Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.

It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.

Learn what is true in order to do what is right.

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

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.