Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

The best scientists that I've met are those that are humanists and scientists at the same time.

To be honest, what I struggled with in my degree is what's so helpful when it comes to social media in that I lack focus. I'll start reading about evolutionary biology and end up on quantum physics. While that makes writing your dissertation very difficult, for a page like IFLS, that's amazing because I get a wide range of everything.

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.

Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.

I don't believe you can reduce the world to a mathematical formula. I start with the world, assume it's complicated, and ask where can I get help from a whole range of disciplines.

A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.

Originality is the essence of true scholarship. Creativity is the soul of the true scholar.

I'm not a one-issue person.

The evidence that I see around me in society indicates that not only is thinking very much out of favor, but I'm not sure that the last couple of generations - Generation X and Generation Next, or whatever you want to call them - even know what a thought is, having been raised to be women.

It's true that I have a wide range of interests. I like to write and paint and make music and go walking on my own and garden. In fact, gardening is probably what I enjoy doing more than anything else.

The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.

One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance.

The true worth of an experimenter consists in his pursuing not only what he seeks in his experiment, but also what he did not seek.

One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.

Be quick to learn and wise to know.

The same parts of my brain get as excited as when I study bio or read a novel and write a paper on it.

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.

In the fields I know best, among the life sciences, it is required that the most expert and sophisticated minds be capable of changing course - often with a great lurch - every few years.

I was very intellectually oriented, very early on.

I'm a huge believer in learning anything from multiple points of view.

Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem.

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

In an age of specialization people are proud to be able to do one thing well, but if that is all they know about, they are missing out on much else life has to offer.

I don't really live like a musician myself. I think music is just something that I do, but I'd like to be doing lots of other things. I like to cure all kinds of illness.

I'd have liked to have been a bit more intellectual. I'd have liked to have had more brains.