Gilbert Newton Lewis Quotes

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

I learned over time that you do not go for the perfect solution….You do what is doable and then you want to try and do a little bit more.

It would be an inconvenient rule if nothing could be done until everything can be done.

Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.

I am convinced that this is the only means of advancing science, of clearing the mind from a confused heap of contradictory observations, that do but perplex and puzzle the Student, when he compares them, or misguide him if he gives himself up to their authority; but bringing them under one general head, can alone give rest and satisfaction to an inquisitive mind.

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.

I believe in anything that works.

His grandfather had often told him that he tried too hard to move trees when a wiser man would walk around them.

You can do anything you want, as long as it works.

My job is not to predict everything that might happen in the future, but to address what we can do today.

When it's impossible, it's better to stoop to compromise, without resisting and without complaining. People who complain are selfish.

Nobody does a lot of plotting. They can't. Everybody wants to do that in life, but I think it's almost impossible. Opportunities present themselves, and you say, "Hey, is this interesting to me?" Is this something you might want to pursue? Maybe you'll get it, maybe you won't. It really does have to do with a "one foot in front of the other" kind of thing, I think.

Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.

You have to sometimes just run with the problem rather than trying to solve it with hi-tech wizardry and lots of planning.

Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.

One learns to itch where one can scratch.

We'd never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started.

The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.

"True science has no belief," says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton's 'Strange Story;' "true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the suspension of judgment." Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick's days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Graeco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria!

The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around. That's all you need to know.

I'm pretty confident the why works now. When it first began, somebody said to me: "Will this work in big business?" I said, "I don't know. Let's try." Somebody said will this work in entrepreneurs, relationships or government and military. I said, "I don't know. Let's try." I kept applying the scientific method. I had a theory. I kept applying that theory, looking for opportunities to fail and it kept working.

It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, & as-yet unsolved problems.

The strongest streak in the American character is a fierce pragmatism that mistrust blind ideology of every stripe and insists on finding what really works.

The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore a subject; no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be applied to anything within the field of consciousness.

Men of science have made abundant mistakes of every kind; their knowledge has improved only because of their gradual abandonment of ancient errors, poor approximations, and premature conclusions.