Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow Quotes

I fell in love with science and decided to continue for my Ph.D., and from there on, I was a scientist.

The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature.

I can't ever remember not wanting to be a scientist.

I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science.

I really like that my work is getting more people interested in science.

Science has a human origin and a human destination.

It must be for truth's sake, and not for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the scientific man studies Nature.

Claiming my right to follow whethersoever science should lead... it is as respectable to be modified monkey as modified dirt.

Science has promised us truth...It has never promised us either peace or happiness.

A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.

Knowing how contented, free, and joyful is life in the world of science, one fervently wishes that many would enter its portals.

Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency are like a face without eyes.

Most man only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.

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.

What is a scientist?... We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself.

Without science, there would be no such hope.

Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.

Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. That pursuit fills me with wonder.

I am only a physicist with nothing material to show for my labours. I have never even seen the ionosphere, although I have worked on the subject for thirty years. That does show how lucky people can be. If there had been no ionosphere I would not have been standing here this morning.

The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.

Science is a fundamental part of our existence.

I have an abiding interest in how ordinary people produce knowledge, and what it means for individuals to know the world. I thought I'd be a theoretical physicist because I love physicists' views of the world - I find general relativity and quantum theory thrilling - but I have always felt uneasy with the idea of an Ultimate Truth. One of the functions of science is to help us instrumentally; it helps us to build things like microchips and GPS satellites. But another function of science in the modern world is to help us feel "at home in the universe".

As we all know, blinking lights means science.

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility, may generally rest assured that he will seek in vain.