Terry Pratchett Quotes

The love of experiment was very strong in him [Charles Darwin], and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't be easy till I have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his books which required argument and the marshalling of facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday.

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. ... The unfamiliar and the strange - these are the domain of all children and scientists.

If one has curiosity, then one stands the chance of attain a high level of scientific inquiry.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

Kids are natural scientists.

Science is for anyone who wants to explore their world and understand things.

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

The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why?

A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.

The search for the lessons of the new science is still in progress, really in its infancy. In this realm, three is a new kind of freedom, where it is more rewarding to explore than to reach conclusions, more satisfying to wonder than to know, and more exciting to search than to stay put. Curiosity, not certainty, becomes the saving grace.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.

I like to say, when asked why I pursue science, that it is to satisfy my curiosity, that I am by nature a searcher trying to understand. If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.

I was like I was in science class: I was curious.

The greatest discoveries all start with the question "Why?"

That's a question mark everyone's asking

In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.

We have relatively little time and a whole lot of curiosity, so the most efficient way to get there is what we do, and that often happens to be some form of science.

There's a wonderful saying that's dead wrong. 'Why did you climb the mountain?' 'I climbed the mountain because it was there.' That's utter nonsense...You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.

For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming.

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

Science probes; it does not prove.

Nature yields her most profound secrets to the person who is determined to uncover them.

If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.

My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.