Samuel Butler

Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more.

If you have a glass full of liquid you can discourse forever on its qualities, discuss whether it is cold, warm, whether it is really and truly composed of H-2-O, or even mineral water, or sake. Meditation is Drinking it!

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

If I could snap my fingers and do one thing in science, I would get more funding for basic science. But the level of funding that needs to be done is not on the order of millions, like the cost of the Breakthrough Prizes. It’s billions to tens of billions.

The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories – those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.

Every succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

To expect that the intricacies of science will be pierced by a careless glance, or the eminences of fame ascended without labour, is to expect a peculiar privilege, a power denied to the rest of mankind; but to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence, or the heights inaccessible to perseverance, is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles.

Science is but an image of the truth.

A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.