Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.
Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.
The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!
No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.
Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.
The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.
The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.
No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.
My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.
Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.