything to do with who we are. It is the gateway to our experience of being one with Source! — David Hoffmeister

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within. — William Kingdon Clifford

Isolated, so-called "pretty theorems" have even less value in the eyes of a modern mathematician than the discovery of a new "pretty flower" has to the scientific botanist, though the layman finds in these the chief charm of the respective sciences. — Hermann Hankel

In some strange way, any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a "discovery" of mine, but rather something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up. — Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar

Don't study science. Play with it. — Abhijit Naskar

I had fallen in love with a young man ... , and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis ... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery ... — Gertrude B. Elion

I heard from a swimming coach that how soon children learn to swim depends on how much they trust themselves and the surrounding world. I am convinced that this (self) confidence is the precondition of success in all intellectual activity. It may even have a greater role than believed in the least understood human talent: creativity, that is, artistic creation and scientific discovery. — Kato Lomb

Time is the best appraiser of scientific work, and I am aware that an industrial discovery rarely produces all its fruit in the hands of its first inventor. — Louis Pasteur

I was the only person in an infinite exploding universe who knew that this powder was made of opal. In a wide, wide world, full of unimaginable numbers of people, I was - in addition to being small and insufficient - special. I was not only a quirky bundle of genes, but I was also unique existentially, because of the tiny detail that I knew about Creation, because of what I had seen and then understood. Until I phoned someone, the concrete knowledge that opal was the mineral that fortified each seed on each hackberry tree was mine alone. Whether or not this was something worth knowing seemed another problem for another day. I stood and absorbed this revelation as my life turned a page, and my first scientific discovery shone, as even the cheapest plastic toy does when it is new. I — Hope Jahren

If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind. — Edsger Dijkstra

The process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder. — Albert Einstein

Science is never rigid, it is flexible. It can bend towards any direction that ultimately tends to do good to humanity. Religion must learn the same. And the moment any religion learns that, it would become the most scientific religion in the world. — Abhijit Naskar

Equations seem like treasures, spotted in the rough by some discerning individual, plucked and examined, placed in the grand storehouse of knowledge, passed on from generation to generation. This is so convenient a way to present scientific discovery, and so useful for textbooks, that it can be called the treasure-hunt picture of knowledge. — Robert P. Crease

To advance science is highly honourable, and I believe the institution of the Nobel Prizes has done much to raise the prestige of scientific discovery. — Frank Macfarlane Burnet

From a long view of the history of mankind, seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade. — Richard Feynman