Gaston Bachelard Quotes

Science is the best idea humans have ever had. The more people who embrace that idea, the better.

Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.

… after some hundreds of years of experience we think that we have learned … how to teach what is known. But now with the undeniable upsurge of scientific research, we cannot continue to rely on the mere fact that we have learned how to teach what is known. We must learn to teach the best attitude to what is not yet known.

Groups do not have experiences except insofar as all their members do. And there are no experiences... that all the members of a scientific community must share in the course of a [scientific] revolution. Revolutions should be described not in terms of group experience but in terms of the varied experiences of individual group members. Indeed, that variety itself turns out to play an essential role in the evolution of scientific knowledge.

By the year 2070 we cannot say, or it would be imbecile to do so, that any man alive could understand Shakespearean experience better than Shakespeare, whereas any decent eighteen-year-old student of physics will know more physics than Newton.

Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.

In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline.

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

With the growth of knowledge our ideas must from time to time be organized afresh. The change takes place usually in accordance with new maxims as they arise, but it always remains provisional.

During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.

Science gives you an understanding of the physical world, and it increases the capacity for fascination.

Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.

I try to stay sane and grounded by hunkering down, eating right, and exercising. I make a routine of spin class, yoga, and Pilates, places I push my body so hard I can lose my mind. Cutting out caffeine and sugar, being mindful, and getting enough rest are important.

To the security of a free Constitution it [knowledge] contributes in various ways: by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights, to discern and provide against invasions of them, to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority, between burdens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of society.

There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.

More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.

Unfortunately, in many cases, people who write science fiction violate the laws of nature, not because they want to make a point, but because they don't know what the laws of nature are.

The mere man of pleasure is miserable in old age, and the mere drudge in business is but little better, whereas, natural philosophy, mathematical and mechanical science, are a continual source of tranquil pleasure, and in spite of the gloomy dogmas of priests and of superstition, the study of these things is the true theology; it teaches man to know and admire the Creator, for the principles of science are in the creation, and are unchangeable and of divine origin.

A scientist should be the happiest of men. Not that science isn't serious; but as everyone knows, being serious is one way of being happy, just as being gay is one way of being unhappy.

SCIENCE is a part of EVERYONE'S everyday life.

Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.

I've always thought comparisons were useless and ugly. It is a short cut to thinking.

The history of knowledge is a great fugue in which the voices of the nations one after the other emerge.

The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.