Carl Sagan Quotes

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism... for testing your thoughts against the universe.

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.

Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.

Experiment is the mother of knowledge.

The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

When the scientific method came into being, it gave us a new window on the truth; namely, a method by laboratory-controlled experiments to winnow true hypotheses from false ones.

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.

Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.

In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected.

In natural science the principles of truth ought to be confirmed by observation.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.

[One's] inability to invalidate your hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.

Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. But experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words, we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

There is no short cut to truth, no way to gain a knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of scientific method.

The ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.