Now the smallest Particles of Matter may cohere by the strongest Attractions, and compose bigger Particles of weaker Virture.... There are therefore Agents in Nature able to make the Particles of Bodies stick together by very strong Attraction. And it is the Business of experimental Philosophy to find them out. [Isaac Newton, Optics (1680)]

I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. [Isaac Newton]

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. [Isaac Newton]

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. [Andre Gide]

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of an individual. [Galileo Galilei]

Young man, if I could remember the names of all these particles, I would have been a botanist! [Enrico Fermi to his student (and future Nobel Laureate) Leon Lederman]

Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis. [Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), to Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God.]

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young. [Konrad Lorenz, 1903-1989]

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. [Paul Dirac (1902-1984)]

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. [Niels Bohr (1885-1962)]

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. [Galileo Galilei]

Il faut de toute necessite que des actions dissymetriques president pendant la vie a l'elaboration des vrais principes immediats naturels dissymetriques. Quelle peut etre la nature de ces actions dissymetriques? Je pense, quant a moi, qu'elles sont d'ordre cosmique. L'univers est un ensemble dissymetrique et je suis persuade que la vie, telle qu'elle se manifeste a nous, est fonction de la dissymetrie de l'univers ou des consequences qu'elle entraine. L'univers est dissymetrique.
It is inescapable that asymmetric forces must be operative during the synthesis of the first asymmetric natural products. What might these forces be? I, for my part, think that they are cosmological. The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric.
[Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)]

Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems. [Rene Descartes (1596-1650), "Discours de la Methode"]

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires. [Bertrand Russell]

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent. [Isaac Newton, 1642-1727]

Even in the best times, managing science has been compared to herding cats; it is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all. [Gerald Holton, in the American Scientist]

Theories are not rejected by cirsumstantial evidence: it takes a theory to beat a theory. [Georg Stigler]

A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself. [Niels Bohr]

The B meson is the hydrogen atom of QCD. [common saying, though first used by Kurt Gottfried - about charmonium!]

Coincidences, in general, are great stumblingblocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities - that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are endebted for the most glorious of illustration. [Edgar Allan Poe, The murders in the Rue Morgue, 1809-49]

The diagrams contains more truth than the underlying formalisme. [Gerard t'Hooft and Veltman 1973]

If God was a mathematician, as even the most agnostic physicists implicitly assume, a renormalizable theory had a chance of saying something about the world. [From 'Strange Beauty' - the biography on Murray Gell-Mann]

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special. [Stephen Hawking]

My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it as it is and why it exists as all. [Stephen Hawking]

In the field of observation, chance favours the prepared mind. [Louis Pasteur]

The grand aim of all science [is] to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms. [Albert Einstein]

The second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the Universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, those experimentalists do bungle things up sometimes. but if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing to do but to collapse in deepest humiliation. [Sir Arthur S. Eddington 1882-1933 (The nature of the Physical World (1928))]

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1. [Ernest Rutherford]

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. [Richard Feynman]

Scientific discovery may not be better than sex, but the satisfaction lasts longer. [Stephen Hawking (BBC News, January 16, 2002)]

Life has been empowered by the Universe to figure itself out. [Robert C. Cowen]

Particle physics is the Universe's local attempt to figure itself out. [Unknown]

We are the eyes through which the Univers observes itself and knows itself divine. [David Zindell]

The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. [Thomas Henry Huxley]

If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe. [Carl Sagan]

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. [Steven Weinberg]

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. [Thomas Edison]

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. [Lyall Watson ]

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment. [Ernest Rutherford 1871-1937]

'Data! Data! Data!', he cried impatiently. 'I can't make bricks without clay'. [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]

The errors of a wise man make your rule
Rather than the perfections of a fool. [William Blake]

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. [Niels Bohr, 1885-1965]

Anything not prohibited by symmetry will happen. [Unknown]

An algorithm, more than just a parametrization and yet less than a true model. [PYTHIA/JETSET manual]

Statistics is merely a quantisation of common sense. [Troels Petersen]

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. [Albert Einstein (1879-1955)]

Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not. [Albert Einstein (1879-1955)]

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. [Albert Einstein (1879-1955)]

Science is a refinement of everyday thinking. [Albert Einstein]

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. [Arthur Conan Doyle, Scandal in Bohemia.]

