Jacques Ellul Quotes

Science demands patience.

Well, I mean, I'm still a scientist, you know. I think once a scientist, always a scientist.

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

Ever since I was a kid, I've had an enormous interest in the sciences - everything from quantum physics to anthropology.

In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.

I think that we scientists are seeking an understanding of the natural world. We come in various types - chemists and physicists and biologists and such - and we all have the same goal. We are making progress.

Whenever I think of how much pleasure I have interviewing scientists, I remember that they're having the real fun in actually being able to do the science.

I always say to my students that being a scientist is like being an explorer, and I really mean that because, in a sense, I think in science we explore the world, the universe around us.

Science appears but what in truth she is, Not as our glory and our absolute boast, But as a succedaneum, and a prop To our infirmity.

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

The sciences, even the best,-mathematics and astronomy,-are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.

Men study science as god not the God of science.

Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere.

She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.

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.

The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulation, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.

Science is a fundamental part of our existence.

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.

Science is a combination of theory and experiment and the two together are how you make progress.

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

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

Our science, so called, is always more barren and mixed with error than our sympathies.

Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable