Rudolph A. Marcus Quotes

It doesn't matter whether it is chemistry or immunology or neuroscience: I just do research on what I find interesting.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin.

Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency are like a face without eyes.

My interest in science was always essentially limited to the study of principles.... That I have published so little is due to this same circumstance, as the great need to grasp principles has caused me to spend most of my time on fruitless pursuits.

In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.

Science demands patience.

It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.

For science is ... like virtue, its own exceeding great reward.

I am only a physicist with nothing material to show for my labours. I have never even seen the ionosphere, although I have worked on the subject for thirty years. That does show how lucky people can be. If there had been no ionosphere I would not have been standing here this morning.

The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.

Everyone has been taught that technique is an application of science.... This traditional view is radically false. It takes into account only a single category of science and only a short period of time

Science is a fundamental part of our existence.

As we all know, blinking lights means science.

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.

My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat--a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.

The protocols of science fiction and the protocols of science are not separate-they'r e woven together.

Nature is our kindest friend and best critic in experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiased on our minds.

A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.

It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.

Science is the most reliable guide in life.

How many wells of science there are in whose depths there is nothing but clear water!

In science, a path that turns out to be a dead end is very useful because you don't devote resources to focusing on that; you go elsewheres.

Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.