C. S. Lewis Quotes

It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.

A great many things have been pronounced untrue and absurd, and even impossible, by the highest authorities in the age in which they lived, which have afterwards, and, indeed, within a very short period, been found to be both possible and true.

To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history.

Science grows like a weed every year.

Every student of science, even if he cannot start his journey where his predecessors left off, can at least travel their beaten track more quickly than they could while they were clearing the way: and so before his race is run, he comes to virgin forest and becomes himself a pioneer.

It takes years to realize the multiple benefits of science; without adequate, sustained funding for research, the careers of many bright, young scientists may come to a screeching halt.

Science moves fastest when there's plenty of debate and controversy.

Is science of any value? I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge.

Throughout history there have been many other examples, similar to that of Haeckel, Huxley and the cell, where a key piece of a particular scientific puzzle was beyond the understanding of the age.

Only where liberty unfetters and expands the human mind, can science flourish.

Science has a human origin and a human destination.

Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.

It was the late Dr. Mahendra Lal Sircar who, by founding the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, made it possible for the scientific aspirations of my early years to continue burning brightly.

There are cases when it takes 50 or 100 years for fundamental science to achieve results.

In every section of the entire area where the word science may properly be applied, the limiting factor is a human one. We shall have rapid or slow advance in this direction or in that depending on the number of really first-class men who are engaged in the work in question. […] So in the last analysis, the future of science in this country will be determined by our basic educational policy.

I hope the necessity will at length be seen of establishing institutions, here as in Europe, where every branch of science, useful at this day, may be taught in it's highest degrees.

Again there is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress; which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument. The native intellectual powers of men in different times are not so much the causes of the different success of their labours, as the peculiar nature of the means and artificial resources in their possession.

I shall devote only a few lines to the expression of my belief in the importance of science … it is by this daily striving after knowledge that man has raised himself to the unique position he occupies on earth, and that his power and well-being have continually increased.

It is the great beauty of our science, chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility.

The value of science to a republican people, the security it gives to liberty by enlightening the minds of its citizens, the protection it affords against foreign power, the virtue it inculcates, the just emulation of the distinction it confers on nations foremost in it; in short, its identification with power, morals, order and happiness (which merits to it premiums of encouragement rather than repressive taxes), are considerations [that should] always [be] present and [bear] with their just weight.

It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

There is no knowledge and science like pondering and thought; and there is no prosperity and advancement like knowledge and science.

It is very seldom that the same man knows much of science, and about the things that were known before science came.