Parker Palmer Quotes

As art is a habit with reference to things to be done, so is science a habit in respect to things to be known.

I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in God-a God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing points of human knowledge-adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown.

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

dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.

There will just always be a distance between you and the people around you. Now, [Hillary Clinton] can clearly emotionally connect with her intimates within the zone of trust. It's just the wall outside the zone of trust is so impermeable.

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.

None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science.

SCIENCE is a part of EVERYONE'S everyday life.

Truth . . . and if mine eyes Can bear its blaze, and trace its symmetries, Measure its distance, and its advent wait, I am no prophet - I but calculate.

It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic .

For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.

The test of all knowledge is experiment.

I mean, how would anyone learn anything if they weren't curious? How would scientists make discoveries? -- We all have the right to be different, don't we?

Sometimes people call folks here at the Simple Way saints. Usually they either want to applaud our lives and live vicariously through us, or they want to write us off as superhuman and create a safe distance. One of my favorite quotes, written on my wall here in bold black marker, is from Dorothy Day: "Don't call us saints; we don't want to be dismissed that easily

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.

Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.

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

Everything factual is, in a sense, theory. The blue of the sky exhibits the basic laws of chromatics. There is no sense in looking for something behind phenomena: they are theory.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.

Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.

No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power.

Poetry, mythology, and religion represent the world as man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it.