Stephen Hawking Quotes

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands.

In science, mistakes always precede the truth

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

Truth in science is always determined from observational facts.

Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.

Educated guesswork' is what science is. You form hypotheses, test them against the evidence, and if they fit the evidence, you can assume you've got close to the truth.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it's an instrument I know how to play. It's almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that's how I feel when proving a theorem.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.

Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.

I suppose it's knowing when you've come up with an idea that works, when you've got it right, whatever it is.

The tendencies are considerably weaker in the natural sciences, which, for the past several centuries, have survived and flourished through such constant challenge, and therefore, at best, seek to encourage it. Serving the status quo in political and socioeconomic realms is a different matter.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

Experiment is the sole source of truth.

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

Science is the most reliable guide in life.

Science emerges from the other progressive activities of man to the extent that new concepts arise from experiments and observations, and that the new concepts in turn lead to further experiments and observations.

A true conservative is on the side of science.

For scientists, reality is not optional.

I don't care what anything was designed to do, I care about what it can do.

The test of all knowledge is experiment.

I believe science has a wonderful ability, in an unbiased way, to offer hope to many people who are confused, but it's not the only way to find hope.

I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.

Science begets knowledge; opinion, ignorance.