Donald Knuth Quotes

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.

The computer is your passport, not only to the future but to knowing what's going around you.

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.

We have entered an era where the kinds of data and analyses that people run have gotten incredibly complicated. So you have researchers using sophisticated software programs that they probably don't understand but are generally accepted and everyone [in the field] uses.

We are in a war on ignorance, a war on scientific ignorance.

What art was to the ancient world, science is to the modern.

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

I don’t think anything about Einstein’s theory because I don’t understand it.

Science is the storytelling of our time.

Languages are the keys of science.

Science is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity, and scientific knowledge has become a vital part of our species' repertory. It comprises what we know of the material world with reasonable certainty. . . . Thanks to science and technology, access to factual information of all kinds is rising exponentially.

From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.

Scientific literacy is one of the underpinnings of everything I do. It's why I work with schools. It's why I teach at university. I do a lot of outreach to try and improve general scientific literacy, but the core of all scientific literacy is just literacy.

Thoroughly to teach another is the best way to learn for yourself.

Without science, there would be no such hope.

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. 5

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

We are a scientific civilization. That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge ... Knowledge is our destiny.

The man who knows how will always be the student, but the man who knows why will continue to be the instructor.

There is a danger one has to really be knowing much more because you can't be too narrow on science.

Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.