Fred Hoyle Quotes

I love to try to understand first principles and be guided by that. But then, enrich them, because they won't last forever, just like everybody thought Newton had all the answers. And you probably read that, in the last of the 19th century, Harvard and others were discouraging people from going into physics because we have all the answers. And right after that, of course - we have - all this stuff is thrown out the window. And now we have whole new answers.

The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.

No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others.

I ain't no gangster. I'm a grown man trying to run a business.

Instead of running for President, why don’t you try walking on a treadmill?

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting that, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want. And also, the problems editors run into when trying to edit performances - it helps me head that off at the pass a little.

I look back on my life and it’s 95% running around trying to raise money to make movies and 5% actually making them. It’s no way to live.

Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.

When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.

I love the construction process and it is always important because we try to experiment and do something new, so the builders are not copying any technique from other projects. Everything is innovative and so I need to be there and be attentive to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Our tendency is to run from the painful realities or try to change them as soon as possible. But cure without care makes us into rulers, controllers, manipulators.

Willpower is a myth. The problem with trying to use willpower to achieve and sustain a behavioral change is that it is fueled by emotion. And as we all know, our emotions are, at best, fickle. They come and go. When your emotions start running down -- and they will -- even your best-laid plans will fall flat.

First... a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

Throughout history, humankind has been resistant to change and to the acceptance of new ideas... When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter, the astronomers of that time refused to accept or even to look at these satellites because the existence of these moons conflicted with their accepted beliefs. So it is now with psychiatrists and other therapists, who refuse to examine and evaluate the considerable evidence being gathered about survival after bodily death and about past life memories. Their eyes are tightly shut.

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.

My teacher in first grade said that long ago people used to believe all kinds of things, because they didn't know any better. Like you shouldn't take a bath, because it could make you sick. And then someone saw germs under a microscope and started to think differently. You can believe something really hard, and still be wrong. (Faith White)

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.

I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics.

The history of science is a record of the transformations of contempts amd amusements.

I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.

The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir

Don't try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.

The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.

Each of us has a God-shaped space within us. Only God can fill that space. But we run ourselves ragged trying to find things other than God to fill it with.

What do you mean, what's the matter with him? Nothing's the matter with him, everything's the matter with him, the same as it is with everybody else. He's just fine. He gets overwhelmed now and then, and he doesn't know how to say what he feels or means, so he cries and runs off a little, trying to find out where to go, for God's sake. Where can you go?