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there. [Charles Darwin]

Let us consider a dimensionless mass, suspended from an inextensible wire, free to oscillate without friction... [Any textbook]

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise. [Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970]

Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money. [Leon Lederman]

We are not sufficiently astonished by the fact that any science may be possible. [Louis de Broglie, 1892-1987]

What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown. [Goethe, Faust, favorite quotation of Niels Bohr]

Statistics is the invers of probability. Probability uses known parameters to predicts probabilities. Statistics uses probabilities to predict parameters. [Troels C. Petersen, 2000]

Confrontation between theory and reality is the major source of knowledge. [Thierry Villiers-Moriamé, 1998]

Statistik er en særdeles logisk og præcis måde at meddele halve sandheder unøjagtigt på. [Anonym]

On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague: This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. [Wolfgang Pauli, Austrian physicist (1900-1958)]

Science is either physics or stamp collecting. [Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand physicist (1871-1937)]

It was absolutely marvelous working for Pauli. You could ask him anything. There was no worry that he would think a particular question was stupid, since he thought all questions were stupid. [Victor Frederick Weisskopf]

I shall stick to the priciple of likelihood which I laid down at the start, and try to give an account of everthing from the beginning which is more rather than less likely. So let us begin again, calling as we do on some protecting deity to see us through a strange an unusual argument to a likely conclusion. [Plato: Timaeus]

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. [Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)]

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. [John von Neumann (1903-1957)]

Remember... we love to think in four dimensions! [Poul Henrik Damgård]

...so the Univers is mainly made of nothing! [Poul Olesen, on the measurement of the cosmological constant]

It's a dark matter in cosmology, but most matters are in that field. [Alexander Khodjamirian, on axions and the possible CP-breaking term in QCD]

Even vacuum is complicated! [Holger Bech Nielsen]

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering. [Arthur C. Clarke (1917-)]

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. [Profiles of the Future (1962; rev. 1973), Clarke's First Law]

Perhaps the adjective ``elderly'' requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory! [Profiles of the Future (1962; rev. 1973), ``Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination'']

But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. [Profiles of the Future (1962; rev. 1973), Clarke's Second Law]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. [Profiles of the Future (1962; rev. 1973), Clarke's Third Law]

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible. [Aristotle]

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. [Isaac Asimov]

We live in a cold and empty Universe. Only the stable relics of the Big Bang remain. The unstable have decayed away with time, and the symmetries has been broken as the Universe has cooled. But every kind of particle that ever existed is still there, in the equations that describe the particles and forces of the Universe. The vacuum "knows" about all of them. We can use accelerators to make the equations come alive. By raising the temperature of the vacuum again we can uncover the symmetries that existed in the early Universe. [C. P. Yuan]

Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. [R. Drabek]

[Renormalization is] just a stop-gap procedure. There must be some fundamental change in our ideas, probably a change just as fundamental as the passage from Bohr's orbit theory to quantum mechanics. When you get a number turning out to be infinite which ought to be finite, you should admit that there is something wrong with your equations, and not hope that you can get a good theory just by doctoring up that number. [Paul Dirac]

The shell game that we play ... is technically called 'renormalization'. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate. [Richard Feynman]

Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. [Aaron Levenstein]

Don't worry too much about statistics! Just tell us what you do, and do what you tell us. [Roger Barlow, ICHEP 2006, Moscow]

In God we trust. All others must bring data. [Robert Hayden, Plymouth State College]

The result of this experiment was inconclusive, so we had to use statistics. [Overheard at international physics conference]

It has often been said that 'nature is simple' - illusion! It is our mind which looks for simplicity to avoid effort. [L. Brillouin, in Scientific Uncertainty and Information]

Evolution is cleverer than you are. [Francis Crick]